Author: TechBrunch

Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski recently told Bloomberg TV that the company essentially stopped hiring a year ago, and that generative AI helped make this large-scale layoff possible. Ta. However, despite Siemiatkowski's bullishness on AI, the company is increasing the number of retiring human workers, as evidenced by public job postings targeting more humans and the company's own statements. It does not rely entirely on AI to replace people. “We stopped hiring about a year ago. We were at 4,500 people and now we're at 3,500,” Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg TV. “We have natural attrition; [does] Any technology company. Employees have been…

Let's call it the Reasoning Renaissance. Following the release of OpenAI's o1 (so-called inference model), there has been an explosion of inference models from competing AI labs. In early November, DeepSeek, an AI research firm backed by quantitative traders, began previewing its first inference algorithm, DeepSeek-R1. In the same month, Alibaba's Qwen team announced what it claimed was the first “open” challenger to o1. So what opened the floodgates? Well, one of them is exploring new approaches to refining generative AI techniques. As my colleague Max Zeff recently reported, “brute force” methods of scaling up models no longer yield the…

Elon Musk's AI company, XAI, could be embroiled in an escalating lawsuit with OpenAI. But that doesn't stop it from shipping new products on Friday nights. This evening, xAI revealed that it has begun rolling out an upgraded version of its flagship Grok 2 chatbot model to all users of X, the social network formerly known as Twitter. (X, which Musk also owns, often serves as a kind of testing ground for Grok.) The enhanced Grok is “three times faster” and “more accurate, follows instructions, and multi-processes.” xAI claims in a blog post. Language ability. ” Free users can only…

OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever spoke on a variety of topics Friday afternoon at the annual AI conference, NeurIPS, and was subsequently honored with an award for his contributions to the field. Sutskever predicts “superintelligent AI,” or AI that is more capable than humans at many tasks, which he believes will someday become a reality. Superintelligent AI will be “qualitatively different” from today's AI and will be unrecognizable in some aspects, Sutskever said. “[Superintelligent] Systems will actually become agentic in the true sense of the word,” Sutskever said, in contrast to current AI, which is “very slightly agentic.” They “reason” and…

Former OpenAI employee Suthir Balaji was recently found dead in his San Francisco apartment, according to the San Francisco Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. In October, a 26-year-old AI researcher expressed concerns about OpenAI violating copyright laws during an interview with the New York Times. “The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) has identified the deceased as Suthir Balaji, 26, of San Francisco. The cause of death has been determined to be suicide,” a spokesperson said in a statement to TechCrunch. “OCME has notified next of kin and there are no further comments or reports to make public…

Telegram has been under unprecedented pressure to clean up its platform this year after founder Pavel Durov was arrested in France and charged with allegedly harmful content shared on his messaging app. are. After announcing the crackdown in September, Telegram has now announced that it has removed 15.4 million groups and channels associated with harmful content such as scams and terrorism in 2024, adding that the effort will include “cutting-edge AI moderation. “It has been strengthened with tools.” According to a post from Durov's Telegram channel, the announcement is part of Telegram's new moderation page to better communicate moderation efforts…

Karsi CEO Tarek Mansour said in a podcast interview that an employee posted a meme to social media influencers about the FBI raid on the home of the CEO of arch-rival Polymarket. He admitted that he asked him to advertise it. Both of these companies offer competing event betting markets, a new kind of gambling industry where people bet on the outcome of events ranging from elections to popular culture. Mr. Mansour said the FBI raided the home of Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan last month, but that Mr. Kalsi had been trying to convince influencers to post memes about his…

G2 Venture Partners, the well-known spinout from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, is raising its third round of funding, with a target of $750 million, TechCrunch has learned. The funding, revealed in a regulatory filing, is a bullish vote of confidence in climate and sustainability startups, but other investors say they're hoping for a boost under the incoming Trump administration. He expresses cautious optimism about the fate of these companies. The company has invested in well-funded startups including renewable power data platform Arcadia, home appliance installer platform 1Komma5, and power and AI data center developer Crusoe, which recently raised $600…

AI continues to reshape power and energy markets, and even oil giants like ExxonMobil are getting in on the act. Exxon this week announced plans to build power plants for its data centers, reflecting how much the power technology company expects to need them over the next decade. By 2027, nearly half of new AI data centers may not have enough power, according to some estimates. Oil and gas companies already operate power plants for their own operations, but the new project will be the first for an external customer. The planned power plant will run on natural gas and…

Healthcare giant Optum has restricted access to its internal AI chatbot used by its employees after security researchers discovered that it was published online and could be accessed by anyone using only a web browser. restricted. The chatbot, seen by TechCrunch, allows employees to ask the company questions about how to handle patient health insurance claims and member disputes in accordance with the company's standard operating procedures (SOPs). The chatbot did not appear to contain or generate any sensitive personal or protected health information, but its parent company, the health insurance conglomerate UnitedHealth Inc., used it to override doctors' orders.…