Author: GT

Crypto investor and $TRUMP token holder, Nicholas Pinto, attends gala dinner for contest winners.Nicholas PintoThe price of President Donald Trump’s meme coin plunged 16% as of Friday morning, just hours after he hosted a black-tie gala at his Virginia golf club for its biggest buyers — an elite crowd that spent a combined $148 million on the token for the chance to be there.It was billed as “the most exclusive invitation in the world.”Among the 220 attendees were crypto influencers, industry executives like Sandy Carter of Unstoppable Domains, and former NBA star Lamar Odom, who used the occasion to praise…

As generative AI becomes faster, cheaper, and more convincing, the ethical stakes are no longer theoretical. What happens when the tools to deceive become widely accessible? And how do we build systems that are powerful — but safe enough to trust? At TechCrunch Sessions: AI, taking place June 5 at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, Artemis Seaford, Head of AI Safety at ElevenLabs, and Ion Stoica, co-founder of Databricks and professor at UC Berkeley, will take the main stage to unpack the ethical challenges of today’s AI. Their conversation will cut to the heart of one of the most urgent questions…

California is preparing to sue the federal government to recover its right to set vehicle emissions standards, Rob Bonta, the state’s attorney general, told TechCrunch in a statement. Senate Republicans voted on Thursday 51 to 44 to overturn a waiver that allowed California to set stricter air pollution standards for vehicles. The state has received waivers more than 100 times since federal laws granted the right some 50 years ago. “The weaponization of the Congressional Review Act to attack California’s waivers is just another part of the continuous, partisan campaign against California’s efforts to protect the public and the planet…

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm since its launch in November 2022. What started as a tool to supercharge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved into a behemoth with 300 million weekly active users. 2024 was a big year for OpenAI, from its partnership with Apple for its generative AI offering, Apple Intelligence, the release of GPT-4o with voice capabilities, and the highly-anticipated launch of its text-to-video model Sora. OpenAI also faced its share of internal drama, including the notable exits of high-level execs like co-founder and longtime chief…

Cooling towers are seen through a window at the Three Mile Island Nuclear power plant, during a tour by Constellation Energy, which has ordered a main power transformer for the nuclear reactor it is trying to reopen, in Middletown, Pennsylvania, on Oct. 16, 2024.Shannon Stapleton | ReutersPresident Donald Trump signed a series of executive orders on Friday to overhaul the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and speed the deployment of new nuclear power reactors in the U.S.The NRC is a 50-year-old, independent agency that regulates the nation’s fleet of nuclear reactors. Trump’s orders call for a “total and complete reform” of the…

Digg, the Web 2.0-era link aggregator that’s now being given a second chance at life, is open to buying Mozilla’s read-it-later app, Pocket. On Thursday, Mozilla announced it would shut down Pocket on July 8, saying that the way people use the web has evolved, and it needed to focus on new areas of development. Shortly after, Kevin Rose, Digg’s original owner, now co-founder of the new Digg alongside Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, posted on X that his company would be interested in acquiring Pocket from Mozilla. Tagging both Mozilla and Pocket on the post, Rose wrote, “we love Pocket…

OpenAI just made its biggest acquisition yet, scooping up Jony Ive and Sam Altman’s secretive device startup, io, in a $6.5 billion all-equity deal. Ive, the legendary designer behind the iPhone and other iconic Apple products, will now lead creative and design work at OpenAI through his firm LoveFrom. The goal? To take AI “beyond the screen” and build a new generation of AI-powered consumer devices. Beyond the tech, there’s a clear narrative play here. OpenAI is framing Altman as the Jobs-esque visionary and Ive as the design genius who makes it all real. Social media had a field day…

Discord is entering its second decade as a company and seeking to go public. Along the way, it’s changed the way that online communities interact, turning groups that may have previously existed as forums or message boards into multi-channel instant message servers. Now, everything finds a home on Discord, whether it’s an AI platform like Midjourney (Discord’s largest server), an international gaming community, or a school club. But message boards still serve their purpose. Sometimes, there’s value in more incremental, organized commentary in a forum, as opposed to the rapidity of real-time, casual chats on Discord, which can flood users…

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Unhappy that Apple intends to source nearly all of its U.S. iPhones from India, President Donald Trump on Friday threatened a 25% tariff on the popular device unless the tech giant moves production to the United States. But Apple has seen little incentive in the past to manufacture domestically.Apple has traditionally produced its devices in China, in massive factories that rely on a vast network of local suppliers. The company’s reliance on this relationship thrust the technology trendsetter into the crosshairs of Trump’s trade war. In response to the president’s recent exchange with China, Apple CEO…

Shares of Intuit popped about 9% on Friday, a day after the company reported quarterly results that beat analysts’ estimates and issued rosy guidance for the full year.Intuit, which is best known for its TurboTax and QuickBooks software, said revenue in the fiscal third quarter increased 15% to $7.8 billion. Net income rose 18% to $2.82 billion, or $10.02 per share, from $2.39 billion, or $8.42 per share, a year earlier.”This is the fastest organic growth that we have had in over a decade,” Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi told CNBC’s “Closing Bell: Overtime” on Thursday. “It’s really incredible growth across the…