Author: TechBrunch

Nick Frost, co-founder of the $5.5 billion Canadian AI startup Cohere, has been a musician his whole life. He told TechCrunch that once he starts singing, he never stops. That hasn't changed now. In addition to his full-time job at Cohere, Frost is also the frontman for Good Kid, an indie rock band made up entirely of programmers. Good Kid is more than just a group of friends who jam in someone's garage on the weekends: The band has 2.3 million monthly listeners on Spotify, recently played Lollapalooza, was nominated for Breakthrough Group of the Year by the Canadian Academy…

Blockchain technology is all about decentralization and virtualization, so it's a bit ironic that people love to gather in person for large-scale blockchain events. Korea Blockchain Week, held in Seoul last week, attracted a record 17,000 attendees and featured 300 speakers. Like any traditional tech conference, the event was attended by many big names in the field, including both well-known figures (such as Vitalik Buterin, Richard Teng from Binance, and Mark Karpeles) and lesser known names (researchers, professors, and founders of many new startups). Unlike regular meetings, there are also ha profiles: apes, penguins, ducks and bears were also on…

It seems increasingly likely that OpenAI will change its complex corporate structure soon. Reports earlier this week said the AI ​​company was in talks to raise $6.5 billion at a pre-money valuation of $150 billion, with Reuters reporting that the deal hinges on OpenAI being able to restructure and remove profit caps for investors. In fact, co-founder and CEO Sam Altman told employees at an all-hands meeting that OpenAI's structure could change next year to become more similar to a traditional for-profit company, according to Fortune magazine. Currently, OpenAI is structured so that its for-profit arm is managed by a…

Over the past few years, nuclear fusion power has gone from being a joke, always thought to be a decade away, to an increasingly realistic and attractive technology that is luring investors off the sidelines. While the technology may be difficult to master and expensive to build right now, fusion promises to produce nearly limitless energy on Earth by harnessing the sun's power source, nuclear reactions. If startups can perfect a commercially viable fusion power plant, it has the potential to upend a multi-trillion-dollar market. The bullish wave driving the fusion industry has been driven by three advances: more powerful…

Alex Parmley had been thinking about starting his latest company, ORNG, since his days working at his previous company, Phood. Phood, which launched in 2018, was a payments app that allowed students to use Dining Dollars to order food from third-party apps and merchants around the world. The company developed the first campus-integrated debit card and partnered with universities across the country, including the University of Texas at Austin. As a business owner, Parmley experienced firsthand the long and tedious process of transferring funds. He recalled that it could take 15 to 30 days for vendors to receive the actual…

Lawyers representing FTX CEO and co-founder Sam Bankman Freed, who was convicted of fraud and money laundering late last year, are seeking a retrial. Following the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, Bankman Freed was convicted on all seven counts and sentenced to 25 years in prison and ordered to pay $11 billion in forfeiture. He is serving his sentence in Brooklyn. Bloomberg reports that Bankman-Freed's appeal focuses on the behavior of U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, claiming that Judge Kaplan's ruling was “not just erroneous but biased” and that the judge “constantly ridiculed Bankman-Freed throughout the trial, repeatedly criticized her…

Stanford Professor Fei-Fei Li, considered by many to be the “godmother of AI,” has raised $230 million for her new startup, World Labs, from backers including Andreessen Horowitz, NEA, and Radical Ventures. World Labs is valued at over $1 billion and the money was raised in two funding rounds, several months apart, TechCrunch reported in August. Li's company hopes to have its first product ready in 2025, and aims to build AI models that understand and interact with 3D worlds. WorldLab is developing “large-scale world models” to be used by professionals, including artists, designers, developers and engineers. Martin Casado, a…

The rise of neobanks has been fascinating to watch in recent years, with many of them having grown from simply challenging traditional banks to becoming huge players in their own right. Dave and Varo Bank are just a few of these neobanks. At TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, Dave co-founder and CEO Jason Wilk and Varo Bank founder and CEO Colin Walsh talk about how their companies overcame challenging macroeconomic conditions to achieve impressive growth in both customers and revenue. Dave has 10 million members and is profitable with record revenue of $73.7 million in the first quarter, while Varo Bank has…

OpenAI released the new o1 models on Thursday, giving ChatGPT users their first chance to try out an AI model that pauses and “thinks” before responding. There are high hopes for these models, code-named “Strawberry” within OpenAI. But does Strawberry live up to the hype? I agree. Compared to GPT-4o, the o1 model feels like one step forward and two steps back. ChatGPT o1 excels at inference and answering complex questions, but the model is roughly four times more expensive to use than GPT-4o. OpenAI's latest models lack the tooling, multimodal capabilities, and speed that made GPT-4o so impressive. In…

OpenAI released the new o1 models on Thursday, giving ChatGPT users their first chance to try out an AI model that pauses and “thinks” before responding. There are high hopes for these models, code-named “Strawberry” within OpenAI. But does Strawberry live up to the hype? I agree. Compared to GPT-4o, the o1 model feels like one step forward and two steps back. OpenAI o1 excels at inference and answering complex questions, but the model is roughly four times more expensive to use than GPT-4o. OpenAI's latest model lacks the tooling, multimodal capabilities, and speed that made GPT-4o so great. In…