Author: GT

If you’re a founder looking to grow your startup, chances are you’re wrestling with more than just product or capital. Talent, scale, and smart execution are the real battlegrounds. That’s exactly what TechCrunch All Stage 2025 is built to address on July 15 at Boston’s SoWa Power Station. Rob Biederman, managing partner at Asymmetric Capital Partners and one of the sharpest minds in talent, tech, and scaling strategy, will share his insights in a roundtable session. This is THE place where you can ask him directly what it takes to scale. See many more top startup leaders taking the stage…

The overabundance of attention paid to how people are turning to AI chatbots for emotional support, sometimes even striking up relationships, often leads one to think such behavior is commonplace. A new report by Anthropic, which makes the popular AI chatbot Claude, reveals a different reality: In fact, people rarely seek out companionship from Claude and turn to the bot for emotional support and personal advice only 2.9% of the time. “Companionship and roleplay combined comprise less than 0.5% of conversations,” the company highlighted in its report. Anthropic says its study sought to unearth insights into the use of AI…

Jeff Bezos is apparently trying to capitalize on the recent blowup between President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal. Bezos has spoken to Trump twice this month, at times discussing more government contracts for his space company Blue Origin, according to the report. Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp also visited the White House to meet with Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles. Bezos even reportedly invited Trump to his upcoming wedding in Venice, Italy. The interactions with the White House came after Musk and Trump spent days slinging mud at each…

Suno, the AI music company currently in a legal battle with music labels, announced on Thursday the acquisition of WavTool, a browser-based AI digital audio workstation (DAW). This acquisition aims to improve Suno’s editing capabilities for songwriters and producers. WavTool, launched in 2023, offers several tools to musicians, such as stem separation, AI audio generation, and an AI music assistant. Suno will integrate WavTool’s technology into its new editing interface, which launched this month.   The terms of the deal have not been disclosed. A company spokesperson noted that “most” of the WavTool employees moved to Suno’s product and engineering teams,…

Google’s AI search features are killing traffic to publishers, so now the company is proposing a possible solution. On Thursday, the tech giant officially launched Offerwall, a new tool that allows publishers to generate revenue beyond the more traffic-dependent options, like ads. Offerwall lets publishers give their sites’ readers a variety of ways to access their content, including through options like micropayments, taking surveys, watching ads, and more. In addition, Google says that publishers can add their own options to the Offerwall, like signing up for newsletters. The new feature is available for free in Google Ad Manager after earlier…

The Supreme Court has upheld a Texas law aimed at blocking children under 18 from seeing online pornography by requiring websites to verify the ages of all visitors. Many states have passed similar age verification laws in an attempt to restrict access to adult material from minors, but digital rights groups have raised questions about such laws’ effects on free speech and whether verifying ages by accessing sensitive data could violate people’s privacy. What is the Texas law?The law requires websites hosting pornographic material to verify the ages of users in hopes of stopping those under 18 from visiting. Adults…

Meta has hired a highly influential OpenAI researcher, Trapit Bansal, to work on its AI reasoning models under the company’s new AI superintelligence unit, a person familiar with the matter tells TechCrunch. OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood confirmed to TechCrunch that Bansal had departed OpenAI. Bansal’s LinkedIn page says that he left OpenAI in June. Bansal has worked at OpenAI since 2022 and was a key player in kickstarting the company’s work on reinforcement learning alongside co-founder Ilya Sutskever. He is listed as a foundational contributor on OpenAI’s first AI reasoning model, o1. Bansal could offer a significant lift to Meta’s…

Diffusion models like OpenAI’s DALL-E are becoming increasingly useful in helping brainstorm new designs. Humans can prompt these systems to generate an image, create a video, or refine a blueprint, and come back with ideas they hadn’t considered before.But did you know that generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) models are also making headway in creating working robots? Recent diffusion-based approaches have generated structures and the systems that control them from scratch. With or without a user’s input, these models can make new designs and then evaluate them in simulation before they’re fabricated.A new approach from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory…

Nvidia briefly became the world’s most valuable company on Wednesday after its stock jumped over 4% in price to a new high of $154.10, pushing its market value to $3.76 trillion. Reuters said the chipmaker overtook Microsoft, which stood at $3.65 trillion after a smaller gain.The rise follows a note from Loop Capital, which raised its price target for Nvidia to $250 from $175. The firm kept its “buy” rating and said demand for generative AI could grow faster than expected.“We are entering the next ‘Golden Wave’ of Gen AI adoption and Nvidia is at the front-end of another material…

Coterra Energy is refocusing on oil. CEO Thomas Jorden shared the company’s decision not to reduce its oil rig count at the JPMorgan Energy conference earlier this week. Here are several key takeaways for investors. 1. For starters, the move signals that Coterra has regained confidence in the direction of oil markets — and inherent in that is more confidence in the outlook for the economy. Alongside its first-quarter earnings report in early May, Coterra said it planned to shift some capital expenditures from its oil assets into natural gas production amid concerns about a potential tariff-driven recession that would…