Category: Tech Crunch

Three years ago, a group of TikTokers joined NBCUniversal’s new initiative aimed at transforming social media influencers into the next generation of TV show creators.  Now, four of these creators are set to launch their original series on Peacock.  According to The Hollywood Reporter, the shows set to premiere are “The Warehouse Phase,” developed by...

Microsoft launched several new “open” AI models on Wednesday, the most capable of which is competitive with OpenAI’s o3-mini on at least one benchmark. All of the new pemissively licensed models — Phi 4 mini reasoning, Phi 4 reasoning, and Phi 4 reasoning plus — are “reasoning” models, meaning they’re able to spend more time...

Tools for Humanity, the startup behind the World human verification project co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, unveiled Wednesday a mobile device designed to help people determine the difference between a human and an AI agent. Rich Heley, Tools for Humanity’s Chief Device Officer and a former Apple director, debuted the Orb Mini device during...

World, the biometric ID company best known for its eyeball-scanning Orb devices, on Wednesday announced several partnerships aimed at driving sign-ups and demonstrating the applications of its tech. World is partnering with Match Group, the dating app conglomerate, to verify the identities of Tinder users in Japan using World’s identity verification system. Additionally, World has...

In 2013, Tatyana Marynich and Anastasiya Khamiankova opened the doors to Imaguru, a startup hub in Minsk, Belarus that would go on to launch some of Eastern Europe’s most prominent tech success stories. A decade later, they’ve been sentenced ‘in absentia’ to a combined 23 years in prison by Belarusian authorities. Their property has been...

According to a new, brow-raising WSJ report, Tesla’s board quietly began searching for Elon Musk’s potential successor about a month ago, approaching executive search firms as the carmaker faced protests, plummeting sales, and shrinking profits while Musk waded into Washington to slash government spending. Board members reportedly met with Musk to express concerns about his...

Eight years after joining Benchmark as the firm’s first woman general partner, Sarah Tavel announced on X that she is transitioning to a more limited role at the storied venture firm. In her new position as a venture partner, Tavel will continue to make investments and serve on existing company boards, but she will have...

OpenAI has published a postmortem on the recent sycophancy issues with the default AI model powering ChatGPT, GPT-4o — issues that forced the company to roll back an update to the model released last week. Over the weekend, following the GPT-4o model update, users on social media noted that ChatGPT began responding in an overly...

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that 20%-30% of code inside the company’s repositories was “written by software” — meaning AI — during a fireside chat with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at Meta’s LlamaCon conference on Tuesday. Nadella gave the figure after Zuckerberg asked roughly how much of Microsoft’s code is AI-generated today. The Microsoft CEO...

On Tuesday, Meta held its first-ever AI developer conference, LlamaCon, at its Menlo Park, California headquarters. The company announced the launch of a consumer-facing Meta AI chatbot app, which will compete with ChatGPT, as well as a developer-facing API for accessing Llama models in the cloud. Both releases aim to expand adoption of the company’s...