Author: TechBrunch
Lilium was once the darling of the emerging electric aircraft industry, raising more than $1 billion before going public, but after efforts to raise money and emerge from bankruptcy failed, it shut down operations and left about 1,000 employees. employees were fired. The publication Gründersene first reported the layoffs. Patrick Nathen, co-founder and CEO of Lilium, confirmed on LinkedIn that the company has ceased operations after 10 years. “It is a sad fact that after 10 years and 10 months, Lilium has ceased operations. The company that Daniel, Sebastian, Mathias and I founded can no longer pursue our shared belief…
The cybersecurity world is full of technical lingo and jargon. At TechCrunch, we have been writing about cybersecurity for years, and even we sometimes need a refresher on what exactly a specific word or expression means. That’s why we have created this glossary, which includes some of the most common — and not so common — words and expressions that we use in our articles, and explanations of how, and why, we use them. This is a developing compendium, and we will update it regularly. An advanced persistent threat (APT) is often categorized as a hacker, or group of hackers,…
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…