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Being interrupted is annoying. Apparently, even AI-generated podcast hosts agree. Or so Google NotebookLM’s users discovered. NotebookLM launched last year and went viral for its feature that creates entirely AI-generated podcast-like discussions from content users upload, discussed by chatty AI bots acting like podcast hosts. In December 2024, NotebookLM launched a new feature called “Interactive … Read more

OpenAI on Monday published what it’s calling an “economic blueprint” for AI: a living document that lays out policies the company thinks it can build on with the U.S. government and its allies. The blueprint, which includes a forward from Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s VP of global affairs, asserts that the U.S. must act to attract … Read more

After more than two years — and nearly 100 episodes — as a host of TechCrunch’s recently ended Found podcast, I have learned a lot about how founders approach building their startups. I’ve heard stories about how founders know when it is the right time to expand from their core product, to how startups approach … Read more

Sidney Scott decided to take himself out of the venture capital rat race and is now jokingly auctioning off his vests — starting at $500,000.  The Driving Forces solo general partner announced on LinkedIn this week that he was shutting down his $5 million fintech and deep tech VC fund that he started in 2020, … Read more

Amazon has decided to discontinue its Astro for Business device, a security robot for small—and medium-sized businesses, just seven months after launch.  In an email sent to customers and employees on Wednesday, provided to TechCrunch, the reason for putting Astro for Business on the shelf is a simple one: Amazon wants to focus on its … Read more

Aiming to bring the “social” back to “social media,” a new app called noplace has surged to the top of the App Store as it launches out of invite-only mode Wednesday. Designed to appeal to a younger crowd — or anyone who wants to connect with friends or around shared interests — noplace is like … Read more

Cloudflare, the publicly-traded cloud service provider, has launched a new, free tool to prevent bots from scraping websites hosted on its platform for data to train AI models. Some AI vendors, including Google, OpenAI and Apple, allow website owners to block the bots they use for data scraping and model training by amending their site’s … Read more

Last week, a hacker claimed to have stolen 33 million phone numbers from U.S. messaging giant Twilio. On Tuesday, Twilio confirmed to TechCrunch that “threat actors” were able to identify the phone number of people who use Authy, a popular two-factor authentication app owned by Twilio. In a post on a well-known hacking forum, the … Read more

Ashwin Nandakumar and Ashwin Jainarayanan were working on their doctorates at adjacent departments in Oxford, but they didn’t know each other. Nandakumar, who was studying oncology, one day stumbled across a curious dataset for prostate cancer, with which he needed sequencing help. “I reached out to a few friends asking to help me analyze this … Read more

Telegram launched a digital currency called Stars for in-app use last month. Now, the company is expanding its use cases to paid content. The chat app is also allowing channels to covert the stars they have to Toncoin — the cryptocurrency Telegram uses over The Open Network (TON) blockchain. Alternatively, they can use them to … Read more