Author: GT

Google I/O, Google’s biggest developer conference of the year, is nearly upon us. Scheduled for May 20 to 21 at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, I/O will showcase product announcements from across Google’s portfolio. Expect plenty of news relating to Android, Chrome, Google Search, YouTube, and — of course — Google’s AI-powered chatbot, Gemini. Earlier this week, Google hosted a separate event dedicated to Android updates: The Android Show. The company announced new ways to find lost Android phones and other items, additional device-level features for its Advanced Protection program, security tools to protect against scams and theft, and a…

OpenAI is poised to help develop a staggering 5-gigawatt data center campus in Abu Dhabi, positioning the company as a primary anchor tenant in what could become one of the world’s largest AI infrastructure projects, according to a new Bloomberg report. The facility would reportedly span an astonishing 10 square miles and consume power equivalent to five nuclear reactors, dwarfing any existing AI infrastructure announced by OpenAI or its competitors. (OpenAI has not yet returned TechCrunch’s request for comment, but to put that into perspective, that’s bigger than Monaco.) The UAE project, developed in partnership with G42 — an Abu…

Sonali De Rycker, a general partner at Accel and one of Europe’s most influential venture capitalists, is bullish about the continent’s prospects in AI. But she’s wary of regulatory overreach that could hamstring its momentum. At a TechCrunch StrictlyVC evening earlier this week in London, De Rycker reflected on Europe’s place in the global AI race, balancing optimism with realism. “We have all the pieces,” she told those gathered for the event. “We have the entrepreneurs, we have the ambition, we have the schools, we have the capital, and we have the talent.” All that’s missing, she argued, is the…

Y Combinator-backed startup Firecrawl is back on the hunt for AI agent employees. As we reported back in February, its first attempt didn’t yield an AI worth hiring. But it’s now placed three new ads on YC’s job board for “AI agents only” and has set aside a $1 million budget total to make it happen. Within about a week after the new job posts went live, it had about 50 applicants, founder Caleb Peffer tells TechCrunch. Firecrawl offers a web crawling tool that scrapes data from websites for LLMs. This is, Peffer admits, a shady part of the AI…

Epic Games is escalating its efforts to pressure Apple to allow its game Fortnite into its App Store, with a new court filing asking Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers to require that Apple “accept any compliant version of Fortnite onto the U.S. storefront of the App Store.” Epic and Apple have been engaged in a years-long legal battle over Apple’s App Store policies, particularly the commissions Apple charges for in-app purchases. The Fortnite publisher scored a major victory last month when Judge Rogers ruled that Apple was in “willful violation” of an injunction on anti-competitive pricing — a ruling that seemed…

Welcome back to Week in Review! We’ve got tons of news for you this week, including a hack at Coinbase; YC thinks Google is a ‘monopolist’; layoffs at Microsoft; and much more. Have a great weekend! Uh-oh: Coinbase says that customers’ personal information, including government-issued IDs, was stolen in a data breach. The hackers demanded $20 million from the company, CEO Brian Armstrong said in a post on X. Coinbase said it will not pay the hackers’ ransom. IPO time, baby: After filing confidentially in December, Chime filed for an IPO this week. There are a ton of blanks in…

The world’s only net-positive fusion experiment has been steadily ramping up the amount of power it produces, TechCrunch has learned. In recent attempts, the team at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) increased the yield of the experiment, first to 5.2 megajoules and then again to 8.6 megajoules, according to a source with knowledge of the experiment. The new results are significant improvements over the historic experiment in 2022, which was the first controlled fusion reaction to generate more energy than the it consumed. The 2022 shot generated 3.15 megajoules, a small bump over the 2.05 megajoules…

MIT says that due to concerns about the “integrity” of a high-profile paper about the effects of artificial intelligence on research and innovation, the paper should be “withdrawn from public discourse.” The paper in question, “Artificial Intelligence, Scientific Discovery, and Product Innovation,” was written by a doctoral student in the university’s economics program. It claimed to show that the introduction of an AI tool into a large-but-unidentified materials science lab led to the discovery of more materials and more patent filings, but at the cost of reducing researchers’ satisfaction with their work. MIT economists Daron Acemoglu (who recently won the…

Redpoint Ventures, a San Francisco-based firm that is about a quarter century old, has raised a $650 million 10th early-stage fund, according to a regulatory filing. Redpoint’s new fund matches the size of its prior fund, which was raised just under three years ago. In a market where many venture firms are decreasing their capital hauls, this consistency could indicate the firm’s limited partners are relatively happy with its performance. The firm’s early-stage strategy is managed by four managing partners: Alex Bard (pictured above), Satish Dharmaraj, Annie Kadavy, and Erica Brescia, who joined the firm in 2021 after serving as…

The morning after Elon Musk’s 2022 acquisition of Twitter (now X), reporters encountered two men with boxes outside the company’s headquarters. One introduced himself as recently laid-off Twitter engineer “Rahul Ligma.”  His real name is Rahul Sonwalkar but the prank went viral. While he never worked for X, he is actually very much a techy. Sonwalker spent several years working as an engineer at Uber. He even went through Y Combinator at that time, working on a logistics startup that he later scrapped before pivoting.   The now 27-year-old wants to draw attention to his more serious endeavor: Julius, the AI data analyst…