Peter Williams, the former general manager of Trenchant, a division of defense contractor L3Harris that develops surveillance and hacking tools for Western governments, pleaded guilty last week to stealing some of those tools and selling them to a Russian broker. A court document filed in the case, as well as exclusive reporting by TechCrunch … Read more
OpenAI isn’t done securing the AI infrastructure it needs to rapidly scale agentic workloads. The ChatGPT-maker on Monday said it has reached a deal with Amazon to buy $38 billion in cloud computing services over the next seven years. OpenAI said it will immediately start using AWS compute, with all capacity targeted to be … Read more
Alphabet’s X moonshot factory is shifting how it brings ambitious technology projects to market, increasingly spinning them out as independent companies rather than keeping them within the Alphabet corporate structure, X’s head honcho, Astro Teller, revealed at TechCrunch Disrupt this past week. The strategy hinges on a dedicated venture fund that exists solely to invest … Read more
Kevin Rose has a visceral rule for evaluating AI hardware investments: “If you feel like you should punch someone in the face for wearing it, you probably shouldn’t invest in it.” It’s a typically candid assessment from the veteran investor, and one born from watching the current wave of AI hardware startups repeat mistakes he’s … Read more
Google says it has removed Gemma from its AI Studio after a U.S. senator accused the AI model of fabricating accusations of sexual misconduct against her. In a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Senator Marsha Blackburn — a Republican from Tennessee — said that when Gemma was asked, “Has Marsha Blackburn been accused of … Read more
Core Scientific shareholders on Thursday voted down an all-stock acquisition offer from partner and competitor CoreWeave that was valued at the time at $9 billion. They did so following a vote-no recommendation from their largest shareholder, Sina Toussi of Two Seas Capital, a firm that focuses on post-bankruptcy companies. Core Scientific emerged from its bankruptcy … Read more
As tech companies tout their plans for massive new data centers, consumers are increasingly worried the AI-driven gold rush will ultimately drive up the price they pay for electricity, according to a new survey. The report, commissioned by solar installer Sunrun, found that 80% of consumers are worried about the impact of data centers on … Read more
On Thursday, at the end of Coinbase’s third quarter earnings call, CEO Brian Armstrong admitted that he was “a little bit distracted,” because he’d been “tracking the prediction market about what Coinbase will say on their next earnings call.” “And I just want to add here the words Bitcoin, Ethereum, Blockchain, Staking, and Web3 to … Read more
Elon Musk and Sam Altman are still taking swipes at each other on Musk’s social media platform X. While both men were founders at OpenAI, where Altman is CEO, they have subsequently sparred across social media, court filings, and corporate blog posts.The latest exchange began when Altman posted what he called “a tale in three … Read more
The AI researchers at Andon Labs — the people who gave Anthropic Claude an office vending machine to run and hilarity ensued — have published the results of a new AI experiment. This time they programmed a vacuum robot with various state-of-the-art LLMs as a way to see how ready LLMs are to be embodied. … Read more
