Author: Editor-in-Chief

OpenAI execs have been fielding plenty of questions about how they expect to pay for the $1.4 trillion worth of data center build-outs and usage commitments they’ve accrued this year, given that their revenue — while rising rapidly — is a $20 billion annual run rate, CEO Sam Altman said Thursday in a post on X. Altman’s comments came in response to comments made by OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar — which she quickly walked back. Speaking at a Wall Street Journal event on Wednesday, Friar said she wanted the U.S. government to “backstop” her company’s infrastructure loans. This, she explained,…

GoFundMe has introduced a new offering that allows you to purchase digital gift cards for your loved ones, enabling them to donate to their favorite nonprofit organizations during the holidays. The product has yet to launch to the public as it’s still in the pilot phase. Later, GoFundMe will formally launch the product after incorporating feedback from consumers and nonprofits alike. The gift cards will start at $5 and come in a variety of themes and causes, including Birthday, Christmas, Hanukkah, and Ramadan, as well as cards for animal lovers, cancer fighters, and nature protectors. These cards work differently from…

Apple’s latest iOS update, available for eligible devices starting Monday, doesn’t introduce any major features, but it does bring one highly requested tweak: the ability to change the transparency of the translucent liquid glass design. If you didn’t like the look of iOS 26, all you could do so far was to reduce transparency via the accessibility settings, which pretty much turned off the liquid glass overlay. With iOS 26.1, we now get a new menu to retain the look while increasing opacity. You can head to Settings > Display & Brightness > Liquid Glass to select either the original…

Andreessen Horowitz is pausing its Talent x Opportunity (TxO) fund and program, according to four sources familiar with the matter, including more than one founder in the program. The firm announced TxO in 2020 to support founders who do not have access to traditional venture networks. Many of TxO’s participants were women and minorities who, overall, receive very slim amounts of venture capital dollars. The announcement of the fund came during the wave of support that underrepresented founders received in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd. The fund launched with $2.2 million in initial commitments, TechCrunch previously reported, with a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz and his wife,…

Lawmakers have called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Flock Safety, a company that operates license plate-scanning cameras, for allegedly failing to implement cybersecurity protections that expose its camera network to hackers and spies. In a letter sent by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL, 8th), the lawmakers urge FTC chairman Andrew Ferguson to probe why Flock does not enforce the use of multi-factor authentication (MFA), a security protection that prevents malicious access by someone with knowledge of the account holder’s password. Wyden and Krishnamoorthi said that while the company offers its law enforcement customers the…

Locket, a private social networking app for friends, has scored a win with Gen Alpha users following the launch of its latest feature, Rollcall. The app, which lets friends share photos that then appear in home screen widgets, first hit the top of the App Store’s charts in early 2022 by taking advantage of Apple’s widget system to form the basis of its social network. Instead of updates sent via push notifications, the app’s widget would update to show your friends’ newly posted photos. This, in turn, would drive engagement back in the app, prompting users to share their own…

Peter Williams, the former general manager of Trenchant, a division of defense contractor L3Harris that develops surveillance and hacking tools for Western governments, pleaded guilty last week to stealing some of those tools and selling them to a Russian broker. A court document filed in the case, as well as exclusive reporting by TechCrunch and interviews with Williams’ former colleagues, explained how Williams was able to steal the highly valuable and sensitive exploits from Trenchant. Williams, a 39-year-old Australian citizen who was known inside the company as “Doogie,” admitted to prosecutors that he stole and sold eight exploits, or “zero-days,”…

Since AI tools went mainstream, filmmakers, writers, and actors have been scrambling to figure out whether these technologies can truly assist their creativity or if they might end up replacing humans. But there’s a larger concern to address before we get swept away by debate: AI can’t run without enormous data centers and energy infrastructure. A new joint venture, dubbed Utopai East, aims to address that need by developing infrastructure specifically for producing movies and TV shows using AI. The joint venture is held 50-50 by investment firm Stock Farm Road(SFR) and AI film and television production company Utopai…

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently said that the company is doing “well more” than $13 billion in annual revenue — and he sounded a little testy when pressed on how it will pay for its massive spending commitments. His comments came up during a joint interview on the Bg2 podcast between Altman and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella about the partnership between their companies. Host Brad Gerstner (who’s also founder and CEO of Altimeter Capital) brought up reports that OPenAI is currently bringing in around $13 billion in revenue — a sizable amount, but one that’s dwarfed by more than $1…

The White House released more details Saturday about a trade deal reached between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in a meeting earlier this week. Among other things, the White House said China will suspend the restrictions on exporting rare earth minerals that it announced in October, and it will resume issuing “general licenses valid for exports of rare earths, gallium, germanium, antimony, and graphite for the benefit of U.S. end users and their suppliers around the world.” The Trump administration says that this will effectively reverse restrictions on rare earth minerals that China had imposed in…