Hey, folks, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s newsletter recapping the notable happenings in tech over the past few days. This week, TC’s auto reporter Sean O’Kane revealed how EV startup Fisker temporarily lost track of millions of dollars in customer payments as it scaled up deliveries, leading to an internal audit that started … Read more
Will Lawrence, the co-founder and CTO of Iron Sheepdog, likes to say that sometimes building something simple is actually really hard. Building simple-to-use technology for the short-haul trucking industry is Iron Sheepdog’s goal. That approach is also why the company thinks it has been able to see a level of adoption from the industry its … Read more
To give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved — and overdue — time in the spotlight, TechCrunch is launching a series of interviews focusing on remarkable women who’ve contributed to the AI revolution. We’ll publish several pieces throughout the year as the AI boom continues, highlighting key work that often goes unrecognized. Read more profiles here. … Read more
Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn’t cover on their own. This week in AI, I’d like to turn the spotlight … Read more
When you sign up to a new social network, you have zero friends, zero followers, zero likes. But as you start posting content, you might get more and more likes and comments. That could lead to new followers. And that dopamine boost will encourage you to post even more. A new app called Palmsy is … Read more
After a lengthy trial and conviction, we finally learned how long former crypto baron Sam Bankman-Fried will be behind bars: up to 25 years. It’s a lengthy sentence, but one that given the scale of the crimes he was convicted of, doesn’t come as a shock. For the crypto industry, it’s also the final page … Read more
As deepfakes proliferate, OpenAI is refining the tech used to clone voices — but the company insists it’s doing so responsibly. Today marks the preview debut of OpenAI’s Voice Engine, an expansion of the company’s existing text-to-speech API. Under development for about two years, Voice Engine allows users to upload any 15-second voice sample to … Read more
If the 2023 crypto venture landscape was an ice-cold pot of water, the first quarter of 2024 is the part where the bubbles start to form right before water boils, Tom Schmidt, a partner at Dragonfly Capital, said to TechCrunch. And he’s not wrong: $2.52 billion in total capital has been raised across the crypto … Read more
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. There’s not that much news from me this week, but I’ve been doing a ton of prep for TechCrunch Early Stage taking place in Boston on … Read more
A day after researchers surfaced X’s plans to test NSFW adult communities on the platform formerly known as Twitter, the company confirmed that Community admins can now set an “Adult Content” label in their settings to avoid having their communities’ content auto-filtered. Otherwise, all NSFW content will be soon filtered across X’s Communities by default. … Read more