Author: Editor-in-Chief

Back by overwhelming demand, we’ve added 10 more exhibit tables to TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 — this will be the final release before they sell out. This is your last chance to showcase your company in front of 10,000+ founders, VCs, and tech innovators from October 27-29 at San Francisco’s Moscone West. Disrupt isn’t just a tech conference — it’s a launchpad. Startups of all stages come here to meet their first investors, land their biggest partnerships, and spark ideas that take them to the next level. In 2025, that launchpad could be your exhibit table. Books yours here. IMAGE CREDITS:HALO…

When Mark Lee was a law student at Harvard, a trademark class exposed him to the staggering scale of counterfeiting, an illicit industry worth more than $3 trillion annually, and set him on an unexpected path to entrepreneurship. “I was always broadly interested in technology and startups, but I never really thought I’d be an entrepreneur. I assumed I was set to become a lawyer; most of my family members are lawyers, and practicing law felt like a natural path,” Lee said in an exclusive interview with TechCrunch. But when he got to Harvard Law, the education wasn’t quite what…

Rover has been in the industry for 15 years, mainly working as a web developer. She’s now building a startup, alongside her son, that creates custom machine learning models for marketplaces. She called vibe coding a beautiful, endless cocktail napkin on which one can perpetually sketch ideas. But dealing with AI-generated code that one hopes to use in production can be “worse than babysitting,” she said, as these AI models can mess up work in ways that are hard to predict. She had turned to AI coding in a need for speed with her startup, as is the promise of…

Bret Taylor, board chair at OpenAI and CEO of AI agent startup Sierra, was asked in a recent interview with The Verge whether he agreed with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s declaration that “someone is going to lose a phenomenal amount of money in AI.” Taylor echoed Altman’s sentiments, suggesting that we are indeed in an AI bubble — but like Altman, he didn’t sound too worried about it. “I think it is both true that AI will transform the economy, and I think it will, like the internet, create huge amounts of economic value in the future,” Taylor said. “I…

AI-powered chatbots play a growing role in spiritual life, according to a New York Times story that examines the popularity of religious chatbots and apps. The Times notes that an app called Bible Chat has been downloaded more than 30 million times, while another app, Hallow, reached the number one spot in Apple’s App Store last year. For the most part, these apps are supposed to point people to religious doctrine and scripture to answer their questions, although at least one website purports to allow users to chat with God. Rabbi Jonathan Roman suggested chatbots could be a “way into…

 According to Simon Black, “With a few exceptions (under section 3[5] of the Employment Standards Act), unpaid internships are not only unethical, but they are illegal. .”The Associate Professor in the Department of Labour Studies at Brock University, explained, “While employers ‘sell’ unpaid internships as a way to gain valuable experience in a particular sector or business, the reality is unpaid internships are about minimizing labour costs at the expense of young workers. We have to understand their proliferation alongside broader labour market trends such as increasing precarious employment and firms desire for “flexibility”. Unpaid internships reproduce…

 The rising cost of food is a concern for many Canadians, and it can be especially challenging for those following a vegan diet. According to recent statistics, the largest year-over-year price increase was for a unit of romaine lettuce, which saw a staggering 45.2 per cent spike in cost. This is followed by a 42.8 per cent increase for 454 grams of butter, a 35.9 per cent hike for a unit of limes, a 36.9 per cent surge for 907 grams of margarine, and a 33.9 per cent increase for 500 grams of flatbread or pita. While there has been…

 With all the problems in the world, from massive inequality to the climate crisis, you’d think voluntary guidelines to improve corporate environmental and social practices would be a no-brainer. After all, addressing those critical issues can also boost a company’s bottom line. But companies with business models based on activities that create greater inequalities and cause harm to the air, water, and soil, are threatened by ESG (environmental, social and governance) investor policies. ESG encourages investors to consider criteria such as environmental risk, pay equity and transparency in accounting. That’s why Big Oil is fighting back. Much of the “anti-woke” rhetoric you hear…

At the center of every empire is an ideology, a belief system that propels the system forward and justifies expansion – even if the cost of that expansion directly defies the ideology’s stated mission. For European colonial powers, it was Christianity and the promise of saving souls while extracting resources. For today’s AI empire, it’s artificial general intelligence to “benefit all humanity.” And OpenAI is its chief evangelist, spreading zeal across the industry in a way that has reframed how AI is built. “I was interviewing people whose voices were shaking from the fervor of their beliefs in AGI,” Karen…

How much do foundation models matter? It might seem like a silly question, but it’s come up a lot in my conversations with AI startups, which are increasingly comfortable with businesses that used to be dismissed as “GPT wrappers,” or companies that build interfaces on top of existing AI models like ChatGPT. These days, startup teams are focused on customizing AI models for specific tasks and interface work, and see the foundation model as a commodity that can be swapped in and out as necessary. That approach was on display especially at last week’s Boxworksconference, which seemed devoted entirely to…