Nvidia-backed data center company CoreWeave has acquired AI developer platform Weights & Biases for an undisclosed sum. According to The Information, CoreWeave spent $1.7 billion on the transaction. Weights & Biases was valued at $1.25 billion in 2023, and it recently filed for an IPO....
EcoDataCenter, a Swedish company that builds eco-friendly data centers used by major compute providers to handle their AI traffic, has raised nearly half a billion dollars — $478 million (€450 million) to be exact — in anticipation of more demand. The equity funding, which is...
Last October, Meta dipped its toe into the world of facial recognition — an area where it has had a tricky track record — with an international test of two new tools: one to stop scams based on likenesses of famous people, and a second...
Defense tech startup Epirus has raised a $250m Series D to expand its counter-drone solutions. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only....
London startup Quantexa has made its name over the years with an enterprise platform that employs AI and data analytics to fight money laundering and fraud. Today, it is announcing new funding of $175 million to double down on that business while also moving deeper...
Alec Radford, a researcher who helped develop many of OpenAI’s key AI technologies, has been subpoenaed in a copyright case against the AI startup, according to a court filing Tuesday. The filing, submitted by an attorney for the plaintiffs to the U.S. District Court in...
A federal judge in Northern California denied Elon Musk’s motion for an injunction that would have halted OpenAI’s planned transition into a for-profit company, Bloomberg reported. Musk failed to provide enough evidence necessary for an injunction, U.S. District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled Tuesday....
The fintech startup has been under federal scrutiny for years for questionable financial and carbon accounting practices. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only....
The imposition of tariffs on Mexico and Canada represents a violation of the USMCA and could trigger a tariff war, experts say....
Amazon has formed a new group within AWS dedicated to creating AI agents, systems that help people automate parts of their lives, Reuters reported on Tuesday. In an email to staff seen by Reuters, AWS CEO Matt Garman said agentic AI has the potential to...
Enforcing the tariffs on Taiwan would be difficult, and they wouldn’t necessarily be enough to meaningfully increase semiconductor manufacturing in the United States, experts told WIRED....
Engineers and executives at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency are drawing healthy taxpayer-funded salaries—sometimes from the very agencies they are cutting....
The founder and CEO of IPO-bound fintech Klarna took to X to once again explain why his company ditched Salesforce’s flagship CRM product about a year ago in favor of its own homegrown AI system. But this time, Sebastian Siemiatkowski emphasized that he doesn’t think...
Amazon reportedly wants to get in on the AI “reasoning” model game. According to Business Insider, Amazon is developing an AI model that incorporates advanced “reasoning” capabilities, similar to models like OpenAI’s o3-mini and Chinese AI lab DeepSeek’s R1. The model may launch as soon...
While several of Google’s rivals, including OpenAI, have tweaked their AI chatbots to discuss politically sensitive subjects in recent months, Google appears to be embracing a more conservative approach. When asked to answer certain political questions, Google’s AI-powered chatbot, Gemini, often says it “can’t help...
We still didn’t get a straight up definition of exactly what an AI agent is during Bret Taylor’s Mobile World Congress fireside chat in Barcelona on Tuesday. The Sierra founder and OpenAI board chair preferred to side-step CNN moderator Anna Stewart’s question asking how “agentic...
When US president Donald Trump picked out a handful of cryptocurrencies for potential inclusion in a national strategic reserve, he sparked a trading frenzy—and questions about who stands to benefit....
Cohere for AI, AI startup Cohere’s nonprofit research lab, this week released a multimodal “open” AI model, Aya Vision, the lab claimed is best-in-class. Aya Vision can perform tasks like writing image captions, answering questions about photos, translating text, and generating summaries in 23 major...
OpenAI on Monday said it is supporting a new consortium called NextGenAI that would focus on supporting AI-assisted research at top universities. NextGenAI, whose 15 founding academic partners include Harvard, the University of Oxford and MIT, will be funded with $50 million in research grants,...
Venture investment to startups founded by women in Europe declined 12% in 2024, but it was in line with the 11% decrease in venture investment overall. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only....
As more people turn to AI chatbots like ChatGPT to look things up on the internet, the way companies approach their online presence has to change. Scrunch AI wants to help enterprises better prepare for a world in which more AI bots and agents visit...
Agents are the next big thing in AI. Some define these “agents” differently from others, but the general idea is, they’re AI-powered tools that can perform tasks autonomously. The agent hype has reached a fever pitch, but one startup was relatively early to the game:...
Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch brought a sales pitch to Mobile World Congress on Tuesday, urging delegates at the world’s biggest telecoms confab in Barcelona to invest in building data center infrastructure and “becoming hyperscalers” to boost the regional AI ecosystem. “We would welcome more domestic effort...
Sequoia-backed Mach Industries, the defense tech founded by 21-year-old Ethan Thornton, landed a contract with the U.S. Army and has plans for its first factory, Thornton told TechCrunch. The factory will be 115,000 square feet in Huntington Beach, California, where Mach’s headquarters is located, CEO...
Big tech companies aren’t sleeping on quantum chips: Amazon Web Services introduced Ocelot; Microsoft, Majorana; and Google, Willow. But although all of these can be considered to be breakthroughs, quantum startups often focus on more practical advancements — and they are making progress. Founded in...
The drive to decarbonize our economies through electrification and clean energy continues to generate momentum around battery technologies, as storage has a key role to play in enabling the green transition. While renewables are clean sources of energy compared to burning fossil fuels, their power...
The Trump Administration has fired a number of National Science Foundation employees who had been handpicked for their expertise in AI, threatening the agency’s ability to sustain key AI research, Bloomberg reported. One of the affected departments inside NSF, called the Directorate for Technology, Innovation,...
At least we can watch AI play Mario. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only....
Google Gemini users can now access the AI chatbot directly from the iPhone’s lock screen, thanks to an update released on Monday first spotted by 9to5Google. Users can now call up Gemini Live, Google’s relatively real-time voice feature for its AI chatbot, before they unlock...
New SEC filings from pharmaceutical companies reveal Donald Trump and Elon Musk's cost-cutting measures could slow drug research and delay FDA approvals....