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Vanguard cuts Indian ride-share startup Ola’s valuation to $2B
Vanguard has revised its valuation of Indian ride-hailing startup Ola to about $2 billion as of the end of August. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
View the articleNanoscale transistors could enable more efficient electronics
Researchers are leveraging quantum mechanical properties to overcome the limits of silicon semiconductor technology.
View the articleNew Research Finds Sixteen Major Problems With RAG Systems, Including Perplexity
A recent study from the US has found that the real-world performance of popular Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) research systems such as Perplexity and Bing Copilot falls far short of both the ma...
View the articleThreads now has 275M monthly active users
Meta's social network, Threads, now has 275 million monthly active users, the company said on Sunday. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
View the articleX updates block feature, letting blocked users see your public posts
X is rolling out its controversial update to the block feature, allowing people to view your public posts even if you have blocked them. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only....
View the articleAffirm launches in the UK, as ‘buy now, pay later’ market faces regulatory overhaul
Buy now, pay later (BNPL) giant Affirm is launching in the U.K., its first market outside North America. Its long-anticipated arrival comes as U.K. lawmakers mull new rules to bring BNPL firms into li...
View the articleFrom Lime to Uber to Hertz: Free and discounted Election Day rides
Election Day is nearly here, and if you haven’t already mailed in your ballot or gone in for early voting, you might need a ride come November 5. Here’s a roundup of all the freebies, discounts,...
View the articleOpenAI has hired the co-founder of Twitter challenger Pebble
Gabor Cselle, the former CEO and co-founder of X (formerly Twitter) challenger Pebble, has joined OpenAI to work on a secretive project. Cselle, who according to LinkedIn has been employed at OpenAI s...
View the articleFounders should seek sector alignment when looking for a family office investor
Family offices invest a substantial amount of capital in startups each year. In the first half of 2023, 27% of overall startup deal value came from deals that included a family office investor, accord...
View the article‘If you actually are solving a problem, you don’t talk about any of the hype,’ investor says
The hype is palpable: As tech folks from near and far converge for TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 in San Fransisco — one of the only places where Waymo is available to the public — there’s ample chatte...
View the articleWesley Chan on what he looks for as he’s shopping for potential unicorns
Investor Wesley Chan has shown a knack for making very early investments into multi-billion-dollar unicorns, such as Plaid, Gusto, Flexport, and, most recently, Canva. Chan comes from an unconventiona...
View the articleWomen in AI: Sophia Velastegui believes AI is moving too fast
As a part of TechCrunch’s ongoing Women in AI series, which seeks to give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved (and overdue) time in the spotlight, TechCrunch interviewed Sop...
View the articleGenAI suffers from data overload, so companies should focus on smaller, specific goals
“There is no AI without data, there is no AI without unstructured data, and there is no AI without unstructured data at scale,” said Chet Kapoor, chairman and CEO of data management company DataSt...
View the articleWhy Wiz really turned down Google’s $23B offer
Welcome back to Week in Review. This week, we’re coming at you right off the heels of TechCrunch Disrupt! If you missed it, we’re highlighting conversations from Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, W...
View the articleQuantum Machines and Nvidia use machine learning to get closer to an error-corrected quantum computer
About a year and a half ago, quantum control startup Quantum Machines and Nvidia announced a deep partnership that would bring together Nvidia’s DGX Quantum computing platform and Quantum Machine’...
View the articleAnthropic Launches Visual PDF Analysis in Latest Claude AI Update
In a significant advancement for document processing, Anthropic has unveiled new PDF support capabilities for its Claude 3.5 Sonnet model. This development marks a crucial step forward in bridging the...
View the articleMIT debuts a large language model-inspired method for teaching robots new skills
MIT this week showcased a new model for training robots. Rather than the standard set of focused data used to teach robots new tasks, the method goes big, mimicking the massive troves of information u...
View the articleCan you build a startup without sacrificing your mental health? Bonobos founder Andy Dunn thinks so
Bonobos founder Andy Dunn is back in the builder’s seat, working on an in-person social media platform called Pie. But the biggest lessons he learned from his $310 million Bonobos exit don’t have ...
View the articleCoffeeSpace is a Hinge-like app that wants to help you find your co-founder
CoffeeSpace is on a mission to help people find partners for their startup ideas online. The startup, which exhibited as part of the Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, has launched a ...
View the articleCareYaya is enabling affordable home care by connecting healthcare students with elders
CareYaya, a platform that matches people who need caregivers with healthcare students, is working to disrupt the caregiving industry. The startup, which exhibited as part of the Battlefield 200 at Tec...
View the articleHow national interest startups should be thinking about government contracts
National interest technology can show up in a lot of ways, like in data analysis and cybersecurity, as well as satellites and weapons. Many startups with dual-use applications are increasingly looking...
View the articleMicrosoft and a16z set aside differences, join hands in plea against AI regulation
Two of the biggest forces in two deeply intertwined tech ecosystems — large incumbents and startups — have taken a break from counting their money to jointly plead that the government cease and de...
View the articleSpaceX wants to test refueling Starships in space early next year
SpaceX will attempt to transfer propellant from one orbiting Starship to another as early as next March, a technical milestone that will pave the way for an uncrewed landing demonstration of a Starshi...
View the articleThe Guy Behind the Fake AI Halloween Parade Listing Says You’ve Got It All Wrong
An SEO agency owner says he is “very depressed” after one of his AI-assisted Halloween parade listings misled revelers in Dublin, Ireland.
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