Author: TechBrunch

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…

The tech layoff wave is still going strong in 2024. Following significant workforce reductions in 2022 and 2023, this year has already seen 60,000 job cuts across 254 companies, according to independent layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi. Companies like Tesla, Amazon, Google, TikTok, Snap and Microsoft have conducted sizable layoffs in the first months of 2024. Smaller-sized startups have also seen a fair amount of cuts, and in some cases, have shut down operations altogether. By tracking these layoffs, we’re able to understand the impact on innovation across companies large and small. We’re also able to see the potential impact of businesses…

In February, Google suspended the ability of its AI-powered chatbot Gemini to generate portraits after users complained about historical inaccuracies: When asked to depict a “Roman legion,” for example, Gemini drew an anachronistic, racially diverse group of soldiers and portrayed a “Zulu warrior” as a stereotypically black person. Google CEO Sundar Pichai apologized, and Demis Hassabis, co-founder of the company's AI research division DeepMind, said a fix would be in place “very quickly,” meaning within a few weeks. In the end, it took much longer than that (despite some Googlers working 120-hour weeks!). But over the next few days, Gemini…