Adobe’s chief strategy officer Scott Belsky announced this week that he will be joining A24, the independent movie studio behind “Civil War,” “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” and many more titles. Belsky first joined Adobe in 2012 through the acquisition of Behance, leaving briefly in 2016 to become a VC at Benchmark but eventually returning … Read more
MLCommons, a nonprofit AI safety working group, has teamed up with AI dev platform Hugging Face to release one of the world’s largest collections of public domain voice recordings for AI research. The data set, called Unsupervised People’s Speech, contains more than a million hours of audio spanning at least 89 different languages. MLCommons says … Read more
OpenAI may have billions of dollars in the bank. But it’s gearing up to raise billions more, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. Per The WSJ, OpenAI is in talks to secure up to $40 billion in a funding round that would value the startup at $340 billion. SoftBank would lead the … Read more
Hackers are exploiting outdated versions of WordPress and plugins to alter thousands of websites in an attempt to trick visitors to download and install malware, security researchers have found. The hacking campaign is still “very much live,” Simon Wijckmans, the founder and CEO of web security company c/side, which discovered the attacks, told TechCrunch on … Read more
Chinese AI company DeepSeek made global headlines for helping spark a massive sell-off in U.S. tech stocks on Monday, with Nvidia dropping almost 20%. In China, the hype around DeepSeek has sent shares of some public companies with supposed ties to it soaring. The problem: There’s no evidence these companies ever invested in or cooperated … Read more
After the TikTok ban went into effect on Sunday, social network Bluesky launched a custom feed for videos on its platform. Now, Flipboard’s newest app, Surf, which is dedicated to browsing the open social web and decentralized services like Mastodon and Bluesky, is taking advantage of that move to introduce a video feed of its … Read more
In 2023, defense tech recruiter Peterson Conway VIII pulled up to the offices of nuclear fusion startup Fuse in a black Suburban, donning his signature cowboy hat. He picked up a recent Fuse hire and proceeded to regale her with stories of his old recruiting days. One story involved prostitutes attending a recruiting event (“not … Read more
With a TikTok ban looming in the United States, Perplexity AI is the latest bidder hoping to give the video app a new corporate home. CNBC first reported on Perplexity’s interest. A source with knowledge of the offer confirmed to TechCrunch that Perplexity (whose CEO Aravind Srinivas is pictured above) has submitted a bid to … Read more
Distracted driving is one of the leading causes of car accidents and a major reason why auto insurance premiums are expected to increase in 2025. For commercial fleets, that’s a nightmare. But for California-based startup Netradyne, it’s a tailwind. Netradyne provides fleet owners, including big names like Amazon, with AI-enabled dashcams that collect vehicle data … Read more
Jeff Horing’s Insight Partners is to New York venture capital what Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia are to Silicon Valley. And it’s a status that has been cemented with Insight’s latest closing. As expected, Insight Partners announced Thursday it closed another giant flagship fund, known as Fund XIII, along with its second Opportunity fund, collectively $12.5 … Read more