Welcome to Gag City, the pink metropolis inhabited by stans and brands alike. In the days leading up to the release of “Pink Friday 2,” Nicki Minaj’s fifth studio album and sequel to her debut record “Pink Friday” that dropped on Friday, Twitter was flooded with AI-generated images of pink-toned cityscapes. Gag City, the dreamy…
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has let launch providers conduct their own investigations in nearly every instance that a launch mishap has occurred since the start of the century — a practice that needs closer scrutiny, a federal watchdog said in a new report. The report, published Thursday by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO),…
It seems the younger a startup is today, the better its fundraising prospects. Recent data from Carta pushes back against the narrative that 2023 has been tough on startups that are not building an AI product. In fact, grouping startups by maturity yields a very different picture. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read…
The whirlwind management drama at OpenAI last month concluded with co-founder Sam Altman reinstated within a week of his surprise dismissal — and a much bigger role for Microsoft, which ended up with a seat on the board for the first time since investing billions into the startup earlier this year. That new, cosier relationship…
Surveys have become an integral part of many aspects of our lives, but most of them are tedious, leading to ineffective responses and actions. Dinghan Shen and Yuan Xue, two software engineers working in Silicon Valley, recognized an opportunity to leverage the breakthroughs brought by large language models to make surveys more empathetic and engaging.…
From the collapse and rebirth of Silicon Valley Bank to the indictment of Sam Bankman-Fried — it’s safe to say that this has been a long year. Emotionally, at least. That’s why the team here at TechCrunch thought it would be fun to have an end-of-year pub quiz testing you, dear reader, on how well…
Amazon is dropping Venmo as a payment option next month, the PayPal owned mobile payment service announced on its website. The official announcement comes as Amazon notified users last night via email that Venmo will no longer be accepted on Amazon.com starting January 10, 2024. Amazon will still, however, accept Venmo debit and credit cards.…
VC investment trends in the cybersecurity market suggest a sector in decline — at least within the context of recent months. According to Crunchbase, cybersecurity deal count fell during Q3 to 153 deals from 181 in Q2. In a more detailed report, Crunchbase suggests that, with Q3 cybersecurity venture funding down 30% compared to the…
Sarvam AI has come out of stealth mode and announced it has raised $41 million as the five-month old Indian startup races to build a suite of full-stack generative AI offerings. The $41 million funding raise is across the Seed and Series A financing rounds. Lightspeed led the rounds with participation from Khosla Ventures and…
Establishing commercial markets on the moon is going to require thinking a little differently. That’s DARPA’s hunch, anyway. DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is the U.S. Department of Defense’s R&D arm, which has just selected 14 companies to participate in a new study to develop technological frameworks for a lunar future. “The next decade…
