Author: TechBrunch
President-elect Donald Trump has confirmed reports that Sriram Krishnan, most recently a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), will become senior policy advisor for AI in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. President Trump said in a statement that Krishnan will “work with the President's Council of Science and Technology Advisers to help shape and coordinate AI policy across the government.” And in a post on X, Krishnan said he will work closely with former PayPal COO David Sachs, who was recently named Trump's crypto and AI “emperor.” “I am honored to serve our country and ensure…
The two largest defense technology companies, Palantir and Anduril, are in talks with technology companies including SpaceX, OpenAI, Saronic, and ScaleAI to form a consortium to bid for Pentagon contracts, the Financial Times reports. It is said that they are doing so. The aim, according to the FT, is to challenge the dominance of “major” defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Boeing. One anonymous participant described this as an effort to “deliver a new generation of defense contractors,” while another said it was meant to sell the government's cutting-edge weapons and other technology. He said it would be…
The U.S. ban on TikTok is expected to take effect within a month, and President-elect Donald Trump said Sunday he wants the app to remain, according to Reuters. “We have to start thinking, because we actually went on TikTok and had billions of views and a great response,” Trump told supporters at an event in Phoenix, Arizona. ” he said. “They brought me a chart, and it was a record, and it was such a beautiful thing to look at, and I looked at it and said, 'Maybe we should put this awful thing down for a while. You may…
OpenAI on Friday announced o3, a new family of AI inference models. The startup claims this to be more advanced than o1 and anything else it releases. These improvements appear to have been brought about by scaling compute during testing, which we wrote about last month, but OpenAI also says it used a new safety paradigm to train its o-series models. . OpenAI on Friday announced new research on “deliberative alignment,” outlining the company's latest methods for ensuring that AI inference models align with the values of human developers. The startup used this method to get o1 and o3 to…
Self-driving car technology and electrification startups were once the darlings of venture capital and the corporate world. These two technologies promised billions of dollars in revenue and new avenues for automakers to make money beyond making and selling cars. With a few exceptions like Waymo and Wayve, the days of VCs printing money are long gone for AVs. But as 2024 began, there was still a buzz of EVs in the air, albeit quieter than before. As 2024 draws to a close, it's safe to say the topic has become something of a whisper as some EV startups falter and…
In recent months, there has been a lot of press about Apple's efforts to expand its footprint in customers' homes with products in development, such as wall-mounted smart home hubs. That strategy could also include smart doorbells, according to a new report from Bloomberg. This doorbell uses Apple's FaceID technology to scan the face of the person approaching the door, connect wirelessly to the deadbolt lock, and automatically unlock it for the occupants of the home. The doorbell is reportedly in the early stages of development and is not expected to be on the market until the end of 2025…
Christian Ponce was wearing an Indiana Jones costume when he met co-founder Theo Schaefer. That was at the 2023 Halloween Party hosted by Entrepreneur First, a startup program that introduces founders to each other before launching their ideas. The two hit it off, Ponce recalls. Schaefer earned a master's degree in underwater autonomous robotics from MIT and worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory searching for extraterrestrial life on Jupiter's moons. “That's crazy,” Ponce says with a laugh. “I came from Caltech and did bioengineering,” where he worked on E. coli. The two bonded over stories about their monotonous jobs as…
A new Wall Street Journal report says OpenAI's efforts to develop its next major model, GPT-5, are behind schedule and the results don't yet justify the hefty cost. This echoes an earlier report in The Information suggesting that OpenAI is considering new strategies as GPT-5 may not represent as much progress as previous models. However, the WSJ article includes additional details about the 18-month development of GPT-5, codenamed Orion. OpenAI has reportedly completed at least two large-scale training runs aimed at improving models by training them on vast amounts of data. Initial training runs were slower than expected, suggesting that…
Becoming a venture capitalist has become Hollywood's newest status symbol. These days, everyone from Olivia Wilde to Emma Watson is either starting a business venture or looking to back the next big thing. Robinhood, Uber, and Klarna all have glamorous names on the cap table, paving the way for the rise of “Hollywood angels.” For founders, having a celebrity on the cap table can bring a lot of buzz to a startup, and bonus points if that celebrity knows what they're doing. Here are some of the top celebrities who invest and what they typically look to invest in (this…
On November 15, Peter Wang posted a message seeking ideas for new incubators and funds to support experimental projects built on the burgeoning Bluesky/AT protocol ecosystem. Four weeks later, Skyseed showed up with an initial commitment of $1 million. The speed of this turnaround is underlined by the fact that the fund doesn't even have a website yet (although it does have a Bluesky profile), but it does prove a few things. People who abandoned X (nee Twitter). But by starting fresh with a new social platform built on an open, decentralized network like AT Protocol, you can avoid the…