Author: Jason

After accounting startup Bench abruptly shut down on December 27 and was bought in a fire-sale by Employer.com, Bench customers are now learning they can’t easily just take their financial data and leave.  And some are very unhappy about it, three customers told TechCrunch. To recap: When Bench, a startup based in Canada that raised… Read more

Amazon is now the latest company to curb some of its DEI programs, Bloomberg reports, after Meta announced that it, too, is ending its diversity efforts earlier on Friday.  An internal memo that was sent to staffers said that the company was looking to wind down outdated programs and materials as part of a review… Read more

On Friday, the nation’s highest court heard arguments on whether to uphold or block a law that could effectively ban TikTok​ in the U.S. The bill, signed into law by President Biden in April 2024, gives TikTok’s parent company ByteDance until January 19 to divest its U.S. operations or face a ban in the country.… Read more

OpenAI disbanded its robotics department. Then, it brought it back. Now, through a social media post from its hardware director and newly published job descriptions, OpenAI is revealing more about its plans for the revived team. In a post on X on Friday, Caitlin Kalinowski, who joined OpenAI to lead hardware last November from Meta’s… Read more

OpenAI was sending “tens of thousands” of server requests trying to download Triplegangers’ entire site which hosts hundreds of thousands of photos. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. Read more

AI companies across the globe raised more than $100 billion in venture capital dollars in 2024, according to Crunchbase data, an increase of more than 80% compared to 2023. It encompasses nearly a third of the total VC dollars invested in 2024. That’s a lot of money funneling into a lot of AI companies. The… Read more

Large corporations aren’t known for taking risks. This is as true in the world of consumer hardware as anywhere. Annual updates are largely incremental, with small changes to things like screen resolution or image quality. It’s a phenomenon that Lenovo is more than happy to buck when it showcases the latest updates to its PC… Read more

In the wake of Meta’s decision to remove its third-party fact-checking system and loosen content moderation policies, Google searches on how to delete Facebook, Instagram, and Threads have been on the rise. People who are angry with the decision accuse Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg of cozying up to the incoming Trump administration at the expense… Read more

A construction zone. A car crash. A double-parked truck. A motorcycle cop with its red, white, and blues deployed.  My one-hour trip along the Las Vegas Strip in a custom-built Zoox robotaxi during CES 2025 wasn’t a dull one. A second, shorter ride the following evening proved less eventful. And in both rides, the Zoox… Read more

Hugging Face, the AI developer platform, has settled a lawsuit against Korean AI startup FriendliAI, which had accused Hugging Face of infringing on one of its patents. Per a filing on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Delaware, FriendliAI reached a “confidential agreement” with Hugging Face on January 8 and… Read more