Author: TechBrunch

Over two years and nearly 100 episodes later, as the host of TechCrunch's recently concluded podcast Found, I've learned a lot about how founders approach building startups. How founders decide when it's the right time to expand beyond their core product, how startups approach hiring, and what inspired entrepreneurs to take the leap in the first place. I've heard stories about it, and everything in between. Although I'm not a founder myself, some of the learnings and advice I heard on the show stood out to me more than others. I've put together a short and sweet list of the…

With iOS 18, Apple rolled out Apple Intelligence, which includes AI-powered features for summarizing notifications. If you receive a large number of notifications from one app, this feature consolidates the contents of all notifications into one card and displays it on your lock screen. You can close the stack after reading the summary, or tap the stack to see individual notifications. However, this characterization is not always accurate. In some cases, you may get strange results, but in other cases the notification may not be properly summarized and may contain glaring inaccuracies. You can turn off or customize the notification…

Open source powers the technology world, and 90% of modern software stacks are formed through frameworks. library; database; operating system. and countless standalone applications. The benefits of open source software are well understood and promise greater control and transparency. However, there is a constant battle between open source and proprietary realms, with many companies retreating from open source to protect their commercial interests. At the heart of all this is the thorny issue of licensing. There are two main types of licenses that meet the formal definition of open source as established by the Open Source Initiative (OSI). “Permissive” licenses…

This story has been updated throughout with more details as the story has developed. We will continue to do so as the case and dispute are ongoing. The community around WordPress, one of the most popular technologies for creating and hosting websites, is going through a very heated controversy. At the core is a fight between WordPress’ co-creator and Automattic’s CEO Matt Mullenweg and WP Engine, which hosts websites built on WordPress. WordPress’ technology is open source and free, and it powers a huge chunk of the internet — around 40% of websites are built on top of WordPress. Websites…

So-called inferential AI models are becoming easier and cheaper to develop. On Friday, NovaSky, a team of researchers based at the Sky Computing Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, released Sky-T1-32B-Preview, an inference model that competes with OpenAI's previous version of o1 on a number of important benchmarks. did. Sky-T1 appears to be the first true open source inference model in the sense that it can be replicated from scratch. The team has released the dataset used for training and the necessary training code. “Incredibly, Sky-T1-32B-Preview was trained for less than $450,” the team said in a blog post,…

Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic and co-creator of WordPress, has deactivated the accounts of several members of the WordPress.org community. Some of its members were spearheading a push to create a new fork of the open source WordPress project. Community criticism of WordPress governance is not new, but the latest uproar comes in September, when Mullenweg publicly accused WP Engine, a commercial hosting company built on WordPress, of profiteering without giving much in return. It started with an accusation. Things quickly escalated (read more here) and after WP Engine was banned from accessing key WordPress resources, we filed a lawsuit…

No company has leveraged the AI ​​revolution more dramatically than Nvidia. Since the introduction of ChatGPT a little more than two years ago, and the many competitive generative AI services launched since then, the company's revenue, profitability, and cash reserves have skyrocketed. And the stock price soared more than eight times. During this period, the world's leading high-performance GPU manufacturers have used their ballooning wealth to significantly increase investments in startups of all kinds, especially AI startups. The semiconductor giant ramped up its venture capital activity in 2024, participating in 49 funding rounds for AI companies, up from 34 in…

Microsoft has taken legal action against a group it says intentionally developed and used tools to circumvent safety guardrails in its cloud AI products. A group of 10 unnamed defendants used stolen customer credentials and custom-designed software to access Microsoft's fully managed services, according to a complaint filed by the company in December in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. It is said to have infiltrated the Azure OpenAI service. Powered by technology from ChatGPT manufacturer OpenAI. In the complaint, Microsoft alleges that the defendant (referred to only by his legal pseudonym “Does”) violated the Computer…

The white cane of the 21st century. Many tech companies have stepped up efforts to make technology more accessible to the visually impaired, but canes have not benefited much from these advances. London-born WeWalk takes a more traditional approach to white canes. Other than the bulkier handle, the company's product doesn't look much different than a standard folding cane. The company currently offers two models: the $850 Smartcane 2 and the $1,150 Smartcane+ 2. The main difference between each layer is that the latter includes a voice-controlled assistant. This is a seemingly invaluable tool for visually impaired people on the…

After accounting startup Bench abruptly shut down on Dec. 27 and was acquired in a fire sale by Employer.com, Bench customers are now learning that they can't simply walk away with just their financial data. And some people are very unhappy about it, three customers told TechCrunch. In summary, when Bench, a Canadian-based startup that raised $113 million from investors including Bain Capital Ventures and Shopify, shut down, thousands of businesses lost access to their accounting and tax documents. . A few days later, Bench announced that it would be acquired by Employer.com for an undisclosed price in a last-minute…