Author: TechBrunch
OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, is reportedly in talks to raise a significant amount of funding led by previous backer Thrive Capital at a valuation of over $100 billion, a significant increase over OpenAI's previous valuation of $86 billion and by far the highest valuation of any AI startup to date. Thrive is reportedly planning to invest about $1 billion. Microsoft is also expected to participate, according to the WSJ, which reported the deal. It's unclear whether the company will also participate in the round. Khosla Ventures, Infosys and Y Combinator are among OpenAI's existing backers. The funding is expected…
Despite previous silence, OpenAI's startup accelerator program, Converge 2, has actually gone live, according to two sources familiar with the program, and TechCrunch has also confirmed that the Open AI Startup Fund has provided funding to the group's startups. Converge 2 is a strange exception to the tech industry's usual PR practices: Accelerator programs typically announce the startups that have been accepted into their programs, as well as those that have graduated. After all, once you invest in them, you have every reason to get public recognition and increase those startups' chances of success. But for months, a tech forum…
Bluesky, a social networking startup and competitor to decentralized X, is introducing new features aimed at reducing toxicity on its platform and making conversations less aggressive than previous versions. The company on Wednesday introduced several anti-abuse features, including the ability to hide replies that X currently offers, and the ability to separate your original posts from other users' quoted posts, the latter of which limits people's ability to attack others or send hate. Dank Tweets began as a form of abuse on Twitter, where people would use the Quote Tweet feature to add their own comment mocking, denigrating, or refuting…
Fluid Trucks, a startup founded to revolutionize the commercial vehicle rental industry, has fired CEO James Eberhardt and chief legal counsel Jennifer Snyder, both co-founders and siblings, according to people familiar with the matter. The changes, which employees described as a hostile takeover, were led by two minority shareholders on the company's board of directors. Both Eberhardt and Snyder retained their positions on the board. The previously unreported management restructuring comes after venture-capital-backed Fluid Truck lost tens of millions of dollars as of June 31 and failed to make payments to vendors and vehicle owners, according to documents viewed by…
Threads is deepening its ties to the Fediverse, also known as the open social web, which powers services like X alternative Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube and Flipboard, as well as other apps. On Wednesday, Meta announced that Threads users will be able to see Fediverse replies to other posts, in addition to their own. Additionally, posts made via the Threads API, including those made via third-party apps and scheduling services, will be syndicated to the Fediverse. The latter was previously announced via an in-app message informing users that their API posts would be shared to the Fediverse starting August 28th. Since…
Just a few weeks ago, in an interview with TechCrunch, Thomas Ingenlath revealed plans to turn Polestar into a self-sustaining company. But now, he's stepped down. Polestar announced on Tuesday that Ingenlath had stepped down as CEO, a role he had held since the electric-vehicle startup spun out of Volvo in 2017. He will be replaced by Michael Roescherer, who previously served as CEO of Stellantis-branded Opel as well as VinFast and Nikola. The leadership changes come at a turbulent time for Polestar, which has implemented job cuts and other cost-cutting measures over the past year. The publicly traded company…
Midjourney, the AI image generation platform that has reportedly generated over $200 million in revenue without any VC investment, is entering the hardware space. The company made the announcement in a post on X on Wednesday, revealing that the new hardware team will be based in San Francisco. We're officially moving into hardware. If you're interested in joining our new team in San Francisco, email us at hardware@midjourney.com.— Midjourney (@midjourney) August 28, 2024 A hint as to what kind of hardware MidJourney, which has a team of fewer than 100 people, might pursue comes from its February hiring of Ahmad…
Hello everyone and welcome to TechCrunch's regular AI newsletter. If you'd like to receive this newsletter in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Say what you want about generative AI, but it's becoming a commodity. At least, that's how it appears. In early August, Google and OpenAI both significantly cut the prices of their most budget-friendly text generation models: Google cut the input price (the cost of having the model process text) by 78% and the output price (the cost of having the model generate text) by 71% for Gemini 1.5 Flash, while OpenAI cut the input price of…
OpenSea, which describes itself as “the world's largest” non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace, said in a blog post on Wednesday that it had received a Wells Notice from the SEC, suggesting that the regulator may soon file suit against the company. CEO Devin Finzer said in a tweet that the SEC is alleging that NFTs on OpenSea's platform are unregistered securities. He then said that crypto companies have “long been in the crosshairs of the SEC,” and that the SEC has made similar allegations against Binance and Coinbase. The crypto industry has long argued that tokens are not traditional securities, even…
LinkedIn has a new chief information security officer, Lee Kisner. Announcing the appointment (quite literally) in a LinkedIn post, Kisner said he was “excited” to take on his new role. Kisner most recently served as CISO at cloud security startup Lacework, and prior to that was CISO at Twitter, a role he left in November 2022, weeks after Elon Musk acquired the social media giant, now known as X, for $44 billion. Kisner previously held senior cybersecurity and privacy roles at Google and Apple. Kisner replaces Jeff Belknap, who served as LinkedIn's CISO until June. In a separate post, Belknap…