Author: GT

Elon Musk and Sam Altman are still taking swipes at each other on Musk’s social media platform X. While both men were founders at OpenAI, where Altman is CEO, they have subsequently sparred across social media, court filings, and corporate blog posts. The latest exchange began when Altman posted what he called “a tale in three acts,” with screenshots showing that he reserved a Tesla Roadster in 2018, then recently tried to cancel it and request a refund on his $50,000 reservation fee, only for his email to bounce. “I really was excited for the car!” Altman wrote. “And I…

The AI researchers at Andon Labs — the people who gave Anthropic Claude an office vending machine to run and hilarity ensued — have published the results of a new AI experiment. This time they programmed a vacuum robot with various state-of-the-art LLMs as a way to see how ready LLMs are to be embodied. They told the bot to make itself useful around the office when someone asked it to “pass the butter.” And once again, hilarity ensued. At one point, unable to dock and charge a dwindling battery, one of the LLMs descended into a comedic “doom spiral,”…

As tech companies tout their plans for massive new data centers, consumers are increasingly worried the AI-driven gold rush will ultimately drive up the price they pay for electricity, according to a new survey. The report, commissioned by solar installer Sunrun, found that 80% of consumers are worried about the impact of data centers on their utility bills. Consumers’ concerns aren’t unfounded. Electricity demand in the United States held steady for over a decade, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). Over the last five years, commercial users including data centers and industrial users began drinking more deeply from…

On Thursday, at the end of Coinbase’s third quarter earnings call, CEO Brian Armstrong admitted that he was “a little bit distracted,” because he’d been “tracking the prediction market about what Coinbase will say on their next earnings call.” “And I just want to add here the words Bitcoin, Ethereum, Blockchain, Staking, and Web3 to make sure we get those in before the end of the call,” Armstrong added. Why blurt those out without any apparent context? As Armstrong hinted, they were words that users on “mention markets” on Kalshi and Polymarket had wagered would be spoken on the call.…

Core Scientific shareholders on Thursday voted down an all-stock acquisition offer from partner and competitor CoreWeave that was valued at the time at $9 billion.   They did so following a vote-no recommendation from their largest shareholder, Sina Toussi of Two Seas Capital, a firm that focuses on post-bankruptcy companies. Core Scientific emerged from its bankruptcy in January 2024.   Core Scientific, which began as a crypto miner and still is one, shares that early history with AI data center provider CoreWeave, which also started as a miner.   But CoreWeave, with investor and partner Nvidia, has now transitioned to serving…

Meta signed three deals this week to procure nearly 1 gigawatt of solar power as it races to power its lofty AI ambitions. The trio of agreements brings Meta’s total solar purchases to over 3 gigawatts of capacity this year. Solar is cheap and quick to build, and as a result, it has become a go-to power source for tech companies as their data center fleets multiply in size. Meta yesterday announced two agreements in Louisiana that see it buying the environmental attributes of a combined 385 megawatts of electricity. Both projects are expected to be completed two years from…

META CEO Mark Zuckerberg (L) and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.Getty ImagesAs tech giants increase their already breathtaking spending on artificial intelligence, their respective digital advertising businesses have also gained momentum.Quarterly earnings reports this week from Meta, Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft all showed healthy revenue on the ads front.The rising online advertising sales have allayed concerns earlier this year that economic turbulence, amplified by President Donald Trump’s trade policies, would negatively impact ad budgets.  “I think the digital ad market is strong,” said Jasmine Enberg, co-founder of Scalable, a creator economy media firm. “I think this economic instability and volatility is…

Social network Bluesky, which on Friday announced a new milestone of 40 million users, will soon start testing “dislikes” as a way to improve personalization on its main Discover feed and others. The news was shared alongside a host of other conversation control updates and changes, which include smaller tweaks to replies, improved detection of toxic comments, and other ways to prioritize more relevant conversations to the individual user. With the “dislikes” beta rolling out soon, Bluesky will take into account the new signal to improve user personalization. As users “dislike” posts, the system will learn what sort of content…

Bending Spoons’ four cofounders this week joined the billionaire ranks. CEO Luca Ferrari’s stake in the Milan-based tech conglomerate is now reportedly worth $1.4 billion, while cofounders Matteo Danieli, Luca Querella, and Francesco Patarnello each hold stakes worth $1.3 billion, according to Forbes estimates based on shareholder data published by the Italian Business Register. The valuations come on the heels of Bending Spoons’ latest funding round: $270 million from investors including T. Rowe Price and earlier backers Baillie Gifford, Cox Enterprises, Durable Capital Partners, and Fidelity, plus a $440 million secondary share sale by existing shareholders. It’s unclear whether any…

On Friday morning, University of Pennsylvania alumni, students, staff, and community affiliates received several emails from hackers purporting to represent the university’s Graduate School of Education (GSE). “We have terrible security practices and are completely unmeritocratic,” read the email. “We love breaking federal rules like FERPA (all your data will be leaked).” A partially redacted email sent by hackers with access to the university of Pennsylvania email system.Image Credits:TechCrunch (screenshot) This message was sent from a variety of different Penn-affiliated email accounts, such as the GSE, as well as purporting to come from several senior members of staff across the…