Author: TechBrunch
Lawyers for the New York Times and Daily News, who are suing OpenAI for allegedly scraping their work without permission to train AI models, say OpenAI engineers accidentally deleted data that could be relevant to the lawsuit. states that it did. Earlier this fall, OpenAI agreed to provide two virtual machines to lawyers at The Times and Daily News to help them run searches for copyrighted content in the AI training set. (A virtual machine is a software-based computer that resides within another computer's operating system and is often used for purposes such as testing, backing up data, and running…
Nvidia reported Wednesday that it made more than $19 billion in net income last quarter, but that did little to reassure investors that the company's rapid growth will continue. Analysts asked CEO Jensen Huang on the earnings call about what would happen to Nvidia if technology companies started using new methods to improve their AI models. The methodology behind OpenAI's o1 model, or “test-time scaling,” has been much talked about. The idea is that if you give an AI model more time and computational power to “think” about a question, it will give you a better answer. Specifically, more compute…
Social media platform Reddit experienced an outage this afternoon at approximately 12:20 PM PT (or possibly earlier), resulting in thousands of users being unable to access the website and app. It's gone. After 4 hours it seems to be working again. According to Reddit's status page, Reddit confirmed that it has fixed the issue and is monitoring the results. We ourselves discovered this fault when trying to access the home page. The following message appeared on a black screen: “Upstream connectivity error or disconnect/reset before header. Reason for reset: Connection failure.” In the iOS app, all I could see was…
Cloud giant Snowflake has agreed to acquire data pipeline management company Datavolo for an undisclosed sum. Snowflake announced the deal during the market's closing bell on Wednesday, at the same time it also announced its third-quarter 2025 earnings. The acquisition has not yet been completed and is subject to customary closing conditions, Snowflake said in a release. Joseph Witt and Luke Roquet, who met while working together at Hortonworks, founded Datavolo in 2023. Witt previously served as CVP at Cloudera, while Roquet was CMO at Cloudera and, before that, head of business development at AWS. Datavolo uses Apache NiFi, an…
Several AI-based learning tools are capitalizing on the “PDF to Brainrot” trend, including ASMR clips of mixing paint and cutting soap, and Minecraft gameplay footage that are “oddly satisfying.” Read the text of the document you uploaded over the video. Subway Surfers. Students can then listen to an automated voice reading the textbook while watching these vertical videos. This video is often referred to as “brain rotting” material by TikTok users. Simple yet engaging gameplay and ASMR videos are strangely popular on TikTok. But it's more than just aimless Minecraft parkour. They are overlaid with a monotonous computer-like voice that…
Social media platform Reddit experienced an outage this afternoon at approximately 12:20 PM PT (or possibly earlier), resulting in thousands of users being unable to access the website and app. It's gone. After 4 hours it seems to be working again. According to Reddit's status page, Reddit confirmed that it has fixed the issue and is monitoring the results. We ourselves discovered this fault when trying to access the home page. The following message appeared on a black screen: “Upstream connectivity error or disconnect/reset before header. Reason for reset: Connection failure.” In the iOS app, all I could see was…
Not all of FTX's former top executives will go to prison. Former FTX Chief Technology Officer Gary Wang was spared prison time today by U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan. Judge Kaplan praised Mr. Wang's cooperation with federal authorities. Wang testified against former FTX founder and CEO Sam Bankman Fried in a trial last fall. Mr. Wang pleaded guilty to four felony counts of fraud and conspiracy. Former FTX CEO Bankman Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison last year and appealed in September. Caroline Ellison, the former CEO of FTX's Alameda Research, was sentenced to two years in prison…
The U.S. government has announced charges against five people accused of carrying out a multi-year hacking campaign (dubbed “0ktapus'' by security researchers) that targeted tech giants and crypto holders. On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Justice issued a press release announcing charges against five suspected hackers. Ahmed Hossam Eldin Elbadawi, 23, of College Station, Texas, Ahmed Hossam Eldin Elbadawi, 23, of College Station, Texas. Noah Michael Urban, 20, of Palm Coast, Florida. Evans Onyeaka Osigbo, 20, of Dallas, Texas. Joel Martin Evans, 25, of Jacksonville, North Carolina. and Tyler Robert Buchanan, 22, from the UK, who was arrested in Spain…
May Mobility is gradually evolving its driverless capabilities. The company began a small rollout of self-driving shuttles this week. Self-driving shuttles automatically travel along a predetermined route without the need for a human safety driver to be present. May will initially deploy one or two self-driving Toyota Sienna minivans to transport employees and “guests” to a two-square-mile area of the city. This is the second city in May's so-called “driver out” operation. In December 2023, the startup began driverless testing in a planned community in Sun City, Arizona, where it is currently transporting passengers for free. May Mobility co-founder and…
Living in isolation and sharing a home office with her mother, a renowned radiologist, has given Shiva Suri a unique perspective on how radiologists work. “I watched her work every day and she was wasting about seven to eight hours on boring workflow tasks,” Suri said. “Only 5% of the time was she limited in her radiology thinking skills, which was really sad.” So Suri, then an engineer at big data analytics company Confluent, founded New Lantern, a startup that automates tedious radiology-related tasks such as 3D measurements during scans and report generation. Suri (pictured below center) noticed that her…