Author: GT

President Donald Trump is urging oil producers to “drill, baby, drill.” U.S. oil and gas investors may not be on board with the plan. “Right now, with low oil prices, I think we’re going to start to see a lot of companies starting to pare back on their capital spending,” said Clark Williams-Derry, an energy finance analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.  The U.S. is already producing more crude oil than any other nation in history. In December 2024, U.S. oil and gas firms produced more than 13.49 million barrels of crude per day. That’s an all-time high…

When Sam Weaver was vice president of product management at Unqork, he realized that the company needed a better way to manage its sprawling network of Kubernetes clusters — which are groups of computing nodes. When Unqork couldn’t find anything off the shelf, it assembled a 15-person team to build a Kubernetes management product. Despite the multi-million-dollar expense, Weaver said the resulting platform was just okay. “I’m thinking to myself, there’s got to be a better way of doing this,” Weaver told TechCrunch. “I mean, what we had built was sufficient, but it was not by any means complete, and…

LONDON (AP) — A magazine journalist’s account of being added to a group chat of U.S. national security officials coordinating plans for airstrikes has raised questions about how highly sensitive information is supposed to be handled.Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg detailed a discussion that happened over the Signal messaging app hours before strikes on Iran-backed Houthi-rebels in Yemen ordered by U.S. President Donald Trump.The National Security Council has since said the text chain “appears to be authentic” and that it is looking into how a journalist’s number was added to the chain.Here’s a look at the app in question. What is…

When Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) hit the $100,000 mark in December, all lights appeared to be flashing green. Many investors were convinced that Bitcoin was about to go parabolic. Indeed, it eventually hit a new all-time high of $109,000 on Jan. 20. But ever since then, Bitcoin has been on the decline, and it now trades around the $83,000 mark. This astonishing turn of events has led some investors to rethink everything they know about Bitcoin, including the famous “Bitcoin Cycle” investment thesis that claims to predict the next move of the world’s most popular cryptocurrency. The “Bitcoin Cycle” investment thesis…

The premiere founder conference brought to you by TechCrunch is heading back to Boston on July 15. TC All Stage 2025 (formerly known as Early Stage) is our tentpole East Coast event that promises an agenda full of founder knowledge — for all stages — that will be passed along to you. What’s more, if you book your ticket today, you’ll save up to $320+ thanks to our Super Early Bird rates. But time is ticking! Prices will go up after March 31. Register before March 31 at 11:59 p.m. PT to save $300+ on All Stage passes. Why go…

Long before Donald Trump was president of the United States, he was a brand—the TV billionaire known for his gaudy properties, his celebrity hobnobbing, and a sprawling universe of products bearing his name, from resorts to steaks to continuing education courses. That brand has grown massively since, and now powers a media company and crypto operation that have added billions to Trump’s net worth. During his first term, critics complained that the president’s corporate empire was riddled with conflicts of interest and offered abundant opportunities to buy influence—when foreign dignitaries stayed at his luxury hotels during official state visits, for…

LetzAI is quickly becoming a go-to platform for high-quality AI-generated images. With a mission to democratise and personalise AI-powered image generation, it has emerged as one of the most popular and high-quality options on the market. The problem: In 2023, Neon Internet CEO and co-founder Misch Strotz was struck by a clever idea: give Luxembourg residents the power to easily generate local images using AI. Within a month, Luxembourg-focused LetzAI V1 went live. Encouraged by strong local demand, Strotz and his team began working on a global version of the platform. The vision? An opt-in AI platform empowering brands, creators,…

Waymo on Tuesday added Washington to its pioneering robotaxi service’s steadily expanding list of U.S. markets, although passengers will have to wait until next year until they can take a driverless ride around the nation’s capital city.For now, Waymo’s robotaxis will continue to map Washington’s streets and corridors with a safety driver sitting behind the wheel to take control of the vehicle if something goes wrong — a precaution required under the regulations currently in force in the District of Columbia.That’s something Waymo already has been doing since it began sending out its robotaxis in Washington in late January after…

Barbados-based Tabit Insurance has secured a $40m insurance facility, capitalised entirely in bitcoin. This enables real-time verification of funds by regulators and auditors, the company press release said, with the capitalisation of the facility in bitcoin touted as an “industry first”. Tabit also said that all insurance policies and premiums will remain denominated in US dollars, though the capital is held in bitcoin. Commenting on the benefits of the development, Tabit co-founder William Shihara said: “Our approach to capital allocation underscores our confidence in providing a steady hand to our partners. By combining traditional balance sheet strength with carefully chosen…

The Arc Prize Foundation, a nonprofit co-founded by prominent AI researcher François Chollet, announced in a blog post on Monday that it has created a new, challenging test to measure the general intelligence of leading AI models. So far, the new test, called ARC-AGI-2, has stumped most models. “Reasoning” AI models like OpenAI’s o1-pro and DeepSeek’s R1 score between 1% and 1.3% on ARC-AGI-2, according to the Arc Prize leaderboard. Powerful non-reasoning models including GPT-4.5, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, and Gemini 2.0 Flash score around 1%. The ARC-AGI tests consist of puzzle-like problems where an AI has to identify visual patterns…