Category: Gaming
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Telegram CEO Durov’s arrest hasn’t dampened enthusiasm for its TON blockchain
Telegram has had a tough few weeks. The messaging app’s founder, Pavel Durov, was arrested in late August and later released on a €5 million bail in France, charged with running a company complicit in distributing child sexual abuse material and facilitating drug trafficking and organized fraud. Predictably, that crashed the price of the network’s…
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TechCrunch Minute: Meta acknowledges it’s scraping all public posts for AI training
If you’re wondering if your Facebook and Instagram posts have been used to train AI models at parent company Meta, the answer is almost certainly yes. That’s probably not a huge surprise. Meta already announced that it’s using user content and data to train AI — but this week, its global privacy director, Melinda Claybaugh,…
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Y Combinator expanding to four cohorts a year in 2025
Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y Combinator will expand the number of cohorts it runs each year from two to four starting in 2025, Bloomberg reported Thursday, and TechCrunch confirmed today. Y Combinator president Garry Tan told the site that approximately the same number of companies will go through YC each year, despite the change. This…
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Investors rebel as TuSimple pivots from self-driving trucks to AI gaming
TuSimple, once a buzzy startup considered a leader in self-driving trucks, is trying to move its assets to China to fund a new AI-generated animation and video game business. The pivot has not only puzzled and enraged several shareholders, but also threatens to pull the company back into a legal morass mere weeks after reaching…
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First impressions of OpenAI o1: An AI designed to overthink it
OpenAI released its new o1 models on Thursday, giving ChatGPT users their first chance to try AI models that pause to “think” before they answer. There’s been a lot of hype building up to these models, codenamed “Strawberry” inside OpenAI. But does Strawberry live up to the hype? Sort of. Compared to GPT-4o, the o1…
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Dave and Varo Bank execs are coming to TechCrunch Disrupt 2024
The rise of neobanks has been fascinating to witness, as a number of companies in recent years have grown from merely challenging traditional banks to being massive players in and of themselves. Dave and Varo Bank are just two examples of such neobanks. Hear Dave co-founder and CEO Jason Wilk and Varo Bank founder and…
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Fintech Bolt is buying out the investor suing over Ryan Breslow’s $30M loan
Bolt says it has settled its long-standing lawsuit with its investor Activant Capital. One-click payments startup Bolt is settling the suit by buying out the investor’s stake “after which Activant will no longer hold any interest in Bolt,” the company said in a statement. Activant’s suit accused founder and then CEO Ryan Breslow of adding…
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Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs comes out of stealth with $230M in funding
Fei-Fei Li, the Stanford professor many deem the “Godmother of AI,” has raised $230 million for her new startup, World Labs, from backers including Andreessen Horowitz, NEA, and Radical Ventures. World Labs is valued at over $1 billion, and the capital was raised over two rounds spaced a couple of months apart, TechCrunch reported in…
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This is how bad China’s startup scene looks now
In early 2018, VC Mike Moritz wrote in the FT that “Silicon Valley would be wise to follow China’s lead,” noting the pace of work at tech companies was “furious” and that China offered “investment opportunities in the best companies.” Soon after, it all imploded. Worse, as the FT notes in a new piece, between…
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Oprah just had an AI special with Sam Altman and Bill Gates — here are the highlights
Late Thursday evening, Oprah Winfrey aired a special on AI, appropriately titled “AI and the Future of Us.” Guests included OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, tech influencer Marques Brownlee, and current FBI director Christopher Wray. The dominant tone was one of skepticism — and wariness. Oprah noted in prepared remarks that the AI genie is out…