Author: GT

Startups don’t build themselves. The Builders Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, taking place October 27–29 at San Francisco’s Moscone West, is where investors, operators, and founders come to talk tactics — the nitty-gritty of getting something off the ground and making it work. This year, we’re bringing some of the sharpest minds in the game to the stage, including legendary investor Elad Gil, former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, and Flexport founder Ryan Petersen. If you’re looking for real-world insights from people who’ve actually built and backed category-defining companies, this is where it happens. Whether you’re wrestling with your first term…

LONDON (AP) — Music streaming service Deezer said Friday that it will start flagging albums with AI-generated songs, part of its fight against streaming fraudsters. Deezer, based in Paris, is grappling with a surge in music on its platform created using artificial intelligence tools it says are being wielded to earn royalties fraudulently. The app will display an on-screen label warning about “AI-generated content” and notify listeners that some tracks on an album were created with song generators.The company said AI-generated music is an “industry-wide issue.” It’s committed to “safeguarding the rights of artists and songwriters at a time where…

Over the last several years, fusion power has gone from the butt of jokes — always a decade away! — to an increasingly tangible and tantalizing technology that has drawn investors off the sidelines. The technology may be challenging to master and expensive to build today, but fusion promises to harness the nuclear reaction that powers the sun to generate nearly limitless energy here on Earth. If startups are able to complete commercially viable fusion power plants, then they have the potential to upend trillion-dollar markets. The bullish wave buoying the fusion industry has been driven by three advances: more…

One of SpaceX’s Starship rockets exploded on a test stand in Texas late on Wednesday night, as the company prepared for the tenth test flight of the heavy-lift rocket system. SpaceX said “all personnel are safe and accounted for” in a post on X, and claimed there are “no hazards to residents in surrounding communities.” The company said in a later update on Thursday that an initial analysis suggests the explosion was caused by a failure of of a “pressurized tank known as a COPV, or composite overwrapped pressure vessel” in the Starship’s nosecone. The enormous explosion caused damage to…

When Baiju Bhatt stepped away from his role as Chief Creative Officer at Robinhood last year, only those close to him could have predicted his next move: launching a space company built around tech that the aerospace industry has largely dismissed, and which might be more groundbreaking than anyone realizes. If people aren’t paying much attention, that’s just fine with Bhatt, who co-founded the trading app in 2013, five years after earning his master’s degree in mathematics at Stanford. It means less competition for his new company, Aetherflux, which has so far raised $60 million on its quest to prove…

Google is rolling out the ability for users to have a back-and-forth voice conversation with AI Mode, its experimental Search feature that lets users ask complex, multi-part questions. With the new Search Live integration, users can have a free-flowing voice conversation with Search and explore links from across the web. Users will be able to access the feature by opening the Google app and tapping the new “Live” icon to ask their question aloud. They will then hear an AI-generated audio response, and they can follow up with another question. Today’s announcement comes a few weeks after Google rolled out AI Mode…

AI investments hit $110 billion in 2024, and the funding landscape in 2025 is more competitive than ever. For early-stage startups, that means more money in the market, but also more pressure to stand out. At TechCrunch Sessions: AI, Rebecca Bellan sat down with three experienced investors: Jill Chase, partner at CapitalG; Kanu Gulati, partner at Khosla Ventures; and Sara Ittelson, partner at Accel. They broke down what they are really looking for when evaluating AI startups from seed through Series C. Their message to founders? Forget the perfect pitch. Focus on building trust, surviving the hype cycle, and being…

The rebooted version of Digg’s news aggregator has entered testing, offering users a first look at what this would-be Reddit competitor, built for the AI era, has in store. At its height in 2008, Digg’s site was valued at $175 million, but it was split up and sold for parts a decade later. In March, Digg’s original founder, Kevin Rose, and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian teamed up to bring the brand back and reinvent the site for a new generation of internet users. The founders think that the internet is being flooded with bots and AI agents, which will create demand…

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said humanity is only years away from developing artificial general intelligence that could automate most human labor. If that’s true, then humanity also deserves to understand and have a say in the people and mechanics behind such an incredible and destabilizing force.  That is the guiding purpose behind “The OpenAI Files,” an archival project from the Midas Project and the Tech Oversight Project, two nonprofit tech watchdog organizations. The Files are a “collection of documented concerns with governance practices, leadership integrity, and organizational culture at OpenAI.” Beyond raising awareness, the goal of the Files is…

Internet connectivity in Iran almost completely disappeared on Wednesday, according to web-monitoring firms, as war with Israel enters its sixth day. NetBlocks, a firm that tracks internet access across the world, wrote on X that Iran is “now in the midst of a near-total national internet blackout.” The firm’s assessment was confirmed by other internet-monitoring organizations.  Data collected by IODA, which is a system that “monitors the Internet infrastructure connectivity in near-real time, with the goal of identifying macroscopic Internet outages,” showed on Wednesday the sudden collapse of internet connectivity in Iran. Image Credits:IODA David Belson, the head of data…