Lee Roberts meets me at the University Club of San Francisco on a Friday morning, hours before his football team will lose to Cal in heartbreaking fashion – a fumble at the goal line, because little about the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s expensive experiment with Bill Belichick has gone according to script….
Bilal Abu-Ghazaleh had just moved to London few days before our call, splitting his time between there and Dubai. After nearly a decade in the U.S., including a stint at Scale AI, he’s bringing that experience to his next venture: 1001 AI , a company creating AI infrastructure for critical industries across the Middle East…
Home goods company Kohler recently unveiled a new device called the Dekoda — a $599 camera that can be attached to your toilet bowl and take pictures of what’s inside. CNET reports that the Dekoda analyzes these images in order to provide updates on your gut health and hydration, and to potentially detect blood. It…
“Hoisted by their own GPTards.” That’s how Meta’s Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun described the blowback after OpenAI researchers did a victory lap over GPT-5’s supposed math breakthroughs. Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis added, “this is embarrassing.” The Decoder reports that in a since-deleted tweet, OpenAI VP Kevin Weil declared that “GPT-5 found solutions to…
The Trump administration is taking its social media attacks on Democratic opponents to an unlikely platform, with the White House and numerous other government agencies joining Bluesky on Friday. In its first post, the new White House account uploaded a highlight reel of Trump footage and memes, along with the message, “What’s up, Bluesky? We…
Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Want another reason to get this free in your inbox? The emailed version of this newsletter includes polls, including one this week that asks readers what they think the best business model is for autonomous vehicle technology….
YouTube has become the biggest platform out there, offering tons of opportunities for creators to earn a living. Back in June, the company reported that its creative ecosystem added over $55 billion to the U.S. GDP and created more than 490,000 full-time jobs. However, many YouTubers have reduced their reliance on ad revenue and brand…
A federal judge has granted Meta-owned WhatsApp’s request for a permanent injunction blocking Israeli cyberintelligence company NSO Group from targeting the messaging app’s users. At the same time, the judge dramatically reduced the fine that NSO Group must pay to Meta. Earlier this year, a jury decided that the cyberintelligence company would have to pay…
Wikipedia is often described as the last good website on an internet increasingly filled with toxic social media and AI slop. But it seems the online encyclopedia is not completely immune to broader trends, with human pageviews falling 8% year-over-year, according to a new blog post from Marshall Miller of the Wikimedia Foundation. The foundation…
Kevin Hartz tends to be first through the door. In 2001, he co-founded Xoom, back when sending money across borders meant standing in line at Western Union. In 2013, it went public, and in 2015, PayPal paid $1.1 billion for it. Four years after launching Xoom, he co-founded Eventbrite, which went public in 2018 and…
