Author: TechBrunch
Xiaodi Hou, co-founder and former CEO of self-driving truck startup TuSimple, said the board will immediately liquidate the company and return the remaining funds (approximately $450 million) to shareholders on a “purely pro rata basis. “Do” is required. It's a “shared class,” according to the letter seen by TechCrunch. Mr. Hou also filed a lawsuit against TuSimple and its former co-founder Mo Chen seeking confirmation that the 2022 voting rights agreement that gave Mr. Chen control over TuSimple expires in November 2024. Mr. Hou claims that this will result in Mr. Chen's voting rights being returned to him. Hou even…
Elon Musk's AI company xAI is reportedly preparing to release a standalone consumer app. The upcoming app will be similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT, and will allow users to access xAI's Grok chatbot from their personal devices, according to the Wall Street Journal. The app is likely to appear after xAI closes its next round of funding, which could reach $5 billion and value the company at $50 billion, according to the Financial Times. This is double the valuation from six months ago. Musk is said to have given investors who backed his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter 25% of xAI…
At this year's TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, Aerospace President and CEO Steve Isakowitz and NASA AC Chief Engineer Charanya Charania took to the stage to create a literal moonshot: a thriving lunar ecosystem. We talked about how to do it. Today on Equity, we're taking you back behind the scenes at TechCrunch Disrupt. This time around, Devin Coldewey will be at the helm. For those keeping track, Devins has kept Equity's podcast crew updated on space startups over the past few months. This includes $29 million in funding for Starfish Space and the recent second commercial agreement between SpaceX…
Europe has to get better at scaling startups. This is the outlook of European Union President Ursula von der Leyen. He is about to begin his second five-year term leading the EU, which has a population of around 449 million people, with his start date set for December 1. Speaking in the European Parliament ahead of the vote to approve the top team (also known as the “Commission”), Ms von der Leyen said the EU's competitiveness would depend on closing what she called the “innovation gap”. Ta. It will increase support for start-ups and reduce red tape that can prevent…
Europe has to get better at scaling startups. This is the outlook of European Union President Ursula von der Leyen. He is about to begin his second five-year term leading the EU, which has a population of around 449 million people, with his start date set for December 1. Speaking in the European Parliament ahead of the vote to approve the top team (also known as the “Committee”), Ms von der Leyen said the EU's competitiveness would see more holes in what she called the “innovation gap”. He said it depends on whether they open it and fill it. We…
Bluesky may not train its AI systems on user content like other social networks do, but it is unlikely to prevent third parties from doing so. According to a report from 404 Media, machine learning librarians at AI company Hugging Face pulled 1 million public posts from Bluesky via the company's Firehose API for machine learning research and pushed the dataset to a public repository. . Controversy has since caused Daniel van Strien to delete the data, but this is a timely reminder that anything you post publicly on Bluesky is publicly available. It functions as a thing. Bluesky said…
India-based audio platform Pocket FM has over 200,000 hours of content on its service. However, CEO Rohan Nayak believes the platform still has room to grow in terms of creating original content and expanding its library into multiple genres and subgenres. The quickest way to do that is by leveraging AI tools that can help with audio production, writing strategies, and adapting stories for different regions. “We feel that our content catalog is still not good enough for our users. There are many genres and subgenres that are not in our library. I don’t think there’s any content,” Nayak told…
A new AI model family is in the works, and this is one of the few that can be recreated from scratch. On Tuesday, Ai2, a nonprofit AI research organization founded by the late Paul Allen, released OLMo 2, the second model family in the OLMo series. (OLMo stands for “Open Language Model.”) While there is no shortage of “open” language models to choose from (see Meta's Llama), OLMo 2 builds on the Open Source Initiative's definition of open source AI: Meet the tools and data you need. The tools to develop it are publicly available. The Open Source Initiative,…
Amid increased scrutiny around the world over Apple and Google's app store fees, gaming platform Roblox is offering 25% more in-game currency Robux for web and gift card purchases compared to mobile platforms. started. Essentially, the company is encouraging users to buy Robux from the web to avoid Apple and Google's increased in-app purchase fees. The company confirmed the move and said it is exploring ways to provide more value to its user and creator communities. “Apple and Google are valued partners, and we're always looking for ways to deliver more value to our community of users and creators while…
President-elect Donald Trump is considering appointing an “AI czar” to the White House, Axios reported. If President Trump appoints such policymakers, they would be responsible for helping coordinate federal regulation and the government's use of AI. Importantly, Axios notes that AI czars would not require Senate approval, allowing them to address the administration's goals more quickly. The AI czar role could eventually be combined with the “crypto czar” role, which the White House is also reportedly considering, and the government established under President Joe Biden's AI executive order. It will complement the agency's chief AI officer. Of course, President Trump…