Author: TechBrunch

Marissa Mayer has a lot of insight into the promise and challenges of online advertising. She played a key role in the early days of Google Search and spent several years as CEO of Yahoo. Mayer currently serves as CEO of his own company, Sunshine. Sunshine develops apps that help you share photos more efficiently between groups, organize your contacts, and remember your friends' birthdays. None of these apps have caught on yet, but given Mayer's background, it's worth considering her opinions as they relate to online advertising. At the Celebrity Valley AI Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday, Mayer…

Embattled Swedish battery maker Northvolt today announced it will file for bankruptcy in the US, dealing a blow to Europe's ambitions for homegrown lithium-ion batteries. The company reportedly opted for Chapter 11 in an effort to restore its financial health. Northvolt, which has soared for years on the back of strong fundraising and a series of announcements about new facilities, has slumped recently. The company laid off 1,600 employees, about 20% of its workforce, in September and unloaded assets from its ill-fated acquisition of Bay Area battery startup Cuberg in November. The company has raised $14.26 billion, including a $1.2…

Brave announced Thursday that it is introducing an AI chat mode for asking follow-up questions based on the initial query in Brave Search. Earlier this year, the company launched an “Answer with AI” overview that appears above search results when you submit a query to provide easy-to-read answers to questions. The AI ​​answer summary will now include a chat bar where you can ask follow-up questions about your initial query. This new feature gives users access to experiences not available on Google, the world's largest search engine. Google offers an “AI Overview” similar to Brave's “Answer with AI” summary, but…

A decade after making its pitch on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in London, fintech N26 has reported its first-ever quarterly (pre-tax) profit. The challenger bank, which has millions of customers across Europe, generated a net operating profit of €2.8 million in the third quarter of 2024 ($2.9 million at current exchange rates). This is not only an important milestone for startups, but also important news for the fintech industry. Challenger banks such as Monzo, N26, Revolut and Starling were once some of the hottest startups in Europe. They raised billions of dollars, expanded aggressively, and overspent to reach the next…

Teleo bills itself as a construction robot startup, but its mission is bigger than automating heavy equipment like excavators and tractors. Teleo's refurbished machinery now allows customers to operate their existing vehicles semi-autonomously. In the future, the startup believes that the data it collects will be a key factor in helping the robotics industry reach its “ChatGPT moment.” It's not a desire to reach the same level of hype surrounding ChatGPT. Instead, Teleo CEO Vinay Shet wants to make a big innovative leap in the field of robotics by using a robotics company, the same one used to build ChatGPT.…

WhatsApp announced on Thursday that it would publish transcripts of audio messages. The Meta-owned company says the new feature is useful when you're on the move or in a noisy place where you can't hear voice messages. A similar feature was announced last year in Apple's Messages app, a competitor to WhatsApp, with the release of Apple's software update, iOS 17. This new feature allows you to transcribe your voice messages to text, so you can continue the conversation even if you can't (or perhaps don't want to) listen to your voice messages. WhatsApp claims that the transcript is generated…

If you ask anyone in the open source AI community, they will tell you that the gap with large private companies is about more than just computing power. AI2 is working to solve this problem, initially using a completely open source database and model, and now using an open and easily adaptable post-training plan to Turning large language models into usable models. Contrary to what many people think, “basic” language models do not emerge from a training process ready to use. Of course, a pre-training process is necessary, but not sufficient. Some even believe that pre-training may soon not be…

Crusoe Energy, a startup building data centers reportedly leased from Oracle, Microsoft and OpenAI, is raising $818 million, according to an SEC filing. Crusoe has secured $686 million of the total $818 million it hopes to raise, according to the filing. According to the filing, 70 investors have invested in this tranche so far. “Companies in the growth stage are constantly interacting with investors,” a Crusoe spokesperson told TechCrunch. The Financial Times reported earlier this year that Crusoe was in talks to raise about $500 million in a funding round led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, with participation from Felicis…

Following several complaints about the algorithm, Meta X competitor Instagram Threads is making changes to allow you to see more content from people you follow in your algorithm feed. Instagram head Adam Mosseri said in a thread that the social network has adjusted its algorithm to show less content from accounts it doesn't follow. “We're rebalancing our rankings to prioritize content from people you follow. That means starting today, we'll see less recommended content from accounts you don't follow and more content from people you follow. You will see more posts from accounts you follow,” Mosseri wrote in the post.…

This morning, around 7 a.m. Pacific Time, social media platform Reddit experienced yet another outage, following on from yesterday afternoon's outage. Thousands of users are currently unable to access the company's website or app. As of this writing, 51,221 users have reported issues on Downdetector.com, and 47,000 users reported issues yesterday. According to Reddit's status page, the platform's performance is slowing down. A spokesperson told TechCrunch: “The updates we made caused instability. We're back on track and are seeing Reddit gain momentum again.” I discovered my first failure yesterday when trying to access the home page. The following message appeared…