Can the creator economy survive the flood of AI?
Online creators and their business models became our focus this week after super-popular YouTuber Mr.Beast announced he would be acquiring fintech startup Step. Then, Hollywood studios sent a flurry of cease-and-desist letters over the launch of ByteDance’s new video generation model SeaDance 2.0. These seemingly unconnected headlines suggest a media landscape in the midst of […]
Bill Gurley says the worst thing you can do for your career right now is play it safe.
For nearly 30 years, Bill Gurley has been one of Silicon Valley’s most influential voices, a general partner at Benchmark, an early investor in companies like Uber, Zillow, and Stitch Fix, and helped define what modern venture capital looks like. Now, having moved to Austin and taken a break from active investing, the Texas native […]
President Trump says Netflix will face ‘consequences’ if it does not fire director Susan Rice
President Donald Trump said in a social media post Saturday that Netflix will “pay the consequences” if it does not fire Susan Rice, who has served on the company’s board since 2018. Trump’s comments came after Rice, a former U.N. ambassador who served in diplomatic and advisory roles in the Obama and Biden administrations, appeared […]
China’s brain-computer interface industry moves forward
Elon Musk’s Neuralink likes to say that it is a “pioneer” in brain-computer interfaces (BCI), but China’s BCI industry is already quietly transitioning from research to scale-up. With stronger policy support, expanded clinical trials, and increased investor interest, a new wave of startups is racing to commercialize both implantable and non-invasive BCIs. So says Phoenix […]
6 days left until disruption rate locks in at lowest level in 2026
Super early bird pricing for TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 ends on February 27th at 11:59pm PT. That means you only have six days left to secure this year’s lowest-priced flights. If Disrupt is on your must-attend list, now’s your chance. Save up to $680 on individual passes and secure up to 30% off on community passes […]
A 9,000 pound monster that I don’t want to give back.
Before leaving on a trip to Tahoe last weekend, GM offered me a week to test drive the company’s 9,000-pound monument, the new 2026 electric Escalade IQL (priced from $130,405). Before continuing, please note that I am not a professional car critic. TechCrunch has some great transportation writers. I’m not one of them. But I […]
Sam Altman wants us to remember that humans also use a lot of energy.
Speaking at an event hosted by The Indian Express this week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman addressed concerns about AI’s environmental impact. First, Altman, who was in India for a major AI summit, said concerns about AI’s water usage were “absolutely fake,” but acknowledged that it was a real problem at the time, “when we were […]
Wikipedia blacklists Archive.today after suspected DDoS attack
Wikipedia editors have decided to remove all links to Archive.today, a web archiving service that is linked more than 695,000 times throughout the online encyclopedia. Archive.today — which also operates under several other domain names, including archive.is and archive.ph — is perhaps most widely used to access content that is inaccessible behind paywalls. Therefore, it […]
Google VP warns two types of AI startups may not survive
The generative AI boom has spawned a flurry of startups. But as the dust begins to settle, two once-popular business models are looking more alarming: LLM wrappers and AI aggregators. Darren Mowry, who leads Google’s global startup organization across Cloud, DeepMind and Alphabet, says startups with these hooks have a “check engine light” on. LLM […]
OpenAI debates whether to report Canadian gunman suspect’s chats to police
The 18-year-old suspected of killing eight people in the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting in Canada reportedly used OpenAI’s ChatGPT in a way that alarmed the company’s staff. Jesse Van Rootseller’s chat about gun violence was flagged by the company’s LLM abuse monitoring tool and banned in June 2025. According to the Wall Street Journal, company […]