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Steve Jobs once said, “Everything’s a remix.” And that’s a philosophy that Mark Cuban has taken to heart, building an entire entrepreneurial and investment career on that simple belief. The real opportunity, Cuban says, lies in spotting patterns others miss and turning them into billion-dollar disruptions. On today’s episode of Equity, Cuban joined TechCrunch’s Rebecca … Read more

When Max Keenan joined Y Combinator’s summer 2022 batch, he was working on Aurelian, a company that automated appointment bookings for hair salons. But less than a year later, a conversation with one of his clients led him to a far more significant problem. A nearby school’s carpool line was constantly blocking the parking lot … Read more

Last year was monumental for the AI industry in the U.S. and beyond. There were 49 startups that raised funding rounds worth $100 million or more in 2024, per our count at TechCrunch; three companies raised more than one “mega-round,” and seven companies raised rounds that were $1 billion in size or larger. How will … Read more

OpenAI and Anthropic, two of the world’s leading AI labs, briefly opened up their closely guarded AI models to allow for joint safety testing — a rare cross-lab collaboration at a time of fierce competition. The effort aimed to surface blind spots in each company’s internal evaluations and demonstrate how leading AI companies can work … Read more

ChatGPT rivals like Google’s Gemini, xAI’s Grok, and, to a lesser extent, Meta AI, are closing the gap to ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular AI chatbot, according to a new report focused on the consumer AI landscape from venture firm Andressen Horowitz. The report, in its fifth iteration, showcases two and a half years of data about … Read more

With Meta successfully poaching a number of its senior researchers, an OpenAI executive reportedly reassured team members Saturday that company leadership has not “been standing idly by.” “I feel a visceral feeling right now, as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something,” Chief Research Officer Mark Chen wrote in a Slack memo … Read more

The overabundance of attention paid to how people are turning to AI chatbots for emotional support, sometimes even striking up relationships, often leads one to think such behavior is commonplace. A new report by Anthropic, which makes the popular AI chatbot Claude, reveals a different reality: In fact, people rarely seek out companionship from Claude … Read more

Suno, the AI music company currently in a legal battle with music labels, announced on Thursday the acquisition of WavTool, a browser-based AI digital audio workstation (DAW). This acquisition aims to improve Suno’s editing capabilities for songwriters and producers. WavTool, launched in 2023, offers several tools to musicians, such as stem separation, AI audio generation, … Read more

Meta has hired a highly influential OpenAI researcher, Trapit Bansal, to work on its AI reasoning models under the company’s new AI superintelligence unit, a person familiar with the matter tells TechCrunch. OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood confirmed to TechCrunch that Bansal had departed OpenAI. Bansal’s LinkedIn page says that he left OpenAI in June. Bansal … Read more

After Google temporarily paused the rollout of its buggy AI-powered “Ask Photos” feature in Google Photos, the company announced that it has improved the feature’s ability to quickly return search results. The AI feature, first introduced at Google’s I/O developer conference last year, allows users to search across their collection of digital photos using natural … Read more