Category: Apps

Penguin Random House, the trade publisher, is adding language to the copyright pages of its books to prohibit the use of those books to train AI. The Bookseller reports that new books and reprints of older titles from the publisher will now include the statement, “No part of this book may be used or reproduced…

Toyota-backed autonomous vehicle company Pony AI has joined the list of Chinese firms going public on the U.S. stock market after a multi-year ban from Beijing on offshore capital raising.  Zeekr, a luxury Chinese electric vehicle startup, debuted on the New York Stock Exchange in May, and WeRide, another AV startup, also hopes to file…

The funnest car I ever drove was the original Tesla Roadster. This was in 2011, back when Elon Musk’s EV company was courting press instead of denigrating us, and they offered me a test drive. I took the car up I-280 — a beautiful, mostly deserted highway with perfectly banked curves that seemed designed for Silicon…

Welcome back to Week in Review. This week, we’re diving into the recent layoffs at Meta; the fallout from the battle between WordPress and WP Engine; and whether Cybertrucks are simply too big to exist in Europe. Let’s get into it. Multiple teams at Meta were hit by layoffs this week. The company confirmed the…

Drone-maker DJI filed a lawsuit Friday against the US Department of Defense over its inclusion on a DoD list of “Chinese military companies.” A DJI spokesperson said the company filed the suit after “attempting to engage with the DoD for more than sixteen months” and deciding “it had no alternative other than to seek relief…

Mira Murati, the OpenAI CTO who announced her departure last month, is raising VC funding for a new AI startup, according to Reuters. This startup will reportedly focus on building AI products based on proprietary models and could raise more than $100 million in this round. When she left, Murati wrote on X that OpenAI…

Social networking startup Bluesky, which just reported a gain of half a million users over the past day, has now soared into the top five apps on the U.S. App Store and has become the No. 2 app in the Social Networking category, up from No. 181 a week ago, according to data from app…

Web hosting provider WP Engine has filed an injunction in a court in Northern California, asking it to intervene and restore its access to the WordPress.org open source repository. After WP Engine filed a lawsuit against WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg and Automattic last month, Mullenweg — who also owns WordPress.org — blocked the company’s access…

How much equity in OpenAI will Microsoft get once the former becomes a for-profit company? That’s the multibillion-dollar question — one the two parties are racing to answer ahead of a two-year deadline. The Wall Street Journal reports that both Microsoft and OpenAI have hired investment banks to negotiate Microsoft’s equity — which could be…

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. This week brought us some exciting fundraising news from around the world, and even some exits. But if you are looking for tech IPOs, you will have…