Author: TechBrunch

OpenAI has disbanded its robotics division. Then it came back. Now, OpenAI is revealing more about its plans for the revived team through a social media post by its hardware director and a newly published job description. Caitlin Kalinowski, who joined OpenAI last November from Meta's AR glasses division to lead hardware, said in a post on X on Friday that OpenAI will develop its own robots with custom sensor suites. In the post, Kalinowski highlighted new OpenAI Robotics job openings with additional information. According to the listing, OpenAI's robotics team will focus on “general purpose,” “adaptive,” and “versatile” robots…

On Saturday, Triplegang CEO Oleksandr Tomchuk received a call that his company's e-commerce site was down. This appeared to be some kind of distributed denial of service attack. He soon discovered that the culprit was an OpenAI bot that was relentlessly trying to scrape his entire massive site. “We have over 65,000 products, and each product has a page,” Tomchuk told TechCrunch. “Each page contains at least three photos.” OpenAI was sending “tens of thousands” of server requests trying to download all of them, hundreds of thousands of photos, along with detailed descriptions. “OpenAI used 600 IPs for data collection.…

AI companies around the world raised more than $100 billion in venture capital in 2024, an increase of more than 80% compared to 2023, according to data from Crunchbase. This represents almost one-third of the total venture capital invested in 2024. This is a large amount. Money is pouring into many AI companies. The AI ​​industry has swelled tremendously over the past two years, filled with overlapping companies, startups that only do marketing but don't actually use AI yet, and legitimate AI startups that are diamonds in the rough. It has become. Investors have a hard time finding emerging companies…

Google searches for how to delete Facebook, Instagram, and threads are on the rise following Meta's decision to eliminate its third-party fact-checking system and relax its content moderation policies. Those angry about the decision say Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is coddling the incoming Trump administration at the expense of making the company's social media platforms a breeding ground for misinformation and polarizing speech. I'm accusing them of being there. Mr. Zuckerberg's statement that the company's third-party fact checkers were “too politically biased” for his vision of “free expression” probably didn't help matters. So if you, like countless others, have ever…

AI developer platform Hugging Face has settled a lawsuit against South Korean AI startup FriendliAI, which had accused Hugging Face of infringing one of its patents. According to documents filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Delaware, FriendliAI reached a “confidential agreement” with Hugging Face on January 8, agreeing to dismiss the lawsuit “with prejudice.” Return to court. “FriendliAI and Hugging Face are hereby dismissed without cost or fee to any party to this action,” the filing states. “The court shall retain jurisdiction over the parties' settlement agreement.” Hugging Face did not respond to requests…

Few cybersecurity risks facing the United States today loom as large as the potential sabotage by Chinese-backed hackers, which senior U.S. national security officials have dubbed the “defining threat of our time.” It is expressed as. The United States said hackers backed by the Chinese government had penetrated deep into networks of critical U.S. infrastructure, including water, energy and transportation systems, in some cases for years. Officials say the goal is to lay the groundwork for a potentially devastating cyberattack in the event of a future conflict between China and the United States, including over a possible Chinese invasion of…

Welcome to Startups Weekly — a weekly roundup of must-sees from the world of startups. Want it delivered to your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. The second week of the year is usually a busy week for startup news, and 2025 is no exception. From CES product announcements to M&A and funding rounds, here's what you need to know. This week's most interesting startup stories Image credit: May Mobility Several startups announced new products at CES 2025, including Full Nature Farms and its farm irrigation system, Soliddd and its smart glasses for macular degeneration patients, and May Mobility and…

Companies that rely on physical supply chains (the networks of facilities and transportation systems used to move materials from one place to another) face many challenges, from staff shortages to rising customer expectations. facing. The pressure doesn't ease. According to a survey by real estate investment trust company Prologis, two-thirds of executives say they are losing sleep over supply chain-related issues. Barry Conlon and David Broe encountered some of these stressors themselves when founding FreightWatch, a startup that provides “freight visibility” and supply chain security solutions to commercial customers. After selling FreightWatch in 2012, Conlon and Broe saw an opportunity…

TikTok's lawyers argued in front of the Supreme Court on Friday that the social network's ban violates the First Amendment rights of TikTok and the American people. The Supreme Court this morning heard arguments on whether to overturn or delay a law that could effectively ban TikTok in the United States. The bill, officially called the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Control Applications Act, would give TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, until January 19, 2025, to sell its U.S. operations or sell it domestically. The law imposes a penalty of facing a business ban. Friday's trade comes just nine days before…

On Friday, the U.S. Department of Justice charged Russian nationals Roman Vitalievich Ostapenko, Aleksandr Evgenievich Oleinik, and Anton Vyaklavovich with running a service that helped criminals launder cryptocurrencies.・Announcing the indictment of Mr. Tarasov. The three were allegedly involved in operating two crypto mixers, Bender.io and Sinbad.io, which were used as “safe havens for the laundering of criminally derived money, including the proceeds of ransomware and wire fraud. It was working,” said Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brent Wible. The statement was made in a press release by the Bureau of Criminal Investigation at the Ministry of Justice. Bender.io and Sinbad.io…