Category: Apps
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Toyota’s CES 2025 press conference: How to watch
Five years ago, Toyota Chairman Akio Toyoda went to CES to share with the world his “personal field of dreams” — a plan to build a prototype city on a 175-acre site at the foot of Mount Fuji in Japan, where people would live and work amongst all of Toyota’s projects, including autonomous vehicle technology,…
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Robinhood, already a ‘comeback’ stock, has even more aggressive plans for 2025
Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev has a lot to celebrate this holiday season. After a bumpy few years following Robinhood’s 2021 IPO — a period during which shares of the commission-free trading app plummeted by more than 90% after it abruptly restricted trading in some meme stocks — the 12-year-old company was just declared Yahoo Finance’s…
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Internal SpaceX documents show the sweet stock deals offered to investors like a16z, Gigafund
Like many highly valued startups, SpaceX sometimes allows its employees to cash out some of their shares by selling to company-authorized outside investors. TechCrunch has gotten a peek at an internal SpaceX document about such a tender offer from May 2022. Musk posted on X last month that SpaceX holds such sales for employees about…
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Silicon Valley stifled the AI doom movement in 2024
For several years now, technologists have rung alarm bells about the potential for advanced AI systems to cause catastrophic damage to the human race. But in 2024, those warning calls were drowned out by a practical and prosperous vision of generative AI promoted by the tech industry – a vision that also benefited their wallets.…
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OpenAI failed to deliver the opt-out tool it promised by 2025
Back in May, OpenAI said it was developing a tool to let creators specify how they want their works to be included in — or excluded from — its AI training data. But 7 months later, this feature has yet to see the light of day. Called Media Manager, the tool would “identify copyrighted text,…
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Accel closes $650 million for new India fund
Accel has raised $650 million for its eighth India fund as the U.S. venture firm expands its investment strategy in the South Asian market. The new fund follows the firm’s seventh India fund secured in March 2022. Accel — which has backed companies including e-commerce group Flipkart, food delivery platform Swiggy and software group Freshworks…
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Judge allows California’s ban on addictive feeds for minors to go into effect
Late Tuesday evening, a federal judge blocked tech lobbying group NetChoice’s challenge to California’s recently enacted law, SB 976, which prohibits companies from serving “addictive feeds” to minors. The effect of this decision is that beginning Wednesday, companies will be prohibited from serving an addictive feed to a California-based user they know to be a…
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Elon Musk’s pro-Trump critics claim they’re being censored on X
Conservative activists claim X is censoring them for being critical of its owner, Elon Musk. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. Conservative activists claim X is censoring them for being critical of its owner, Elon Musk. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
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A look back on my favorite episodes of TechCrunch’s Found podcast
TechCrunch’s Found podcast, which has brought listeners the stories behind the startups since April 2022, released its final episode today. I’ve been one of the hosts of Found since November 2022 and in that time have spoken to more than 75 founders about the startups they are building. These founders hail from many different backgrounds…
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Will Smith eating spaghetti and other weird AI benchmarks that took off in 2024
When a company releases a new AI video generator, it’s not long before someone uses it to make a video of actor Will Smith eating spaghetti. It’s become something of a meme as well as a benchmark: Seeing whether a new video generator can realistically render Smith slurping down a bowl of noodles. Smith himself…