Author: TechBrunch
Last year, police surveillance startup Flock Safety hired the mayor of a California city with more than 200,000 residents to promote its product. However, Moreno Valley Mayor Ulises Cabrera now refuses to allow Flock to use his position as mayor to benefit Flock, according to a lawsuit Cabrera filed against Flock in November 2024. He claims that he was unfairly dismissed for this reason. Backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Flock grew to a $3.5 billion valuation by selling license plate recognition technology across the country (and recently expanded into drones), but the lawsuit , concerns have been raised about the influence…
Francois Cholet, a former Google engineer and influential AI researcher, co-founded a nonprofit organization that helps develop benchmarks to examine “human-level” intelligence in AI. The nonprofit ARC Prize Foundation will be led by Greg Kamradt, former Salesforce engineering director and founder of AI product studio Leverage. Mr. Kamrat will serve as president and director. Fundraising for the ARC Prize Foundation will begin in late January. “[W]We are…growing into a proper nonprofit foundation that serves as a useful north star to artificial general intelligence,” Chollet wrote in a post on the nonprofit’s website. (Artificial general intelligence is a vague term, but…
Watch Duty, an app that tracks wildfires with live maps and alerts, was the No. 1 free app on Apple's App Store as of Wednesday morning. As devastating fires continue to rage across Southern California, the fire tracking app has surpassed the ChatGPT app to take the number one spot. Watch Duty has been available since 2021 and is used by firefighters and first responders across the western United States. Fire tracking apps are spreading rapidly amid wildfires. Image credit: Maxwell Zeff The Watch Duty app obtains information about ongoing wildfires from a network of active and retired firefighters, first…
The tech layoff wave continued through 2024. Following significant workforce reductions in 2022 and 2023, 2024 saw more than 150,000 job cuts across 542 companies, according to independent layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi. Large companies like Tesla, Amazon, Google, TikTok, Snap, and Microsoft conducted sizable layoffs in 2024, while smaller-sized startups also experienced cuts, and in some cases, shut down operations altogether. We’re continuing to track the industry’s layoffs into 2025 so you can see the trajectory of the cutbacks. Later this year, we will break out our 2024 and 2025 lists in order to make the trends easier to parse. By…
Russian internet provider Nodex suffered a devastating cyberattack earlier this week in which hackers breached its network and wiped its internal servers, immediately completely cutting off internet connectivity to Russian customers. announced that the system is being restored. The Russian regional ISP outage began late on January 6, and customer internet traffic levels continue to show 0%, according to data from Cloudflare, a leading network that monitors internet trends and traffic. Nodex's internet traffic collapsed late on January 6, 2025. Image credit: Cloudflare / TechCrunch (screenshot) In a post on Russian social networking site VK, Nodex acknowledged the cyberattack. “The…
Hello everyone, welcome to TechCrunch's regular AI newsletter. If you'd like to have this sent to your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. The AI news cycle didn't slow down much this holiday season. Blink and you'll miss some new developments between OpenAI's 12-day “shipmas” and DeepSeek's major model release on Christmas Day. And its momentum has not slowed down even now. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a blog post on Sunday that OpenAI knows how to build artificial general intelligence (AGI) and is starting to set its sights on superintelligence. He said he was thinking about it. AGI…
TikTok's potential competitor, Triller, hopes to capitalize on a potential ban on TikTok in the US by pitching creators to move their content from the popular short-form video app to its own app. The company has now launched a website, SaveMyTikToks.com, which promises to back up all your TikTok videos by uploading them to Triller. The site is powered by Amplify.ai, a customer engagement platform that Triller's parent company, TrillerNet, acquired in 2021. The deal was initially focused on helping Triller creators track and monetize their content, while also helping brands and advertisers match their content with consumers. . From…
The smart pet wearables market is estimated at $1.72 million in 2024, with pet technology startups entering the market with dog trackers and collars that can link directly to satellite tracking without the need for an LTE signal. I am. At CES 2025, SATELLAI introduced a pet tracker and smart collar. This includes features such as health monitoring, activity tracking, and an AI coach (accessible through a companion app) that provides guidance on training and pet care recommendations tailored to your specific dog. . The company was founded by Mark Mao (now CEO), who previously worked at Huami, a Chinese…
The Japanese government issued a warning on Wednesday, saying a Chinese hacker group has targeted and compromised dozens of government agencies, companies and individuals in the country since 2019. Japan's National Police Agency and the National Cybersecurity Incident Preparedness Strategy Center have attributed the years-long hacking incident to a group called MirrorFace. According to a machine translation, authorities said in a warning: “The Mirrorface attack campaign is a coordinated cyberattack suspected to be linked to China, and is designed to steal information related to Japan's national security and advanced technology. “It is the main purpose.” A longer version of the…
San Francisco startup Based Hardware announced the launch of its new productivity-enhancing AI wearable, Omi, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. The device can be worn as a necklace, and saying “Hey Omi” will activate Omi's AI assistant. The company also claims that Omi can be attached to the side of your head using medical tape and can understand what you're talking to using a “brain interface.” The startup's founder, Nick Shevchenko, started selling the device on Kickstarter as a “Friend,” but another San Francisco hardware maker launched its own Friend device and changed its domain…