Author: GT

Lauren Kolodny, a partner at Acrew Capital, has always championed technology’s power to democratize access to financial services for everyday people. When the fledgling neobank Chime struggled to convince investors in 2016 that it could build a large business serving the working class, Kolodny was the only VC out of 100 Chime pitched who agreed to back the company, stepping in with a $9 million Series A extension when it was nearly out of money. That bet paid off big time. Last month, Chime went public at a $14.5 billion valuation. Kolodny, who appeared on the Forbes Midas List three…

Elon Musk’s X will begin experimenting with a new way to use Community Notes, its crowdsourcing fact-checking system, to highlight well-liked posts from users with different perspectives. On Thursday, the Community Notes X account announced the launch of a pilot test where select contributors would be able to rate posts by answering questions about why they either like or don’t like that particular post. The system is similar to how Community Notes fact-checking works. Instead of simply allowing users to upvote or downvote posts for accuracy — something that could be easily gamed if like-minded contributors teamed up to promote…

Intel Corp. is shedding thousands of workers and cutting expenses as its new CEO works to revive the fortunes of the struggling chipmaker that helped launch Silicon Valley but has fallen behind rivals like Nvidia Corp.In a memo to employees, CEO Lip-Bu Tan said Intel plans to end the year with 75,000 workers, down 31% from 108,900 employees at the end of last year, through layoffs and attrition. The company previously announced a 15% workforce reduction. “I know the past few months have not been easy. We are making hard but necessary decisions to streamline the organization, drive greater efficiency…

Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan is making progress on his plan for the company to shed its inefficiencies. And that includes spiking several manufacturing projects. The semiconductor giant reported Thursday in its second-quarter earnings report that it will delay, and in some cases not move forward with, multiple manufacturing projects. Specifically, Intel said it was no longer going forward with its previously announced projects in Germany and Poland. Those projects included an assembly and testing facility in Poland and a chip factory in Germany. Both projects have been sitting in limbo since being suspended in 2024, shortly after being announced. The…

Jakub Porzycki | Nurphoto | Getty ImagesElon Musk’s satellite internet service Starlink said it had a “network outage” on Thursday. The company said it was working on a solution.There were more than 60,000 reports of an outage on Downdetector, a site that logs issues.Starlink is owned and operated by SpaceX, which is also run by Musk.Musk apologized for the outage on X and said, “Service will be restored shortly.”Musk posted earlier Thursday that the company’s direct-to-cell-phone service was “growing fast” following the announcement that T-Mobile’s Starlink-powered satellite service was available to the public.T-Mobile said the T-Satellite service was built to…

Tech companies looking to sell their artificial intelligence technology to the federal government must now contend with a new regulatory hurdle: prove their chatbots aren’t “woke.” President Donald Trump’s sweeping new plan to counter China in achieving “global dominance” in AI promises to cut regulations and cement American values into the AI tools increasingly used at work and home.But one of Trump’s three AI executive orders signed Wednesday — the one “preventing woke AI in the federal government” — marks the first time the U.S. government has explicitly tried to shape the ideological behavior of AI.Several leading providers of the…

Chris Martin of Coldplay performs live at San Siro Stadium, Milan, Italy, in July 2017.Mairo Cinquetti | NurPhoto | Getty ImagesDays after Astronomer CEO Andy Byron resigned from the tech startup, the HR exec who was with him at the infamous Coldplay concert has left as well. “Kristin Cabot is no longer with Astronomer, she has resigned,” a company spokesperson wrote in an email to CNBC Thursday. Cabot was the company’s chief people officer. Cabot and Byron, who is married with children, were shown in an intimate moment on the ‘kiss cam’ at a recent Coldplay show in Boston, and immediately hid…

Strawberries are the most popular berry in the U.S. for both consumers and farmers alike. They’re also some of the most pesticide-reliant fruits and consistently top the Environmental Working Group’s “Dirty Dozen” list of the most contaminated produce. San Luis Obispo, California-based TRIC Robotics thinks it can help strawberry farmers reduce chemical use with the help of UV light and robots. The startup built a fleet of robots that use UV-C light, a form of ultraviolet light that is largely blocked by the earth’s atmosphere, to kill bacteria and damage pest populations. The tractor-sized autonomous robots can treat up to…

President Donald Trump’s plan to boost artificial intelligence and build data centers across the U.S. could speed up a building boom that was already expected to strain the nation’s ability to power it.The White House released the “AI Action Plan” Wednesday, vowing to expedite permitting for construction of energy-intensive data centers as it looks to make the country a leader in a business that tech companies and others are pouring billions of dollars into.The plan says to combat “radical climate dogma,” a number of restrictions — including clean air and water laws — could be lifted, aligning with Trump’s “American…

In an office at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), a soft robotic hand carefully curls its fingers to grasp a small object. The intriguing part isn’t the mechanical design or embedded sensors — in fact, the hand contains none. Instead, the entire system relies on a single camera that watches the robot’s movements and uses that visual data to control it.This capability comes from a new system CSAIL scientists developed, offering a different perspective on robotic control. Rather than using hand-designed models or complex sensor arrays, it allows robots to learn how their bodies respond to control…