Author: Katie Boyd

Meta’s chief scientist and deep learning pioneer Yann LeCun said he believes that current AI systems are decades away from reaching some semblance of sentience, equipped with common sense that can push their abilities beyond merely summarizing mountains of text in creative ways. His point of view stands in contrast to that of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, […]

Venture capital investment into Europe’s tech industry plunged by half in 2023 as investors continued to reel from the effects of high interest rates, according to data from venture capital firm Atomico. However, artificial intelligence was a standout category that saw continued mega funding rounds. Atomico’s “State of European Tech” report, published Tuesday, showed that […]

SoftBank posted an investment gain on its Vision Fund in the fiscal second quarter but booked another quarterly loss. Here’s how SoftBank did in the September quarter against LSEG estimates: For the first half of SoftBank’s fiscal year, it posted a 1.41 trillion loss ($9.3 billion). This compares to a 3 trillion yen profit in the […]

Shein has seen big swings in its price tag over the last year. The Singapore-headquartered fast fashion platform is targeting a valuation of up to $90 billion in a potential U.S. initial public offering, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday. TechCrunch has reached out to Shein for comment. An investor briefed on the matter told us that there’s still […]

It’s strange times we’re living in when a blockchain billionaire, not the usual Big Tech suspects, is the one supplying the compute capacity needed to develop generative AI. It was revealed yesterday that Jed McCaleb, the co-founder of blockchain startups Stellar, Ripple and Mt Gox and aerospace company Vast, launched a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that purchased 24,000 […]

Policymakers in Washington are now engaged in a wide range of discussions regarding how to prevent AI technology from spinning out of control. But for all the focus on various dangers, we’re losing sight of how the AI economy should be structured — how humanity can be best poised to take best advantage of this […]

Athens, Georgia, is home to the University of Georgia, and the police there are used to college town-type crimes: break-ins, bar fights and assorted rowdiness. That kind of thing. But the 911 call that came in on the night of March 13, 2019, was unlike anything the Athens-Clarke County Police Department had ever encountered. On […]

The Indian startup ecosystem did not escape the fundraising woes that struck the rest of the world in the third quarter: Startups in the country raised 50% less than they did a year ago and raised less than they did in the second quarter as well, according to private market database Tracxn. As we noted last week, […]

A year ago, Sam Bankman-Fried was revered as a titan of the industry and living large at a $40 million penthouse in the Bahamas, while he ran a crypto empire valued at $32 billion. On Tuesday morning in a Manhattan federal court in New York, the now disgraced founder and ex-CEO of the bankrupt crypto exchange […]

A few lines buried in the legal terms for the FedNow service, which is now live, create an important opportunity for digital wallet and payment app providers. While the new FedNow legal regime creates significant business opportunities for all players in this space, emerging nonbank payment providers may have the most to gain from this change. […]