Category: Gaming
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Pavel Durov says Telegram is now profitable
Telegram founder Pavel Durov said Monday that the company is now profitable. Durov said the chat app’s total revenue surpassed $1 billion in 2024. The company, which launched its premium subscription service in 2022, now has 12 million paid users. Durov also said that the app is finishing the year with more than $500 million…
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WhatsApp scores historic victory against NSO Group in long-running spyware hacking case
A US judge ruled that the Israeli spyware maker breached hacking laws by using WhatsApp to infect devices with Pegasus © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. A US judge ruled that the Israeli spyware maker breached hacking laws by using WhatsApp to infect devices with Pegasus © 2024 TechCrunch. All…
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xAI is testing a standalone iOS app for its Grok chatbot
Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, is testing out a standalone iOS app for its chatbot, Grok, which was available only to X users until now. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, is testing out a standalone iOS app for its chatbot, Grok, which was available…
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X jacks up Premium+ prices 37.5%, hits some markets harder
X is raising prices for its top-tier subscription service by 37.5%, marking the largest price increase since the platform’s acquisition by Elon Musk in 2022. The Premium+ service will cost $22 monthly in the U.S., up from $16, effective December 21, according to a company statement. Annual subscriptions will increase to $229 from $168. X…
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Palantir and Anduril reportedly building a tech consortium to bid on defense contracts
Two big defense tech players, Palantir and Anduril, are talking to tech companies including SpaceX, OpenAI, Saronic, and Scale AI about forming a consortium to bid on Pentagon contracts, according to a report in the Financial Times. The goal, the FT says, is to challenge the dominance of “prime” defense contractors like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon,…
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Sriram Krishnan named Trump’s senior policy advisor for AI
Incoming president Donald Trump has confirmed reports that Sriram Krishnan, until recently a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), will serve as senior policy advisor for AI at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Trump said in a statement that Krishnan will “help shape and coordinate AI policy across government, working with…
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Trump says he wants to keep TikTok around ‘for a little while’
With a US TikTok ban scheduled to take effect in less than a month, President-elect Donald Trump said Sunday that he’d like to keep the app around, according to Reuters. “We’re going to have to start thinking because, you know, we did go on TikTok, and we had a great response with billions of views,…
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OpenAI trained o1 and o3 to ‘think’ about its safety policy
OpenAI announced a new family of AI reasoning models on Friday, o3, which the startup claims to be more advanced than o1 or anything else it’s released. These improvements appear to have come from scaling test-time compute, something we wrote about last month, but OpenAI also says it used a new safety paradigm to train…
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The biggest flops and fizzles in 2024 transportation, from Apple Car to Fisker
Autonomous vehicle technology and electrification startups were once the darlings of the VC and corporate world. The two technologies promised billions of dollars in revenue — and a new pathway for automakers to make money beyond building and selling cars. Those VC-money-printing days have been over for AVs for a while now, with a few…
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Tetsuwan Scientific is making robotic AI scientists that can run experiments on their own
LLM models are already capable of diagnosing scientific outputs, but, until now, had “no physical agency to actually perform” experiments. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. LLM models are already capable of diagnosing scientific outputs, but, until now, had “no physical agency to actually perform” experiments. © 2024 TechCrunch. All…