Author: TechBrunch
Updated on December 25th at 12:21pm Pacific: Added details on xAI evaluation and Kingdom Holdings' contribution. Elon Musk's AI company xAI has raised $6 billion in a Series C funding round. The company announced this week that Andreessen Horowitz, Blackrock, Fidelity, Lightspeed, MGX, Morgan Stanley, OIA, QIA, Sequoia Capital, Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Nvidia, AMD and others have joined. Saudi conglomerate holding company Kingdom Holdings invested about $400 million in the round, according to public documents. The filing also revealed that xAI's current valuation is $45 billion, nearly double its previous valuation. The new cash brings xAI's total funding…
When a startup raises a seed round, the eternal question arises: how much should the founders pay themselves and their first few employees? Kruze Consulting, a CPA firm specializing in venture-backed startups, recently analyzed the average salary range of over 450 seed-stage startups and shared the data with TechCrunch. The averages below are based on actual payroll records, not survey responses, Kruse said. Perhaps unsurprisingly, salaries for technical engineering/product roles tend to be higher than for CEOs. What's surprising is that salaries for people with COO/Operations titles tend to be even higher on average. This is frowned upon. That's because…
David Crane is in an enviable position. As CEO of GV, a venture company funded entirely by Google at $1 billion a year, his team of about 100 people makes big bets, despite some notable limitations. That's it. At the TechCrunch StrictlyVC event in San Francisco earlier this month, Krane said GV has invested in an astonishing 800 companies over the past five years, and over $10 billion over its 15-year history. No company has made more money at once than Uber, which was funded exclusively by GV in a $258 million Series C round in 2013. Still, GV still…
AMD is going all out for that at CES 2025. While chipmaker Nvidia remains at the forefront of the AI boom, its competitor is sucking the oxygen out of every room it graces. So how will AMD counter Nvidia's reported RTX 5000 announcement? The company will need to show off its own next-gen GPUs. As part of the ongoing rebranding, the RDNA 4 cards may arrive as the RX 8000 or RX 9000 series. No matter the company's name or numbers, AMD is going for it at this year's show. The presser will begin early on January 6th at 11am…
For millions of people at home with friends and family over the Christmas season, it's a time when many are busy fixing patchy Wi-Fi in their homes or facing a barrage of technology questions. It's also a time to do things. Instead, give them the gift of sound security advice this holiday season. This is the perfect time to actually make meaningful changes that will strengthen your loved one's cybersecurity. That's not to say it's not worth your time to fix your family's printer, but sharing a little security advice can go a long way in protecting your loved ones…
The tech layoff wave is still going strong in 2024. Following significant workforce reductions in 2022 and 2023, this year has more than 130,000 job cuts across 457 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…
A year after Onyx Motorcycles owner James Khatiblou passed away suddenly, leaving customers with unfulfilled orders and millions of dollars in unpaid debt, the brand has been revived by its original founder. “I'm excited to announce that I'm bringing back my original brand Onyx with incredible support!” founder Tim Seward wrote in a LinkedIn post on Monday. “Onyx is literally back in the future!” Initially, the company will only sell about 100 RCR electric dirt bikes. It's unclear whether these are newly produced units or part of a fleet of e-bikes manufactured by Onyx's Chinese supplier earlier this year that…
According to The Information, OpenAI has recently been looking into building its own humanoid robots. The report names “two people with direct knowledge” of these conversations. ChatGPT manufacturers have been involved in this field for some time with financial support. The company has previously invested in Figure and 1X, along with “general purpose AI” company Physical Intelligence. In 2021, OpenAI abandoned such ambitions after quietly shutting down its robotics division. Of course, a lot has happened in the last three years, with breakthroughs in both the hardware and the AI systems that power it. Barring some big-ticket startup acquisitions, a…
Is it possible to train an AI using only data generated by another AI? It may sound like a crazy idea. However, this has been around for quite some time and is gaining traction as new real data is becoming increasingly difficult to obtain. Anthropic used some synthetic data to train one of its flagship models, Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Meta used AI-generated data to fine-tune the Llama 3.1 model. And OpenAI is said to be sourcing synthetic training data from o1, its “inference” model, for the upcoming Orion. But why does AI need data in the first place? And what…
Samsung's CES reporter is always a weirdo. Korean electronics giants generally maintain a dry attitude when it comes to home appliances. After all, the company is expected to announce its latest flagship device, the Galaxy S25, towards the end of January. CES 2025 continues the company's television and consumer electronics heritage. There are also plenty of possibilities, including consumer robots that will probably never see the light of day. Samsung has adopted the tagline “AI for All: Everyday, Everywhere” for its presentation, which begins on January 6th at 2pm PT/5pm ET. That doesn't give us much to work on. After…