Author: GT

Sora’s rapid adoption drove a number of App Store scammers to try to get in on the act. Following the launch of OpenAI’s invite-only, video-generating mobile app last week, Apple’s App Store was flooded with fakes that also proclaimed themselves to be “Sora” or “Sora 2” — the latter a reference to the underlying new AI video model that was released alongside the mobile app. These apps somehow made it past Apple’s App Review process. They actually had public listings on the App Store, despite using a brand name that’s trademarked by OpenAI and fairly well known in the tech…

Discord disclosed on Wednesday that around 70,000 users may have had sensitive data — like their government ID photos — exposed after hackers breached a third-party vendor that the platform uses for age-related appeals. A Discord user would make an “age-related appeal” if the platform suspects they may be underage, or if they live somewhere that requires identity verification for platform access. In those cases, users are asked to send a selfie holding their government ID and Discord username to the platform’s Trust & Safety team. Discord said it has contacted affected users, whose exposed data may also include their…

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — At a five-star resort tucked in the mountains of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, the cryptocurrency industry was celebrating a historic start to the year on Capitol Hill. Its priorities were sailing through Congress with unusual speed and one senator did not hesitate to say why.Sen. Tim Scott, chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, was asked during the August panel what had changed to clear the way for such progress.“I got to tell you,” said Scott, R-S.C. “Thank you, to all of y’all, for getting rid of Sherrod Brown,” he said, referring to the…

Reflection AI, a startup founded just last year by two former Google DeepMind researchers, has raised $2 billion at an $8 billion valuation, a whopping 15x leap from its $545 million valuation just seven months ago. The company, which originally focused on autonomous coding agents, is now positioning itself as both an open source alternative to closed frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic, and a Western equivalent to Chinese AI firms like DeepSeek. The startup was launched in March 2024 by Misha Laskin, who led reward modeling for DeepMind’s Gemini project, and Ioannis Antonoglou, who co-created AlphaGo, the AI system…

Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has pushed back on local media reports suggesting it plans to open an office in India, with a general partner calling the coverage “entirely fake news.” Earlier on Thursday, Indian media outlets reported that a16z was preparing to establish a physical presence in the country by setting up an office in Bengaluru. The reports, which cited unnamed sources, also said the firm was in the process of hiring a local partner. However, Anish Acharya, a Bay Area-based general partner at a16z who has spent the last six years with the firm, dismissed the reports.…

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Thursday tweeted a video of his company’s first deployed massive AI system — or AI “factory” as Nvidia likes to call them. He promised this is the “first of many” such Nvidia AI factories that will be deployed across Microsoft Azure’s global data centers to run OpenAI workloads. Each system is a cluster of more than 4,600 Nvidia GB300 rack computers sporting the much-in-demand Blackwell Ultra GPU chip and connected via Nvidia’s super-fast networking tech called InfiniBand. (Besides AI chips, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang also had the foresight to corner the market on InfiniBand when…

Super.money, a financial service platform spun off last year by Walmart-owned Flipkart, has quietly partnered with payments infrastructure firm Juspay as it expands into direct-to-consumer (D2C) checkout and targets $100 million in annual revenue by 2026. The partnership comes as Juspay works to rebuild momentum after facing pushback from major payment companies earlier this year — a dispute that complicated its fundraising efforts. Last week, Super.money launched its D2C checkout product, Super.money Breeze, which promises merchants a one-click checkout experience and aims to speed up online purchases by removing one-time passwords and repeated logins. The company did not disclose any…

In a development born of the government shutdown, the SEC announced Thursday that companies can proceed with IPOs using an obscure automatic approval process, now with the added bonus of skipping pricing information entirely. What’s happening is that with 90% of SEC staff furloughed, startups can file their paperwork and have it automatically become effective after 20 days. This option always existed; firms just rarely use it because they prefer having SEC reviewers actually look at their disclosures before going public. The difference here is that the SEC won’t penalize companies for omitting pricing or “price-dependent information” during the shutdown,…

Famed roboticist and iRobot founder Rodney Brooks has sounded the alarm on a humanoid robot investment bubble. He’s not the only one. In a recent essay, Brooks calls out the billions of venture dollars being poured into humanoid robot companies like Figure. His take: Despite the amount of money being injected into the industry, humanoids won’t be able to learn dexterity — or the fine motor movements with hands — rendering them essentially useless. His take might surprise some, especially those VCs investing in the sector. But not the multiple robotics-focused VCs and AI scientists who have told TechCrunch in…

The United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) on Friday designated Google with a special status in the market for online search that would enable the regulator to enforce stricter regulations. The CMA has designated Google as having “strategic market status” in the search and search advertising markets, which means the company has such “a substantial and entrenched” position that it requires special regulations to ensure fair competition. “Google has had an unparalleled position in this digital activity for an extended period. Other traditional general search providers are significantly smaller than Google and have been for many years. Bing is…