Author: GT

In a blog post last July, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that “selling access” to Meta’s openly available Llama AI models “isn’t [Meta’s] business model.” Yet Meta does make at least some money from Llama through revenue-sharing agreements, according to a newly unredacted court filing. The filing, submitted by attorneys for the plaintiffs in the copyright lawsuit Kadrey v. Meta, in which Meta stands accused of training its Llama models on hundreds of terabytes of pirated e-books, reveals that Meta “shares a percentage of the revenue” that companies hosting its Llama models generate from users of those models. The filing…

On March 21, Dogecoin co-creator Billy Markus said on X (formerly Twitter) that he would love to see the social networking application shift its focus from its “current political screaming” to creators like earlier. He further said that creator tools have been completely ignored. X owner and chairman Elon Musk was quick to ask Markus to “help build” creator tools on the platform. Markus, who goes by the pseudonym Shibetoshi Nakamoto on X, added that politics is the “true cancer” and it ruins everything, “especially brains.” Founded in 2006, Twitter was acquired by Elon Musk in October 2022, which he…

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks as Crypto czar David Sacks, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and Executive Director of the Presidential Council of Advisers for Digital Assets Bo Hines attend the White House Crypto Summit at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., March 7, 2025. Evelyn Hockstein | ReutersBo Hines has no professional background in crypto. He earned his law degree three years ago from Wake Forest. He’s twice unsuccessfully run for Congress in North Carolina. Now the 29-year-old former football player is wrapping up his second month as one of the leaders of President…

By Hannah Lang (Reuters) – The U.S. Treasury on Friday lifted economic sanctions against Tornado Cash, a firm that makes cryptocurrency transactions harder to track, which the Biden administration had accused of helping launder more than $7 billion for North Korean and other cyber hackers. The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control blacklisted Tornado Cash in 2022 after concluding it was helping launder the proceeds of cyber crimes, including more than $455 million stolen by Lazarus, a North Korean government-backed hacking group. Six users of Tornado Cash – a cryptocurrency “mixer” that obscures the origins and recipients of transactions…

Social network Bluesky, an open source X rival, has made a change that will allow publishers to better track the referral traffic originating from posts on its platform. According to a comment from Bluesky employee Emily Liu, the company is now sending referral traffic through Bluesky’s “go” subdomain to make it easier for publishers to track when visitors to their site came by way of a link shared on the social network. When you click on a link shared on Bluesky, you’ll notice that it briefly displays as a “go.bsky.app” URL before landing you on the publisher’s own domain. This…

Over the past week, Bitcoin has fluctuated between $81K and $87K, even though interest rates are holding steady. Despite Trump’s pro-crypto stance and the launch of a U.S. Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, bitcoin’s price has stalled, primarily due to economic pressures like inflation and investor sell-offs. In the short term, volatility is still a factor, but big players like BlackRock and Fidelity are doubling down, and Bitcoin’s role in global trade and finance keeps growing. The long-term outlook is still bullish. Bitcoin is cementing itself as a significant financial asset, and those playing the long game stand to benefit the most.…

As generative AI moves increasingly into the physical world through robotics, vehicles, and drones, the need to map cloud-based AIs to real-world environments can lead to a huge mismatch. Rerun, a Stockholm-based dev tools startup, which builds a data stack for this emergent kind of “physical AI,” has secured $17 million in seed funding to help AI developers smooth out the bumps from code to road, as it were. The seed round was led by Point Nine out of Germany, bringing the 2022-founded startup’s total funding to date to $20.2 million. Nikolaus West, co-founder and CEO of Rerun, told TechCrunch that…

By Nate Raymond BOSTON (Reuters) – The founder of a cryptocurrency financial services firm pleaded guilty on Friday to U.S. charges that he participated in a wide-ranging scheme to manipulate the market for digital tokens on behalf of client companies. Aleksei Andriunin, the founder and CEO of cryptocurrency “market maker” Gotbit, and his company entered guilty pleas in federal court in Boston to charges that they conspired to commit market manipulation and committed wire fraud. The pleas by the Russian national and his company came less than a month after Andriunin, 26, was extradited from Portugal, where he had been…

Meta’s social network Threads, an X competitor with more than 320 million monthly active users, is now rolling out new features related to topics, reply controls, and video playback in the app, among other things. It’s also making political content suggestions more personalized to the user, the company says. Combined, the features aim to make the app more relevant to users and keep them engaged with the network’s content, at a time when X is no longer Threads’ only competitor. Today, Meta faces the rise of alternative networks like Bluesky, which now has over 33 million users and a platform…

OpenAI is bringing new transcription and voice-generating AI models to its API that the company claims improve upon its previous releases. For OpenAI, the models fit into its broader “agentic” vision: building automated systems that can independently accomplish tasks on behalf of users. The definition of “agent” might be in dispute, but OpenAI Head of Product Olivier Godement described one interpretation as a chatbot that can speak with a business’s customers. “We’re going to see more and more agents pop up in the coming months” Godement told TechCrunch during a briefing. “And so the general theme is helping customers and…