Tech

When we gather ’round the proverbial fire and exchange our online dating war stories, we’re usually talking about the usual suspects: Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, Grindr, and sometimes more niche apps like Lex. But ever since Facebook Dating launched in 2019, I’m not sure I have ever heard a tale that began there — I know more people who met in …

Andreessen Horowitz is pausing its Talent x Opportunity (TxO) fund and program, according to four sources familiar with the matter, including more than one founder in the program.  The firm announced TxO in 2020 to support founders who do not have access to traditional venture networks. Many of TxO’s participants were women and minorities who, overall, receive very slim amounts of venture capital dollars. The announcement of …

Solo VC investor extraordinaire Elad Gil said on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt that AI has been one of the least predictable tech booms he’s ever seen. Gil is on the cap table of virtually every hit company of the past decade, including many of today’s leading AI companies. Still, he thinks that over the last year, certain AI markets appear …

Lawmakers have called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Flock Safety, a company that operates license plate scanning cameras, for allegedly failing to implement cybersecurity protections that expose its camera network to hackers and spies. In a letter sent by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL, 8th), the lawmakers urge FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson to probe …

A Japanese trade organization representing publishers like Studio Ghibli wrote a letter to OpenAI last week, calling for the AI giant to stop training its AI models on their copyrighted content without permission. Studio Ghibli, the animation studio behind films like “Spirited Away” and “My Neighbor Totoro,” has been especially impacted by OpenAI’s generative AI products. When ChatGPT’s native image …

Locket, a private social networking app for friends, has scored a win with Gen Alpha users following the launch of its latest feature, Rollcall. The app, which lets friends share photos that then appear in home screen widgets, first hit the top of the App Store’s charts in early 2022 by taking advantage of Apple’s widget system to form the …

How much power is enough for AI? Nobody knows, not even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman or Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. That has put software-first businesses like OpenAI and Microsoft in a bind. Much of the tech world has been focused on compute as a major barrier to AI deployment. And while tech companies have been racing to secure power, those …

Apple has redesigned the web interface for its App Store, making it actually usable for people who aren’t viewing the store on Apple devices. Before this update, users could see individual pages for apps on the web — which they probably found via a search engine — but there was no way to browse within the App Store. On a …

Peter Williams, the former general manager of Trenchant, a division of defense contractor L3Harris that develops surveillance and hacking tools for Western governments, pleaded guilty last week to stealing some of those tools and selling them to a Russian broker.   A court document filed in the case, as well as exclusive reporting by TechCrunch and interviews with Williams’ former …

Cloud-computing company Lambda deepened its relationship with Microsoft through a sizable AI infrastructure deal. Nvidia-backed Lambda announced it struck a multibillion-dollar deal with Microsoft on Monday to deploy tens of thousands of Nvidia GPUs, according to a press release. The exact size of the deal was not disclosed. Some of these GPUs will be Nvidia GB300 NVL72 systems, which were …