Author: TechBrunch
Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic and co-creator of WordPress, has deactivated the accounts of several members of the WordPress.org community. Some of its members were spearheading a push to create a new fork of the open source WordPress project. Community criticism of WordPress governance is not new, but the latest uproar comes in September, when Mullenweg publicly accused WP Engine, a commercial hosting company built on WordPress, of profiteering without giving much in return. It started with an accusation. Things quickly escalated (read more here) and after WP Engine was banned from accessing key WordPress resources, we filed a lawsuit…
No company has leveraged the AI revolution more dramatically than Nvidia. Since the introduction of ChatGPT a little more than two years ago, and the many competitive generative AI services launched since then, the company's revenue, profitability, and cash reserves have skyrocketed. And the stock price soared more than eight times. During this period, the world's leading high-performance GPU manufacturers have used their ballooning wealth to significantly increase investments in startups of all kinds, especially AI startups. The semiconductor giant ramped up its venture capital activity in 2024, participating in 49 funding rounds for AI companies, up from 34 in…
Microsoft has taken legal action against a group it says intentionally developed and used tools to circumvent safety guardrails in its cloud AI products. A group of 10 unnamed defendants used stolen customer credentials and custom-designed software to access Microsoft's fully managed services, according to a complaint filed by the company in December in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. It is said to have infiltrated the Azure OpenAI service. Powered by technology from ChatGPT manufacturer OpenAI. In the complaint, Microsoft alleges that the defendant (referred to only by his legal pseudonym “Does”) violated the Computer…
The white cane of the 21st century. Many tech companies have stepped up efforts to make technology more accessible to the visually impaired, but canes have not benefited much from these advances. London-born WeWalk takes a more traditional approach to white canes. Other than the bulkier handle, the company's product doesn't look much different than a standard folding cane. The company currently offers two models: the $850 Smartcane 2 and the $1,150 Smartcane+ 2. The main difference between each layer is that the latter includes a voice-controlled assistant. This is a seemingly invaluable tool for visually impaired people on the…
After accounting startup Bench abruptly shut down on Dec. 27 and was acquired in a fire sale by Employer.com, Bench customers are now learning that they can't simply walk away with just their financial data. And some people are very unhappy about it, three customers told TechCrunch. In summary, when Bench, a Canadian-based startup that raised $113 million from investors including Bain Capital Ventures and Shopify, shut down, thousands of businesses lost access to their accounting and tax documents. . A few days later, Bench announced that it would be acquired by Employer.com for an undisclosed price in a last-minute…
OpenAI has disbanded its robotics division. Then it came back. Now, OpenAI is revealing more about its plans for the revived team through a social media post by its hardware director and a newly published job description. Caitlin Kalinowski, who joined OpenAI last November from Meta's AR glasses division to lead hardware, said in a post on X on Friday that OpenAI will develop its own robots with custom sensor suites. In the post, Kalinowski highlighted new OpenAI Robotics job openings with additional information. According to the listing, OpenAI's robotics team will focus on “general purpose,” “adaptive,” and “versatile” robots…
On Saturday, Triplegang CEO Oleksandr Tomchuk received a call that his company's e-commerce site was down. This appeared to be some kind of distributed denial of service attack. He soon discovered that the culprit was an OpenAI bot that was relentlessly trying to scrape his entire massive site. “We have over 65,000 products, and each product has a page,” Tomchuk told TechCrunch. “Each page contains at least three photos.” OpenAI was sending “tens of thousands” of server requests trying to download all of them, hundreds of thousands of photos, along with detailed descriptions. “OpenAI used 600 IPs for data collection.…
AI companies around the world raised more than $100 billion in venture capital in 2024, an increase of more than 80% compared to 2023, according to data from Crunchbase. This represents almost one-third of the total venture capital invested in 2024. This is a large amount. Money is pouring into many AI companies. The AI industry has swelled tremendously over the past two years, filled with overlapping companies, startups that only do marketing but don't actually use AI yet, and legitimate AI startups that are diamonds in the rough. It has become. Investors have a hard time finding emerging companies…
Google searches for how to delete Facebook, Instagram, and threads are on the rise following Meta's decision to eliminate its third-party fact-checking system and relax its content moderation policies. Those angry about the decision say Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is coddling the incoming Trump administration at the expense of making the company's social media platforms a breeding ground for misinformation and polarizing speech. I'm accusing them of being there. Mr. Zuckerberg's statement that the company's third-party fact checkers were “too politically biased” for his vision of “free expression” probably didn't help matters. So if you, like countless others, have ever…
AI developer platform Hugging Face has settled a lawsuit against South Korean AI startup FriendliAI, which had accused Hugging Face of infringing one of its patents. According to documents filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Delaware, FriendliAI reached a “confidential agreement” with Hugging Face on January 8, agreeing to dismiss the lawsuit “with prejudice.” Return to court. “FriendliAI and Hugging Face are hereby dismissed without cost or fee to any party to this action,” the filing states. “The court shall retain jurisdiction over the parties' settlement agreement.” Hugging Face did not respond to requests…