Author: TechBrunch

Polymarket, a prediction marketplace that allows users to bet on real-world events, has partnered with AI-powered search engine Perplexity to surface news summaries of events. When users click on an event in Polymarket, they are now shown a summary of news related to the event based on Perplexity's search results, with a search box to ask further questions. Polymarket is also using Perplexity's Pages feature (which allows users to create shareable pages from search results) to create columns that will appear on Perplexity's Discover page, and Perplexity said it will explore partnerships with more third parties to feature content in…

This week, thousands of hackers, researchers, and security professionals gathered in Las Vegas for the security conferences Black Hat and Def Con, annual pilgrimages aimed at sharing the latest research, hacks, and knowledge across the security community. TechCrunch was on-site to report on the back-to-back shows and bring you some of the latest research. CrowdStrike got the attention and the “big fail” award it didn't want, but the company addressed the scandal and admitted it screwed up just weeks after releasing a buggy software update that caused a global IT outage. Hackers and security researchers may not forget easily, but…

Elon Musk's social media platform X has been the target of a series of privacy complaints after it used European Union users' data to train AI models without their consent. Late last month, eagle-eyed social media users discovered settings that indicated X had begun covertly processing local user-submitted data to train its Grok AI chatbot. The revelation prompted the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), the watchdog that oversees X's compliance with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), to express “consternation.” GDPR allows for fines of up to 4% of annual global turnover if a violation is found, but stipulates…

Heavy-equipment maker CNH Industrial has a long history of mergers and acquisitions and once oversaw legendary brands like Ferrari, but five years ago, at the height of agtech's boom, the global giant struggled to make inroads in the startup world. The conglomerate turned to one of its longest-tenured executives, Italian businessman Michele Lombardi. Lombardi rose through the ranks in CNH's business development group, where he was part of the “black belt team” that built top-tier corporate partnerships, and when the company approached him for this new role in 2019, he was essentially starting a new chapter “from scratch.” “They were…

Just weeks after a software update caused a global IT meltdown, CrowdStrike isn't shying away from the spotlight — in fact, the company's president, Michael Sentonas, took to the stage at the Pwnie Awards to accept the Most Epic Fail award. The awards ceremony took place at Def Con, right after the Black Hat conference, where CrowdStrike had the largest booth and gave away free T-shirts and action figures. A company spokesperson told TechCrunch that the message to attendees was “thanks and admiration for the Black Hat community.” Video of Sentonas' acceptance speech Share onlineLike conference attendees who seemed ready…

Where there's shadow there's yang, where there's action there's reaction, where there's proprietary software there's an open source alternative, and so on. The issue of “openness” in technology has rarely been more central to the public consciousness than it has been in the past few years. The steady decline of Twitter has led millions of people to seek alternatives, many of which are open source, and last year's OpenAI power struggle has put a spotlight on what “open source” actually means in the context of the burgeoning AI revolution. The consumer software world has long offered “open” alternatives to existing…

Once India's second-highest-valued startup, Oyo's valuation at $10 billion has fallen to $2.4 billion in a new funding round. The Gurugram-headquartered startup has raised $173.5 million in a Series G funding round. InCred Wealth, Patient Capital and J&A Partners invested in the new round. TechCrunch reported in May that Oyo was seeking a funding round that could lower its valuation to below $3 billion. “We deny any rumors, including those about the valuation in the article,” a company spokesperson told TechCrunch in May. “At this stage, there are no concrete transactions, let alone any discussions about valuation.” The valuation cut…

Amazon is losing money on its Echo smart speakers. This has been an open secret ever since Alexa was born. It's the product of the kind of money-losing strategy that only a company the size of Amazon could sustain for a decade. Of course, selling hardware at a loss can be an effective strategy: think about printers and razors, which are footholds for companies and allow them to make up their losses on ink cartridges and blades, respectively. From a saturation perspective, Amazon's strategy has been successful: Earlier this year, founder Jeff Bezos claimed that Alexa is now in 100…

Turkey appears to have restored access to the Meta-owned Instagram app after blocking it on August 2. The country's Minister of Transport and Infrastructure, Abdulkadir Ularoglu, Posts It announced that the ban will be lifted at 9:30pm Turkish time today. Cybersecurity Monitor NetBlocks say”Live metrics show that Instagram is gradually being restored on internet providers in #Turkey after authorities and Meta negotiated the removal of terrorist content and the reinstatement of unjustly closed accounts.” The ban came after Turkish officials accused Instagram of censoring condolence posts related to the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. Uraloglu wrote today that the…

Elon Musk doesn't want Tesla to just be a car company — he wants it to be an AI company, the company that figures out how to make cars drive themselves. Critical to this mission is Dojo, Tesla's custom-built supercomputer designed to train Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD) neural network. FSD is not actually full self-driving; it can perform some self-driving tasks but still requires an attentive human behind the wheel. But with more data, more computing power, and more training, Tesla believes it can cross the boundary from near self-driving to fully self-driving. This is where Dojo comes in. Musk…