Author: GT

When Nigel Morris tells you he’s worried about the economy, you listen. As industry observers know, Morris co-founded Capital One and pioneered lending to subprime borrowers, building an empire on understanding exactly how much financial stress the average American can handle. Now, as an early investor in Klarna and other buy-now-pay-later companies like Aplazo in Mexico, he’s watching something that makes him deeply uncomfortable. “To see that people are using [BNPL services] to buy something as basic and fundamental as groceries,” Morris told me on stage at Web Summit in Lisbon this week, “I think is a pretty clear indication…

Amazon’s budding satellite internet program is no longer called Project Kuiper. It is now known simply as “Leo.” The name change comes as the company appears to be shifting its focus from “unserved or underserved” communities to securing larger commercial contracts. The satellite network has been in the works since 2019 and, as Amazon tells it, the name Project Kuiper was only ever supposed to be temporary. Leo is a nod to the network’s location in what’s known as low-Earth orbit, commonly referred to in the space industry as “LEO.” As Amazon worked toward launching the first Kuiper satellites earlier…

According to a new report from the International Energy Agency, the world will spend $580 billion on data centers this year — $40 billion more than will be spent finding new oil supplies. Those numbers help to illustrate some big shifts in the global economy, and comparing data centers and oil seems particularly apt given concerns about how generative AI might accelerate climate change. Kirsten Korosec, Rebecca Bellan, and I discussed the report’s findings on the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast. There’s no question that these new data centers are going to be hungry for power, and that they…

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. To get this in your inbox, sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! It seems like a day doesn’t go by without Waymo making some kind of expansion announcement. Detroit, Las Vegas, Nashville, San Diego, and Washington, D.C., are just a few of the cities the company plans to bring its robotaxi to in the coming months. But as I have argued in this newsletter before, there is another “expansion” I think is more important.  Freeways.  And now after…

JPMorgan Chase says it’s been billed a total of $142 million in legal fees for the defense of Charlie Javice and Olivier Amar, respectively the founder and chief marketing officer at financial aid startup Frank. JPMorgan acquired Frank for $175 million in 2021, but earlier thai year, Javice and Amar were found guilty earlier of defrauding the bank by inflating Frank’s customer count, with Javice sentenced to seven years in prison. JPMorgan is now seeking to overturn a judge’s order requiring the bank to pay the pair’s legal fees, as reported in The Wall Street Journal. Michael Pittinger, a lawyer…

A federal jury in California ruled Friday that Apple must pay medical device maker Masimo $634 million for infringing a patent on blood oxygen monitoring technology. Reuters reports the jury found that the Apple Watch’s workout mode and heart rate notification features violated Masimo’s patent. “This is a significant win in our ongoing efforts to protect our innovations and intellectual property, which is crucial to our ability to develop technology that benefits patients,” Masimo said in a statement. “We remain committed to defending our IP rights moving forward.” An Apple spokesperson told Reuters that the company plans to appeal the…

After a two-week blackout, YouTube TV and Disney announced Friday that they have reached a deal. In addition to bringing Disney networks like ABC, ESPN, and FX back to YouTube’s streaming TV service, the deal will also see ESPN make its new direct-to-consumer service available on YouTube TV at no additional price. YouTube will also be able to sell select Disney networks and the Disney+/Hulu bundle as part of different packages. In a statement, Disney Entertainment Co-Chairmen Alan Bergman and Dana Walden, along with ESPN Chairman Jimmy Pitaro, described the deal as one that “recognizes the tremendous value of Disney’s…

Tesla has published the most detailed look at the performance and relative safety of its advanced driver-assistance software, just a few weeks after Waymo’s co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana at TechCrunch Disrupt called on companies to release more data. On a new section of its website, Tesla claims that in North America, owners using the company’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) software are driving around 5 million miles before a major collision and around 1.5 million miles before a minor collision. That’s a far lower rate than the national average based on statistics provided by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). That data…

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…

Andy Konwinski is concerned that the U.S. is losing its dominance in AI research to China, calling the shift an “existential” threat to democracy. Konwinski is a Databricks co-founder and the co-founder of the AI research and venture capital firm Laude. “If you talk to PhD students at Berkeley and Stanford in AI right now, they’ll tell you that they’ve read twice as many interesting AI ideas in the last year that were from Chinese companies than American companies,” Konwinski said onstage at the Cerebral Valley AI Summit this week.   In addition to investing through Laude, the venture fund…