Author: TechBrunch

This week we're taking a breath and keeping up with all the news happening in the industry with StrictlyVC downloads. Connie Royzos and Alex Gove are breaking the top headlines. They argue: The new creator fund of slow ventures and whether it is a gimmick, the validity of the spiritual awakening of Tray Con Valley, the validity of the car rental startups has come out of the validity of the car rental startups. Continuous Saga or gimmick whether US meta stepped into the Humaoid Robot Arena rebel against Tesla StrictlyVC downloads posts every Tuesday. Subscribe to Apple, Spotify, or where…

Safe Superintelligence is an AI startup founded by former Openai chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, and could raise more than $1 billion at a $30 billion valuation. Bloomberg reports that VC company Greenoaks Capital Partners is leading the contract and pledging to invest $500 million. If the terms of the round remain unchanged, funding will increase Safe Superintelligence total to approximately $2 billion. Sutskever is widely respected for its AI and wider technology. He is believed to have contributed to major AI breakthroughs at Openai, including the technical approach that enabled the development of ChatGpt. Safe Superintelligence, a former Openi researcher,…

Former Openai CTO Mira Murati has announced her new startup. Naturally, it focuses on AI. A startup called Thinking Machines Lab, which came out of stealth today, said, “We're going to build tools to work with AI.” [people’s] To create AI systems that are “more widely understood, customizable, and generally competent” than those currently available. Murati leads Thinking Machine Lab as CEO. Openai co-founder John Schulman is the company's chief scientist and former Chief Research Officer of Openai, Barret Zoph is CTO. In a blog post shared with TechCrunch, Thinking Machines Lab wrote that while AI features are progressing dramatically,…

US-based venture capital firm Insight Partners confirmed that hackers had compromised their systems in January. When TechCrunch reached, Insight Partner confirmed the cybersecurity incident in a statement released Tuesday. Calculist first reported the violation earlier in the day. Insight Partner said in its statement that it detected that “fraudulent third parties” had access to “specific insight information systems through sophisticated social engineering attacks” on January 16th. “As soon as this incident was detected, we moved quickly to begin containment, correction and investigation within hours,” the statement said. The company has over $90 billion in assets under its control and has…

Last week, Valve removed the game from the online store steam due to the product being woven with malware. After removing a game called Piratefi, security researchers analyzed the malware and discovered that the person who planted it tricked gamers into modifying existing video games to install an information steeler called Vidar did. Marius Genheimer, a researcher who analyzes malware and works with the Secuinfra Falcon team, told TechCrunch that, based on the commands and control servers related to the malware and its configuration, “Piratefi is used to distribute Vidar payloads.” I suspect it's just one of the tactics of.…

Elon Musk has spent decades building a universe of companies that has served as an incubator for up-and-coming engineers and a proving ground for his inner circle. That universe — an ecosystem of Silicon Valley tech titans, veterans of his companies like Tesla and SpaceX, and a crop of fresh-faced hackers and software engineers — has now collided with the U.S. federal government. The dozens of individuals who work under, or advise, Musk and the Trump-ordered Department of Government Efficiency — individuals who TechCrunch has identified or confirmed independently — reflects more than the billionaire’s proclivity to collect talent. They…

When he was a senior studying at Texas A&M University, Matthew Iomi realized there was no good option to transport groups of people. The fellow college students heading for the night together had no access to on-demand rides, with the same convenience, accessibility and affordability as typical ride platforms like Uber and Lyft. “Once you hit those 6-7 [person] Mark, you had to split and take multiple cars. This is inefficient and not very sustainable. Plus, it's an inferior experience because no one can ride with us,” Iomi, now 28, told TechCrunch. “One other option was to book a charter…

Newspaper publishing giant Lee Enterprises said the ongoing cyberattacks have caused disruption across the business, and is now in a third week suspension. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Lee said she is conducting forensic analysis to determine whether a cyberattack has stolen any confidentiality or personal data. “Preliminary investigations show that threat actors illegally accessed the company's network, encrypted critical applications and excluded certain files,” Lee said in a filing, adding that the incident was ransomware. It was described as an attack. Lee said he expects the outage to last several more weeks as the company…

Many venture industry observers are wondering whether Andreessen Horowitz, the company that manages $45 billion, is looking to become a publicly traded company. Co-founder Marc Andreessen said, “I'm not munching a bit to get the company out of it,” like this week's Invest Yesterday Yount The Best Podcast. However, he discussed his goal of building an A16Z with a permanent company, inspired by JP Morgan and a public private equity company. Historically, venture capital companies have been a partnership consisting of “a small tribe of people sitting in a room together, trying to bounce ideas off each other when they…

The backdoor talk in encrypted services has been coming back to the round after reports revealed that the UK government is trying to force Apple to provide Icloud end-to-end encryption (E2EE) device backups Masu. Officials were said to be leaning against Apple to create a “backdoor” on a service that would allow state officials to access clear data. Since passing the 2016 update to state surveillance authority, the UK has had the drastic powers to restrict the use of strong encryption by technology companies. According to a report by the Washington Post, UK officials seek Apple's demand for “blanket” access…