Author: TechBrunch
Telegram founder Pavel Durov said on Monday that the company is now profitable. Durov said the chat app's total revenue will exceed $1 billion in 2024. The company launched its premium subscription service in 2022 and currently has 12 million paying users. Durov also said the app will end the year with more than $500 million in cash, not including crypto assets. Telegram's CEO said the company paid down a large amount of debt this fall. “Over the past four years, Telegram has issued approximately $2 billion in debt. We took advantage of the favorable price of Telegram bonds and…
A US judge has ruled that Israeli spyware maker NSO Group violated hacking laws by using WhatsApp to secretly infect devices with the Pegasus spyware. In a landmark ruling Friday, a Northern California federal judge targeted the devices of 1,400 WhatsApp users, upholding state and federal hacking laws and WhatsApp's terms of service that prohibit the use of the messaging platform for malicious purposes. The court held that NSO Group was responsible for violating the law. . The ruling comes five years after Meta-owned WhatsApp sued NSO Group, alleging that the spyware organization exploited a vulnerability in the messaging platform's…
Elon Musk's AI company xAI is testing a standalone iOS app for the chatbot Grok, which was previously only available to X users. The app, currently in beta in Australia and several countries, provides access to real-time data from the web and X, offers generative AI features such as text rewriting, long paragraph summaries, quick Q&A, and images. can also be generated. Also text prompts. “Grok is an AI-powered assistant designed for maximum authenticity, usefulness, and curiosity. Get answers to all your questions, create impressive images, upload photos, and more. and gain a deeper understanding of your world,” the list…
President-elect Donald Trump has confirmed reports that Sriram Krishnan, most recently a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), will become senior policy advisor for AI in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. President Trump said in a statement that Krishnan will “work with the President's Council of Science and Technology Advisers to help shape and coordinate AI policy across the government.” And in a post on X, Krishnan said he will work closely with former PayPal COO David Sachs, who was recently named Trump's crypto and AI “emperor.” “I am honored to serve our country and ensure…
The two largest defense technology companies, Palantir and Anduril, are in talks with technology companies including SpaceX, OpenAI, Saronic, and ScaleAI to form a consortium to bid for Pentagon contracts, the Financial Times reports. It is said that they are doing so. The aim, according to the FT, is to challenge the dominance of “major” defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Boeing. One anonymous participant described this as an effort to “deliver a new generation of defense contractors,” while another said it was meant to sell the government's cutting-edge weapons and other technology. He said it would be…
The U.S. ban on TikTok is expected to take effect within a month, and President-elect Donald Trump said Sunday he wants the app to remain, according to Reuters. “We have to start thinking, because we actually went on TikTok and had billions of views and a great response,” Trump told supporters at an event in Phoenix, Arizona. ” he said. “They brought me a chart, and it was a record, and it was such a beautiful thing to look at, and I looked at it and said, 'Maybe we should put this awful thing down for a while. You may…
OpenAI on Friday announced o3, a new family of AI inference models. The startup claims this to be more advanced than o1 and anything else it releases. These improvements appear to have been brought about by scaling compute during testing, which we wrote about last month, but OpenAI also says it used a new safety paradigm to train its o-series models. . OpenAI on Friday announced new research on “deliberative alignment,” outlining the company's latest methods for ensuring that AI inference models align with the values of human developers. The startup used this method to get o1 and o3 to…
Self-driving car technology and electrification startups were once the darlings of venture capital and the corporate world. These two technologies promised billions of dollars in revenue and new avenues for automakers to make money beyond making and selling cars. With a few exceptions like Waymo and Wayve, the days of VCs printing money are long gone for AVs. But as 2024 began, there was still a buzz of EVs in the air, albeit quieter than before. As 2024 draws to a close, it's safe to say the topic has become something of a whisper as some EV startups falter and…
In recent months, there has been a lot of press about Apple's efforts to expand its footprint in customers' homes with products in development, such as wall-mounted smart home hubs. That strategy could also include smart doorbells, according to a new report from Bloomberg. This doorbell uses Apple's FaceID technology to scan the face of the person approaching the door, connect wirelessly to the deadbolt lock, and automatically unlock it for the occupants of the home. The doorbell is reportedly in the early stages of development and is not expected to be on the market until the end of 2025…
Christian Ponce was wearing an Indiana Jones costume when he met co-founder Theo Schaefer. That was at the 2023 Halloween Party hosted by Entrepreneur First, a startup program that introduces founders to each other before launching their ideas. The two hit it off, Ponce recalls. Schaefer earned a master's degree in underwater autonomous robotics from MIT and worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory searching for extraterrestrial life on Jupiter's moons. “That's crazy,” Ponce says with a laugh. “I came from Caltech and did bioengineering,” where he worked on E. coli. The two bonded over stories about their monotonous jobs as…