In recent months, the big three cloud vendors — Amazon, Microsoft and Google — have relaxed their egress fees, which are a tax of sorts that the cloud companies charge customers to move their data to another vendor. It’s a way to keep existing customers in the fold, but it’s kind of a ham-handed way … Read more
In March, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill that could force ByteDance to divest TikTok or face a ban in U.S. app stores. Much of the related discussion and debate has centered around American data security and speech rights, but a potential move also highlights something else: TikTok is growing its focus … Read more
Phone giant AT&T has reset millions of customer account passcodes after a huge cache of data containing AT&T customer records was dumped online earlier this month, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. The U.S. telco giant initiated the passcode mass-reset after TechCrunch informed AT&T on Monday that the leaked data contained encrypted passcodes that could be used … Read more
Elon Musk’s AI startup, X.ai, has revealed its latest generative AI model, Grok-1.5. Set to power social network X’s Grok chatbot in the not-so-distant future (“in the coming days,” per a blog post), Grok-1.5 appears to be a measurable upgrade over its predecessor, Grok-1 — at least judging by the published benchmark results and specs. … Read more
Google today briefly showed a section on the new Google Messages page claiming that Apple is set to roll out Rich Communication Services (RCS) support for iPhones this fall, according to a report by 9to5Google. This indicates that the iPhone maker is likely to extend RCS support in the upcoming iOS 18 update. The page had … Read more
You might’ve heard of Grok, X’s answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It’s a chatbot and, in that sense, behaves as you’d expect — answering questions about current events, pop culture and so on. But unlike other chatbots, Grok has “a bit of wit,” as X owner Elon Musk puts it, and “a rebellious streak.” Long story … Read more
As AI proliferates and things on the internet are easier to manipulate, there’s a need more than ever to make sure data and brands are verifiable, said Scott Dykstra, CTO and co-founder of Space and Time, on TechCrunch’s Chain Reaction podcast. “Not to get too cryptographically religious here, but we saw that during the FTX … Read more
Demis Hassabis, CEO and one of three founders of Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) subsidiary DeepMind, has been awarded a knighthood in the U.K. for “services to artificial intelligence.” Ian Hogarth, chair of the U.K. government’s recently launched AI Safety Institute and previously founder of music startup Songkick, was awarded Commander of the Order of the British … Read more
Orbit Fab wants to build “gas stations” for satellites – which means it needs the gas cap, a mechanism for transferring propellant from an orbital tanker to the customer spacecraft. That docking mechanism, called RAFTI, is now flight qualified and on the market. The price tag for each port? Just $30,000. The Colorado-based startup (and … Read more
It’s rare that I come across a pitch deck that ticks almost all the boxes. It’s so good, in fact, that I fed Plantee’s deck into an AI tool I built, and it determined there was a 97.7% chance that Plantee would raise money. This tool generally determines that only about 7.5% of all pitch … Read more