Author: TechBrunch
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…
A new Wall Street Journal report says OpenAI's efforts to develop its next major model, GPT-5, are behind schedule and the results don't yet justify the hefty cost. This echoes an earlier report in The Information suggesting that OpenAI is considering new strategies as GPT-5 may not represent as much progress as previous models. However, the WSJ article includes additional details about the 18-month development of GPT-5, codenamed Orion. OpenAI has reportedly completed at least two large-scale training runs aimed at improving models by training them on vast amounts of data. Initial training runs were slower than expected, suggesting that…
Becoming a venture capitalist has become Hollywood's newest status symbol. These days, everyone from Olivia Wilde to Emma Watson is either starting a business venture or looking to back the next big thing. Robinhood, Uber, and Klarna all have glamorous names on the cap table, paving the way for the rise of “Hollywood angels.” For founders, having a celebrity on the cap table can bring a lot of buzz to a startup, and bonus points if that celebrity knows what they're doing. Here are some of the top celebrities who invest and what they typically look to invest in (this…
On November 15, Peter Wang posted a message seeking ideas for new incubators and funds to support experimental projects built on the burgeoning Bluesky/AT protocol ecosystem. Four weeks later, Skyseed showed up with an initial commitment of $1 million. The speed of this turnaround is underlined by the fact that the fund doesn't even have a website yet (although it does have a Bluesky profile), but it does prove a few things. People who abandoned X (nee Twitter). But by starting fresh with a new social platform built on an open, decentralized network like AT Protocol, you can avoid the…
Prominent investor Marc Andreessen recently met with Biden administration staff to discuss how they are working closely with two or three large AI companies to control AI and control other companies through burdensome regulation. He said it gave the impression that he wanted to shut him out. Although Andreessen did not name OpenAI, it was implied that OpenAI would have been a beneficiary of this alleged effort. But OpenAI CEO Sam Altman dismissed Andreessen's comments as a “conspiracy theory” on his podcast with Bari Weiss this week. “So we were in the same room with them and other companies and…
On the first day of Y Combinator's Winter 2024 session, shortly after orientation and taking photos in front of the YC sign, PearAI's founders were “canceled,” as founder Nang Ang explained to TechCrunch. , received a barrage of hate online. But they survived and graduated from YC's Winter 2024 class earlier this month with a revised idea and a new initial product. Now, they have also reached their $1 million seed funding goal and have raised a total of $1.25 million, including YC's standard deal of $375,000, Ang told TechCrunch. Summary: That Saturday in September, Ang and his co-founder Duke…
U.S. prosecutors in New Jersey on Friday announced charges against Rostislav Panev, 51, a dual Russian-Israeli citizen accused of being the primary developer of the LockBit ransomware group. Mr. Panev is currently in Israeli custody and faces extradition to the United States. LockBit is one of the most prolific ransomware gangs, accused of launching devastating data theft cyberattacks on thousands of companies around the world, including the United States, and racking up at least $500 million in ransom payments alone. is believed to be responsible. Although authorities identified and seized Rockbit's infrastructure in a takedown operation in February, Rockbit briefly…
ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm since its launch in November 2022. What started as a tool to supercharge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved into a behemoth with 300 million weekly active users. 2024 has been a big year for OpenAI, from its partnership with Apple for its generative AI offering, Apple Intelligence, the release of GPT-4o with voice capabilities, and the highly-anticipated launch of its text-to-video model Sora. OpenAI closed the year with “12 Days of OpenAI,” a series of 12 streams highlighting new product reveals and…
Welcome to Startups Weekly — a weekly roundup of must-sees from the world of startups. Want it delivered to your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. This week has been full of news. This is probably because this week is also the “real” last week of 2024. This is another way we say goodbye for now and see you in 2025! This week's most interesting startup stories Image credit: We Are / Getty Images There was some M&A this week, but also a reminder that it's always worth watching things carefully, whether it's a future LP or a shiny announcement.…