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Lawyers for Elon Musk and OpenAI made their closing arguments this week, and now it’s up to jurors to decide whether OpenAI did anything wrong as it’s transformed into a slightly-more-for-profit organization. But as Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I noted on the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, a big theme in the trial’s final days was whether OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is trustworthy — for example, Musk’s attorney Steve Molo grilled Altman about whether statements he’d made during congressional testimony were truthful. Kirsten noted that Musk has made plenty of misleading statements of his own, and that trust…
Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. To get this in your inbox, sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! There is a bit of a theme emerging in transportation — and really every industry: AI is creating jobs for some at the loss of others. General Motors, for instance, laid off more than 10% of its IT department, or about 600 salaried employees — in a deliberate skills swap. This won’t translate into a one-to-one exchange, which means there will likely be a net-negative job…
Publicis Groupe has agreed to acquire LiveRamp for $2.2 billion all-cash deal, the French holding company said Sunday.Publicis is betting the acquisition will position it as a leader in agentic transformation—or the use of AI agents to automate and collaborate on corporate workflows.“Where we truly need LiveRamp is to win a fair share of this agentic transformation market,” Publicis Groupe CEO Arthur Sadoun told ADWEEK. “This is where we are making a big shift.”LiveRamp specializes in so-called “data collaboration,” which allows different companies to share and build new data sets and data models together. These can be used for many…
It’s commencement season at American universities — and this year, at least a couple speakers have discovered that it’s tough to get graduating students excited about a future shaped by artificial intelligence. Last week, Gloria Caulfield, an executive at real estate firm Tavistock Development Company, gave a speech at the University of Central Florida acknowledging that we’re living in a time of “profound change,” which can be both “exciting” and “daunting.” “The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution,” Caulfield declared — prompting the students in the audience to begin booing, getting louder and louder until Caulfield chuckled, turned…
When Lior Susan started Eclipse Ventures in 2015, the firm’s thesis of digitizing the physical world wasn’t particularly popular in Silicon Valley. “It was the era of enterprise software and SaaS, and it felt fairly lonely the first couple of years,” Susan said on stage at a recent StrictlyVC event in San Francisco. More than a decade later, Eclipse finds itself at the center of the tech world’s action. The firm’s $6.5 million Series A investment in Cerebras Systems in 2016 paved the way for a total return of $2.5 billion when the semiconductor company went public this week. The…
During the Trinity nuclear test on July 16, 1945, in the New Mexico desert—the world’s very first test of an atomic bomb—a new material spontaneously formed. It was discovered only recently, by an international research team coordinated by geologist Luca Bindi at the University of Florence, which identified the novel clathrate based on calcium, copper, and silicon. It’s a material never before observed either in nature or as an artificial compound created in the laboratory.What Are Clathrates?The term “clathrates” denotes materials characterized by a “cage-like” structure that traps other atoms and molecules inside, giving them unique properties. Of great technological…
Apps for budgeting and personal finance do a good job of tracking your money as you earn and spend it. Some also have excellent debt calculators that help you figure out how to pay off your debts.Each debt calculator is a little different. Some suggest a specific method for paying down debt, while others are simulators that let you see how your total amount paid will decrease if you increase your monthly payment.Here are a few useful calculators and some guidance about what makes them different.A Straightforward Plan: BankrateBankrate’s free debt payoff calculator gives you a timetable for paying off…
It’s likewise smartly designed, packing up into—as you likely already gleaned—the shape of a suitcase. The heavy-duty handles and latches are strong. Though the Nomad is 28 pounds, which is a bit on the heavy side for a single-hand carry, the shape and large handle actually make it easier to carry than smaller and cheaper models.The Nomad uses a dual-venting system to achieve good airflow, even when the lid is closed. The vents, combined with the raised fins on the bottom of the grill (which elevate your charcoal, allowing air to flow underneath), allow for very precise control of both…
Once configured, setup proceeds much like the Aiper and pricier Irrigreen apps: You create a zone, then use the app to define its boundaries. Similar to the aforementioned systems, Oto’s sprinkler is designed for precision watering, firing water in a beam in a single direction instead of a wide spray. That said, Oto’s spray is comparably narrow, only hitting a single, designated patch instead of producing a two-dimensional curtain of water like Irrigreen’s “water printing” system. You get a nice preview of this as you set the boundaries of your yard.Like its competitors, Oto lets you set each zone as…
Lately, Kegel has been steadily improving its automation, to the point where today’s machines do the entire job without any human intervention.The lanes you and I bowl on as amateurs are oiled very differently from the ones pros use.At your local bowling center, public lanes are oiled in what’s referred to as a “high” ratio: The level of oil present in the middle of a lane is eight to 10 times higher than what’s on the outside. At the far left and right of the lane, many public bowling alleys have no oil at all.“On a normal pattern at your…
Inside a makeshift workshop in Gaza, rebuilt after it was damaged by Israeli air strikes, Suleiman Abu Hassanin stands among piles of broken concrete, trying to give them a new form. His voice over the phone sounds tired, carrying the weight of what he is trying to do: rebuild in a place where building materials are no longer available.Gaza’s construction crisis did not begin with the latest war. For years, the Israeli blockade restricted the entry of cement, steel, and other building materials, slowing reconstruction efforts across the enclave. But after nearly two years of intensified bombardment, the scale of…
ArXiv, a widely used open repository for preprint research, is doing more to crack down on the careless use of large language models in scientific papers. Although papers are posted to the site before they are peer-reviewed, arXiv (pronounced “archive”) has become one of the main ways that research circulates in fields like computer science and math, and the site itself has become a source of data on trends in scientific research. ArXiv has already taken steps to combat a growing number of low-quality, AI-generated papers, for example by requiring first-time posters to get an endorsement from an established author.…
The vibes around the current AI boom aren’t great, even in the tech industry, according to a lengthy social media post from Menlo Ventures partner Deedy Das. Das described San Francisco as “pretty frenetic right now,” as “the divide in outcomes is the worst I’ve ever seen.” Using a “back of the envelope AI calculation,” he projected that there are around 10,000 people — founders and employees at companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Nvidia — that have “hit retirement wealth of well above $20M,” while everyone else worries “they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and…
AI-powered marketing platform Nectar Social announced Thursday that it raised a $30 million Series A round led by Menlo Ventures and its Anthology Fund, which was created alongside Anthropic. The company, which officially exited stealth last year, is an agentic operating system for marketers. It told TechCrunch that it uses autonomous AI agents to help brands run “social activity, moderation, creator workflows, competitive intelligence and commerce conversations end-to-end.” It also has data partnerships with companies like Meta and Reddit that allows the Nectar agent pull and pool data into one place from various platforms, rather than brands needing to use…
OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman is officially taking the reins of the company’s product strategy, according to Wired. This seems to solidify an already-existing change, with Brockman overseeing OpenAI’s products on an interim basis while the company’s CEO of AGI deployment Fidji Simo is out on medical leave. Wired also reports that in a staff memo, Brockman described plans to combine ChatGPT and its programming product Codex into a single unified experience. “We’re consolidating our product efforts to execute with maximum focus toward the agentic future, to win across both consumer and enterprise,” Brockman reportedly said. This is just…
Working from home has its own perils. Pets can be demanding, your back aches from hours at a desk, or you simply forget to move. There are a few apps that nudge you to move around or indicate that you’re not sitting in an ideal position, but they’re easy to dismiss. I’ve spent the better part of a decade at a home desk, iterating on the setup as I go — gaming chair, lumbar support, the works. None of it guarantees good posture. Then I came across Isa, a desk device from German startup Deep Care that takes a different…