Author: GT

Before the mayor of San Jose, California, arrives at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new business, his aides ask ChatGPT to help draft some talking points.“Elected officials do a tremendous amount of public speaking,” said Mayor Matt Mahan, whose recent itinerary has taken him from new restaurant and semiconductor startup openings to a festival of lowriding car culture. Other politicians might be skittish admitting a chatbot co-wrote their speech or that it helped draft a $5.6 billion budget for the new fiscal year, but Mahan is trying to lead by example, pushing a growing number of the nearly 7,000 government…

Deutsche Bank has more than tripled its stock price target for MP Materials , after the rare-earths miner secured a strategic investment from the Defense Department and a major contract with Apple . Deutsche now sees MP Materials shares rising to $67 compared with $20 previously. The new target implies 15% upside from Wednesday’s close of $58.22 per share. The Pentagon is providing MP with a guaranteed price floor that will help “transform MP from a commodity producer vulnerable to Chinese pricing dominance to a strategic partner,” Deutsche analyst Corinne Blanchard told clients in a Wednesday note. And the Defense…

The chief executive of U.K. retail conglomerate Co-op on Wednesday said that hackers had stolen the personal data of all of the company’s customers during an April cyberattack.  Co-op Group CEO Shirine Khoury-Haq told BBC News that the hackers copied the company’s member list of 6.5 million members, but that Co-op shut down its network before the hackers could lock up its systems with ransomware. The members’ data includes names, addresses, and contact information. The retailer’s network shutdown subsequently resulted in widespread internal disruption across its U.K. back offices and grocery stores. The breach at Co-op in April was part…

Shipping has a pollution problem, but one company has a solution that does more than just eliminate a boat’s carbon dioxide. London-based Seabound has developed a carbon capture system that transforms CO2 from the engine into limestone, a key ingredient in cement. Fittingly, the company will install it aboard the UBC Cork, a cement carrier currently sailing through the Mediterranean Sea. When the ship docks in Norway, the limestone created from the voyage will be offloaded and used to make more cement at Heidelberg Materials’ net-zero plant in Brevik. (The name Heidelberg may ring a bell — earlier this year, it…

LONDON (AP) — Smartphones, laptops, headphones and other electronic devices are essential for work and play in our daily lives. But all that time spent typing, scrolling or listening also means our devices gradually accumulate grime that needs to be cleaned off.You might not give much thought to cleaning your devices but there are reasons you should, says Logitech, which makes keyboards, webcams and other computer peripherals.“Regular cleaning and proper maintenance not only keeps your gadgets looking pristine, and wins you hygiene points, it also helps them perform better and last longer,” the company says. “In the case of devices…

Rafael Henrique | Lightrocket | Getty ImagesRoblox announced the start of age-verification technology Thursday for users who want to chat more freely on the social-gaming platform as part of its new “trusted connections” feature.Roblox Chief Safety Officer Matt Kaufman said that the company felt it was the right time to implement age-estimation software to coincide with “features that we really believe are something that should be limited to an older audience — 13 and over.”The company’s use of age-screening tech, provided by the identity verification company Persona, comes as several states, like Utah, have established age-verification laws requiring app store…

Just five days after opening up orders on its Reachy Mini robots, AI developer platform Hugging Face says it has logged $1 million worth of sales. That’s not a bad start for a company that’s just recently expanded into robotics, and is largely known for letting developers download open source AI models off the internet. On this episode of Equity, Hugging Face co-founder and chief scientist Thomas Wolf breaks down where he sees the company’s robotics going. While other startups tackling robots for the home — such as Figure and 1X — want their robots to offload some of your…

Rex Salisbury, the solo GP behind Cambrian Ventures, fondly recalls the time he fell in love with fintech. The year was 2015; he had recently left his job as an investment banker to try his hand at engineering at a mortgage startup in San Francisco. “That’s when you had companies like Stripe, Plaid, Credit Karma, Wealthfront starting to scale,” he told TechCrunch. “Lending Club had just done their IPO, and was trading really well.” Investors’ excitement for fintech grew exponentially in the following years, reaching a fever pitch in 2021. Things calmed down noticeably a year later, however, as interest…

Via, the transit software startup that garnered attention for its consumer-facing on-demand shuttle service, said it has filed confidentially for an initial public offering. Via has been batting around plans for an IPO for years. The company filed confidentially for an IPO in 2021, but never took the next official and regulatory steps to enter the public markets. Now, the company says it’s ready. Its status as a confidential filing, however, leaves lots of missing details, including the number of shares to be offered and the price range for the proposed offering have not yet been determined. When Via launched…

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has sent letters to Faraday Future founder Jia Yueting and president Jerry Wang, alerting them that they may soon face enforcement actions from the agency as the result of a three-year fraud investigation. The letters, known as “Wells Notices,” state that the commission’s staff has made an internal determination to recommend an enforcement action against the electric vehicle company, the two executives, and two former employees who weren’t named, according to a regulatory filing published Wednesday. Faraday Future wrote in the filing that the SEC is focused on “purported false and misleading statements” related…