While Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says he likes podcasts, he might not actually be listening to them anymore. That tidbit comes towards the end of a longer Bloomberg profile of Nadella, with a focus on Microsoft’s AI strategy and its complicated relationship with OpenAI. To illustrate how much he uses the company’s Copilot AI assistant […]
How Silicon Valley’s influence in Washington benefits the tech elite
Since Donald Trump took office, more than three dozen employees, allies, and investors of Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and Palmer Luckey have taken roles at federal agencies, helping direct billions in contracts to their companies.
Thousands of people have embarked on a virtual road trip via Google Street View
It’s Friday afternoon and I’m listening to Bowdoin College’s radio station, interspersed with ambient car honking noises. I am not in Maine. I am not in a car. I am at my desk. This is Internet Roadtrip. Internet Roadtrip is what I will call an MMORTG (massive multiplayer online road trip game). Neal Agarwal, the […]
OpenAI’s planned data center in Abu Dhabi would be bigger than Monaco
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 […]
Build, don’t bind: Accel’s Sonali De Rycker on Europe’s AI crossroads
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 […]
Fake fired Twitter worker ‘Rahul Ligma’ is a real engineer with an AI data startup used by Harvard
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. […]
Viral outrage over Apple’s EU payment warnings misses key fact
Apple says the warning messages now appearing next to EU App Store listings that use third-party payment systems are not actually new. According to a number of recent reports, Apple added a warning with a red exclamation mark next to apps that it found were not using its own “private and secure payment system.” The […]
Vibe-coding startup Windsurf launches in-house AI models
On Thursday, Windsurf, a startup that develops popular AI tools for software engineers, announced the launch of its first family of AI software engineering models, or SWE-1 for short. The startup says it trained its new family of AI models — SWE-1, SWE-1-lite, and SWE-1-mini — to be optimized for the “entire software engineering process,” […]
Sam Altman’s goal for ChatGPT to remember ‘your whole life’ is both exciting and disturbing
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman laid out a big vision for the future of ChatGPT at an AI event hosted by VC firm Sequoia earlier this month. When asked by one attendee about how ChatGPT can become more personalized, Altman replied that he eventually wants the model to document and remember everything in a person’s life. […]
xAI blames Grok’s obsession with white genocide on an ‘unauthorized modification’
xAI blamed an “unauthorized modification” for a bug in its AI-powered Grok chatbot that caused Grok to repeatedly refer to “white genocide in South Africa” when invoked in certain contexts on X. On Wednesday, Grok began replying to dozens of posts on X with information about white genocide in South Africa, even in response to […]