Welcome, folks, to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter covering this week’s noteworthy happenings in tech. TikTok’s fate in the U.S. looks uncertain after President Joe Biden signed a bill that included a deadline for…
President Joe Biden signed a bill on Wednesday that could ban TikTok – for real this time. After so many false starts and stops, some creator economy founders and their clients are rolling their eyes. They’ve been through this before. “I…
“When an investor passes on you, they will not tell you the real reason,” said Tom Blomfield, group partner at Y Combinator. “At seed stage, frankly, no one knows what’s going to fucking happen. The future is so uncertain. All they’re…
Cities around the country have long been crying out for more control over how autonomous vehicles are deployed on their streets. In California, they might finally get their wish. A handful of AV-related bills, which made progress this…
OpenAI’s video generation tool Sora took the AI community by surprise in February with fluid, realistic video that seems miles ahead of competitors. But the carefully stage-managed debut left out a lot of details — details that have been…
EyeEm, the Berlin-based photo-sharing community that exited last year to Spanish company Freepik, after going bankrupt, is now licensing its users’ photos to train AI models. Earlier this month, the company informed users via email that it…
Meta’s new large language model, Llama 3, powers the imaginatively named “Meta AI,” a newish chatbot that the social media and advertising company has installed in as many of its apps and interfaces as possible. How does this model stack…
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Ticktock, TikTok: It’s been a wild week for TikTok. Even as the company starts…
AI may be inching its way into the newsroom, as outlets like Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, Gizmodo, VentureBeat, CNET, and others have experimented with the format. But while most respectable journalists will condemn this use case, there…
After a successful unveiling at CES, Rabbit is letting journalists try out the R1 — a small orange gadget with an AI-powered voice interface. This comes just weeks after the launch of the Humane Ai Pin, which is similarly pitched as a new…
Act fast! Applications for our Call for Content close today, April 26 at 11:59 p.m. PT. If you’re a seasoned startup pro ready to lead a session at TechCrunch Disrupt on October 28-30, now’s your chance to apply! Send in your proposal to…
Aside from the crucial omission of an Ask and Use of Funds slide, just about every slide in the deck felt almost very good — but then stumbled by overlooking an important detail.
The OpenAI Startup Fund, a venture fund related to — but technically separate from — OpenAI that invests in early-stage, typically AI-related companies across education, law and the sciences, has quietly closed a $15 million tranche.…
Google is testing a new “Speaking practice” feature in Search that helps users improve their conversational English skills. The company told TechCrunch that the feature is available to English learners in Argentina, Colombia, India,…
Apple’s App Store isn’t always as trustworthy as the company claims. The latest example comes from RockAuto, an auto parts dealer popular with home mechanics and other DIYers, which is upset that a fake app masquerading as its official app…
Rubrik’s strong IPO pricing and warm reception by the public markets after its listing add more weight to the perspective that the public markets are not as closed to tech startups as some thought. If Rubrik’s result isn’t enough to break…
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration closed a long-standing investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot driver assistance system after reviewing hundreds of crashes involving its misuse, including 13 that were fatal. At the same…
Ultra-fast fashion e-commerce giant Shein will be subject to an additional layer of governance rules targeted at very large online platforms (VLOPs) under the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA), the Commission announced Friday.…
Global Founders Capital, the Berlin-based early-stage VC firm with close ties to the German startup factory Rocket Internet, is going to become the venture arm of Rocket Internet. The VC previously raised two $1 billion funds and, just a…
xAI, Elon Musk’s 10-month-old competitor to the AI phenom OpenAI, is raising $6 billion on a pre-money valuation of $18 billion, according to one trusted source close to the deal. The deal – which would give investors one quarter of the…
Goldman Sachs said in a report late Thursday that Indian food delivery giant Zomato’s quick commerce arm Blinkit is now more valuable than its core food delivery business, as per the bank’s sum-of-the-parts analysis. The investment bank…
The Federal Trade Commission voted 3-2 to ban the use of most noncompete agreements on Tuesday. This ruling means companies can’t require their employees, that aren’t senior executives, to wait a set amount of time before joining a…
Norwest Venture Partners, a 65-year-old firm backed solely by Wells Fargo, has raised its 17th fund at $3 billion. That’s a noteworthy number, given that NVP last raised the same amount in December 2021. That was the peak of the venture…