Powerhouse venture firm Andreessen Horowitz has hired Daniel Penny as an investor, its webpage confirms.  Penny is the former Marine who was tried last year and found not guilty of criminally negligent homicide in the death of a homeless man on a New York City subway. After the man acted erratically, Penny held him in […]

During Snap’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Tuesday, CEO Evan Spiegel said that the uncertainty surrounding TikTok’s future has positively affected its business. “We’re not trying to draw too many conclusions from some of the engagement lift we saw when [TikTok] went dark for that brief period of time. I would say that the overall environment […]

Alphabet is shrugging off concerns sparked by DeepSeek over AI spending, boosting its capital expenditures to a whopping $75 billion. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Alphabet is shrugging off concerns sparked by DeepSeek over AI spending, boosting its capital expenditures to a whopping $75 billion. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

As a university student, Dalton Signor was troubled by how many people around him smoked or vaped, including his grandmother and 14-year-old sister. Signor (pictured center) felt that existing smoking cessation medicines, whether patches, gums, or lozenges, are not very effective because they take too long to start working. “They take about 30 minutes to […]

Google removed a pledge to not build AI for weapons or surveillance from its website this week. The change was first spotted by Bloomberg. The company appears to have updated its public AI principles page, erasing a section titled “applications we will not pursue,” which was still included as recently as last week. Asked for […]

A group of developers at AI dev platform Hugging Face, including Thomas Wolf, the company’s co-founder and chief scientist, say they’ve built an “open” version of OpenAI’s deep research tool. Deep research, which OpenAI unveiled during an event Sunday, crawls the web to compile research reports on any subject. While impressive, deep research is currently […]

Figure AI founder and CEO Brett Adcock announced Tuesday that the humanoid robotics firm is exiting a deal with OpenAI. The Bay Area-based robotics company has instead opted to focus on in-house AI, owing to a “major breakthrough.” Adcock was tightlipped in terms of specifics, but he promised to deliver “something no one has ever […]

Cybersecurity company SailPoint is hoping to sell $1 billion worth of stock in its upcoming IPO and offer another signal that IPOs will become hot again. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Israeli spyware maker Paragon Solutions confirmed to TechCrunch that it sells its products to the U.S. government and other unspecified allied countries. Paragon’s executive chairman John Fleming said in a statement to TechCrunch on Tuesday that, “Paragon licenses its technology to a select group of global democracies — principally, the United States and its allies.” […]