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When an 82-year-old Kentucky woman was offered $26 million from an AI company that wanted to build a data center on her land, she said no. Sure, that same company can try to rezone 2,000 acres nearby anyway, but as AI infrastructure stretches further into the real world, the real world is starting to push back.  That tension is everywhere this week, from OpenAI shutting down its Sora app to courts finally starting to hold social platforms like Meta accountable. On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into what it looks like when the AI hype cycle meets reality.  Subscribe to Equity…

Free users are costly for OpenAI. One of its biggest challenges throughout this change will be introducing ads at scale, without deteriorating trust or pushing users to competing chatbots, like Google’s Gemini or Anthropic’s Claude.“It’s not going to be easy for ChatGPT to, let’s say, erode the quality of the experience without losing a lot of users,” says Stefano Puntoni, a marketing professor at Wharton who researches generative AI. Neither of OpenAI’s main competitors features sponsored ad buttons in the outputs, though Google recently said it’s not ruling it out.Sometimes, when I asked a question with a name brand in…

Physical Intelligence, the two-year-old San Francisco robotics startup, is in discussions to raise about $1 billion in new funding at a valuation exceeding $11 billion, according to Bloomberg. The deal would effectively double the company’s $5.6 billion valuation in just four months. Founders Fund is set to participate with Lightspeed Venture Partners also in talks to invest alongside returning backers Thrive Capital and Lux Capital, Bloomberg reported. The deal is still in early stages and details could change, noted the outlet. TechCrunch visited Physical Intelligence’s headquarters in January, where co-founder Sergey Levine described the company’s ambition simply: “Think of it…

Handala’s second claim, however—that it hacked the FBI—seems, for now, to be fiction. All evidence points to Handala having breached Patel’s older, personal Gmail account. Widely believed to be a “hacktivist” front for Iran’s intelligence agency the MOIS, Handala suggested on its website that the emails contained classified information, but the messages initially reviewed by WIRED didn’t appear to be related to any government work. TechCrunch did find, however, that Patel appears to have forwarded some emails from his Justice Department email account to his Gmail account in 2014.Handala, which cybersecurity experts have described to WIRED as an “opportunistic” hacker…

Financial services marketing is one of the hardest kinds of marketing to crack. But John Brockelman and his team at State Street Investment Management have proven, campaign after campaign, that it can be done well and done right. Tune in for his playbook on how financial services marketers can drive growth, connection and culture.What you’ll learn: How to align marketing with sales and business objectives The importance of simplifying brand architecture for market expansion How to build intentional talent strategies by mixing specialized and generalist expertise Why guerrilla marketing and experiential activations outperform traditional advertising in regulated industries How to…

Winter testing has been completed for the VW ID.EVERY1, the first vehicle under a joint venture between Rivian and Volkswagen Group to be equipped with the EV maker’s software and electrical architecture. That’s not just progress toward getting this vehicle into customers’ hands; it also unlocks another $1 billion investment from Volkswagen Group into Rivian. About $750 million is coming in the form of an equity investment. The other $250 million is either equity or convertible debt, depending on which prototypes Volkswagen Group provided to Rivian for testing. (The companies did not make this immediately clear.) The German automotive giant…

We’ve professionally sat in a lot of office chairs, and the Branch Ergonomic Chair Pro has held the top spot in our office chair buying guide ever since we first tested it. It’s easy to spend a lot on an office chair, but this one packs in plenty of features for a relatively modest price. We like it at full price, and we’ve shared deal stories when it has gone on sale for $450 in the past.Right now, though, it’s down to $400 thanks to the Amazon Spring Sale. That’s $50 cheaper than we’ve seen it before, and so of…

Top of the Ticker: The New York Times reports that Versant, the parent company of MS NOW and CNBC, is one of many suitors interested in acquiring Vox’s podcast division.Acquisition talks are in their early stages, according to the Times, but if Versant succeeds in this purchase, it will fulfill the media company’s focus on diversifying its portfolio and revenue streams beyond its cable networks.Vox’s podcast network produces nearly 40 podcasts. Should they all fall under the Versant umbrella, it would align well with Versant’s two of four core verticals: political news & opinion and sports & genre entertainment.No Kings…

SoftBank has taken on a new $40 billion loan to help it cover its $30 billion commitment to invest in OpenAI as part of the AI model maker’s record-breaking $110 billion raise last month, the Japanese conglomerate said on Friday. Most striking is that the loan is unsecured and has a 12-month term, meaning it must be repaid or refinanced by next year. This could be a signal that the lenders believe OpenAI’s highly anticipated public listing will indeed come later this year, as some markets outlets, like CNBC, have reported. The loan is provided by JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs,…

The world’s top AI research conference, the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems—better known as NeurIPS—became the latest organization this week to become embroiled in a growing clash between geopolitics and global scientific collaboration. The conference’s organizers announced and then quickly reversed controversial new restrictions for international participants after Chinese AI researchers threatened to boycott the event.“This is a potential watershed moment,” says Paul Triolo, a partner at the advisory firm DGA-Albright Stonebridge who studies US-China relations. Triolo argues that attracting Chinese researchers to NeurIPS is beneficial to US interests, but some American officials have pushed for American and Chinese…

Waymo is now providing 500,000 paid robotaxi rides every week across 10 U.S. cities, the company shared in a post on X this week. The eye-popping figure is reflective of the Alphabet-owned company’s accelerated commercial expansion. But it’s Waymo’s rate of growth in ridership and markets that offers a more compelling story.  In less than two years, the company’s average weekly paid robotaxi trips have grown tenfold, from 50,000 per week in May 2024 to 500,000 per week today. Over that same two-year timespan, Waymo has expanded within its initial markets of Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles — and…

For more than 40 days and 40 nights, the US Congress failed to come to a deal that would restart paychecks for many Department of Homeland Security employees. The evidence is all over the country’s airports, in the form of hours-long waits to go through security.Workers with the Transportation Security Administration have been forced to call out as they struggle to pay for gas, rent, childcare, and groceries, according to officials from the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents some 47,000 TSA agents. Nearly 12 percent of agents called out on Thursday, compared to a usual average of 4…

SK hynix, a South Korean memory chip giant already listed on the KOSPI, is laying the groundwork for a potential U.S. listing that could reportedly raise an estimated $10 billion to $14 billion. The company announced this week that it has confidentially filed a Form F-1 with the the listing, targeting the second half of 2026. But the real question isn’t just how much it can raise: it’s whether a U.S. listing could increase is trading value as one of the most critical players in the AI chip supply chain. Despite its critical role in high-bandwidth memory (HBM), a key…

Get it? So a spinning loop produces an oscillating flux; if you graphed its values it would trace out a sine wave. That creates an oscillating voltage in the wire, causing electrons to move, and boom: You have alternating current. You just created a generator! This is called electric induction.Now you can amp this up by replacing that single loop of wire with a wrapped coil containing many, many loops. Oh, it also works in reverse: Instead of rotating a coil in a stationary magnetic field, you can rotate magnets around a stationary coil. The relative motion is all that…

Today co-anchor Savannah Guthrie announced she will return to NBC News’ morning show on Monday, April 6.Guthrie revealed her return date during an emotional interview with her former co-anchor, Hoda Kotb, saying, “When times are hard, you want to be with your family. And I want to be with my family,” referencing her NBC News colleagues. Acknowledging the difficulty of the situation, as the search for her mother, Nancy Guthrie, approaches two months, with authorities still aggressively pursuing all angles, Guthrie went on to say, “I don’t know if I can do it. I don’t know if I’ll belong anymore, but…

The European Union’s top executive body has confirmed a cyberattack after hackers reportedly stole reams of data from its cloud storage. European Commission spokesperson Nika Blazevic confirmed to TechCrunch on Friday that the Commission “discovered a cyber-attack, which affected part of our cloud infrastructure.” “We have taken immediate steps and contained the attack. Risk mitigation measures were also implemented. The investigation is ongoing but we can already confirm that the Commission’s internal systems were not affected by the cyber-attack,” the spokesperson said. In a longer statement on its website, the Commission said the breach “affected its cloud infrastructure hosting the…