Category: Apps

Meta’s social network, Threads, now has 275 million monthly active users, the company said on Sunday. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. ​ In Brief Posted: 11:34 PM PST · November 3, 2024 Meta’s social network, Threads, now has 275 million monthly active users (MAUs), the company said on Sunday. “Yesterday…

Vanguard has revised its valuation of Indian ride-hailing startup Ola to about $2 billion as of the end of August. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. ​ In Brief Posted: 2:40 AM PST · November 4, 2024 Vanguard has revised its valuation of Indian ride-hailing startup Ola to about $2 billion…

Can the U.S. meaningfully regulate AI? It’s not at all clear yet. Policymakers have achieved progress in recent months, but they’ve also had setbacks, illustrating the challenging nature of laws imposing guardrails on the technology. In March, Tennessee became the first state to protect voice artists from unauthorized AI cloning. This summer, Colorado adopted a tiered, risk-based…

OpenAI’s search offers a glimpse of what an AI-search interface could one day look like. But it’s too impractical as a daily driver right now. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. ​ Last week, OpenAI released its highly anticipated search product, ChatGPT Search, to take on Google. The industry has been…

One of the lessons that the wild Silicon Valley venture funding environment of the past few years has clearly taught is this: Bigger valuations are not always better. “I think we’ve all kind of seen the negative impact of having a valuation too high from the last, call it, three years,” Elizabeth Yin, co-founder of…

Columbus says hackers accessed resident’s Social Security numbers and bank account details © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. ​ The City of Columbus, Ohio’s state capital, has confirmed that hackers stole the personal data of 500,000 residents during a July ransomware attack.  In a filing with Maine’s attorney general, Columbus confirmed…

Large language models have already proven transformative for robotics. While researchers and companies alike utilize the platforms to supercharge robotic learning, a pair of roboticists at UC Berkeley and ETH Zurich challenged themselves by leveraging generative AI to put a cheap robot arm to work. Jannik Grothusen and Kaspar Janssen trained a pair of $120…

Family offices invest a substantial amount of capital in startups each year. In the first half of 2023, 27% of overall startup deal value came from deals that included a family office investor, according to a recent report from PwC. Despite their prevalence in startup deals, family offices can be a mysterious class of investors…

Gabor Cselle, the former CEO and co-founder of X (formerly Twitter) challenger Pebble, has joined OpenAI to work on a secretive project. Cselle, who according to LinkedIn has been employed at OpenAI since October, announced the news in a post on X yesterday. “Will share more about what I’m working on in due time,” he…

Election Day is nearly here, and if you haven’t already mailed in your ballot or gone in for early voting, you might need a ride come November 5.  Here’s a roundup of all the freebies, discounts, and information on getting to the polls that transportation companies are offering. Micromobility Lime is offering free rides to…