Category: Uncategorized

Silicon Valley used to take a backseat to Washington, D.C. But now, the people disrupting technology have taken the wheel at the highest echelons of government. And that’s thanks, in large part, to the Department of Government Efficiency, better known as DOGE. Much reporting on DOGE has focused on its staffers’ ties to Musk, the billionaire bestie of… Read more

OpenAI is embracing rival Anthropic’s standard for connecting AI assistants to the systems where data resides. In a post on X on Wednesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that OpenAI will add support for Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol, or MCP, across its products, including the desktop app for ChatGPT. MCP is an open-source standard that… Read more

Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX has allowed Chinese investors to buy stakes as long as the funds are routed through the Cayman Islands or other offshore hubs, according to reporting from ProPublica.  SpaceX is a defense contractor for the Pentagon, one that handles sensitive work like building a classified spy satellite network. Investment from China… Read more

One academic who reviewed the dataset said it was “clear evidence” that China, or its affiliates, wants to use AI to improve repression. Read more

Bradley Tusk, co-founder and managing partner at Tusk Venture Partners, told TechCrunch in today’s episode of Equity that VC as we know it is dead. And it has been for the last four years.  “Maybe there’s some VC that I’ve never heard of that’s awash with liquidity the last couple of years, but we haven’t… Read more

Digital banking startup Mercury has raised $300 million in primary and secondary funding at a $3.5 billion post-money valuation, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Wednesday. The valuation is more than double the startup’s valuation when it last raised capital – a $120 million Series B round in 2021 that valued the company at $1.62… Read more

The Canadian company is developing small modular reactors. It previously raised nearly $100 million. Read more

The proliferation of scarily realistic deepfakes is one of the more pernicious byproducts of the rise of AI, and falling victim to scams based on these deepfakes is already costing companies millions of dollars — not to mention the implications these could have on national security. A startup that’s built a toolset aimed at governments… Read more

Sez Us, a social app founded by Democratic strategist Joe Trippi, is trying to build a platform without rage-bait. Rage-bait refers to any posts that are intended to stoke controversy. This might be an intentionally controversial political take, or it can be a wholly fabricated scenario designed to farm engagement (for example, a satirical creator… Read more

YouTube is changing how it counts views on YouTube Shorts to give creators a deeper understanding of how their short-form content is performing, the company announced on Wednesday. Shorts views will now count the number of times a creator’s Short starts to play or replay. In the past, a view had been counted after a… Read more