Author: TechBrunch

TikTok's parent company ByteDance has big plans to buy Nvidia chips in 2025, despite US restrictions. ByteDance plans to spend $7 billion on the chip in 2025, The Information reported, citing internal sources. If ByteDance does this, it will become one of the world's largest owners of NVIDIA chips, despite US efforts to restrict Chinese companies from purchasing such US-made AI chips. In 2022, the United States announced export restrictions on certain types of AI chips to countries including China, where ByteDance is headquartered. These restrictions have since been tightened many times. According to a report in The Information, ByteDance…

The U.S. Treasury Department told lawmakers in a letter Monday that it suffered a cyberattack in early December that it blamed on hackers from the Chinese government. In a letter shared with senior members of the U.S. House of Representatives and seen by TechCrunch, the Treasury Department said the hackers gained remote access to certain workstations of Treasury Department employees and accessed unclassified documents, calling it a “critical It is called a “cybersecurity incident.” The Treasury Department reported on December 8 from BeyondTrust, a company that provides identity access and remote support technology to large organizations and government agencies, that…

While AI is lauded by some as the biggest technological breakthrough since the industrial revolution, enterprises — arguably the tech’s biggest potential customer base — have been slow to adopt AI. While some investors predicted that 2024 would be the year we’d start to see more AI adoption by enterprises, that didn’t play out as budgets remained constrained and AI tech often remained in the “experimental” category. Will that all start to change in 2025? Depends on who you ask. TechCrunch talked to 20 venture capitalists who back startups looking to sell to enterprises about their predictions for 2025. They…

Volkswagen Group's troubled automotive software arm Cariad has been releasing terabytes of customer data on around 800,000 Audi, SEAT, Skoda and Volkswagen electric cars onto the internet for several months, Der Spiegel reports. I left it on [in German]He quoted a security researcher who learned about the data breach from an anonymous whistleblower. Researchers speaking at the Chaos Computer Club in Hamburg, Germany this week said the published data also includes the exact location coordinates of more than half of the vehicles on the list, some 460,000. He said that Some of the location data is accurate to a few…

Encode, the nonprofit that co-sponsored California's ill-fated AI safety law SB 1047, seeks permission to file a court brief in support of Elon Musk's injunction to block OpenAI from becoming a for-profit company. Ta. In a draft brief filed Friday afternoon in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Encode's lawyers said OpenAI's transformation into a for-profit company would undermine the company's mission to “develop and deploy innovative technology.” He said it would be “damaging.” It is safe and beneficial to the public. ” “OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman claim to be developing technology that will…

Bench, the venture capital-backed accounting startup that abruptly shut down last week, leaving thousands of customers locked out of their accounts, will be acquired by Employer.com for an undisclosed price in a last-minute deal. was obtained exclusively by TechCrunch. San Francisco-based HR technology company Employer.com focuses on payroll and onboarding, in contrast to Bench, which specializes in accounting and tax. Matt Charney, Employer.com's chief marketing officer, told TechCrunch that the company is bringing back the Bench platform and providing instructions for customers to quickly log in and retrieve their data. Charney told TechCrunch that customers will have the option of…

Nvidia has completed its acquisition of Run:ai, an Israeli startup that helps manage and optimize AI hardware infrastructure. As part of the merger, Run:ai said its software, which currently only works on Nvidia products, will be open sourced, meaning Nvidia rivals such as AMD and Intel can also adapt it to their own hardware. said to mean. “We are eager to build on our gains to date, expand our talented team, and expand our product and market reach,” Run:ai told Bloomberg in a statement. “Open sourcing the software allows us to extend its availability to the entire AI ecosystem.” Nvidia…

AI holds great promise for healthcare, but not just on the medical side. Many startups believe that machine learning-based systems can bring a lot of benefits to adjacent tasks such as scheduling and confirming reservations. Brazilian startup Carecode is one of these AI believers. The company has quietly emerged with ambitions to reduce healthcare costs and improve healthcare outcomes by developing AI agents that focus on tasks that occur before, during and after medical appointments, and typically Performed by a call center. “We tend to think that the moment with a doctor is the only thing that matters, but after…

Middle Eastern startup Calo has injected significant funding into offering time-poor customers and a growing range of heat-and-cook products, with a business built around increasingly customized ready-to-eat meals. We are trying to expand both of our customers. -Eat food. The Middle East meal delivery market is expected to reach $11.2 billion by 2030, according to a MarkNtel Advisors report released last year. Food aggregators like Careem, Deliveroo, and Talabat have built large businesses by capitalizing on the habit of busy professionals ordering meals rather than preparing them themselves. This was primarily driven by the COVID-19 pandemic. Riyadh-based Calo differentiates itself…

US telecommunications giant Verizon, which was targeted by the China-linked cyber espionage group Salt Typhoon, announced that it had secured its network. In a statement given to TechCrunch on Sunday, Verizon spokesperson Richard Young said the company had “contained the cyber incident brought on by this nation-state threat actor” and had “no security measures in place on our network for some time.” “We have not detected any threat actor activity.” ” Verizon's containment of the incident was confirmed by a “highly reputable cybersecurity firm,” the company said, but Young declined to name the third party. The scale of the Salt…