Steve Ballmer slams founder he supports after pleading guilty to fraud: “I feel fooled and stupid.”
Silicon Valley tends to tolerate a certain amount of hyperbole from founders when pitching to investors, often ignoring it as part of selling their vision. But some choices can cross the line and lead to jail time for founders and scandal for investors. A case in point is Joseph Samberg, whose once-high-flying fintech startup Aspiration […]
Palantir reportedly assists IRS with financial crimes investigation
Palantir has been assisting the Internal Revenue Service’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation in investigating various financial crimes in the United States for the past 10 years, The Intercept reported. Citing public documents obtained by the nonprofit watchdog group American Oversight detailing IRS contracts with Palantir, the outlet reported that the IRS has paid Palantir $130 […]
Two college students raise $5.1 million pre-seed to build AI social network on iMessage
Social networking app Series announced it has raised $5.1 million in a pre-seed round with investors including Venmo co-founder Iqram Magdon-Ismail, Pear VC, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, and GPTZero founder Edward Tian. The company was founded early last year by Yale University students Nathaneo Johnson and Sean Hargrow. Both are still fourth year university students. […]
The meta’s loss is the thinking machine’s gain.
Weiyao Wang spent eight years at Meta, his first job out of college, where he helped build multimodal perception systems and contributed to open-world segmentation projects, including SAM3D. His last day at Meta was last week, and he has since joined the Thinking Machines Lab (TML). His move to TML comes as the AI startup […]
Google invests up to $40 billion in cash and compute in Anthropic
Google plans to invest up to $40 billion in Anthropic to support the AI company’s growing computing needs, Bloomberg reports. According to Anthropic, the Alphabet subsidiary currently plans to invest $10 billion at Anthropic’s valuation of $350 billion, and an additional $30 billion if Anthropic meets certain performance goals. The investment commitment comes after Anthropic […]
Marked-up Mac minis flood on eBay amid AI-induced shortage
Amidst a shortage of sold-out machines, overpriced Mac minis are flooding eBay, making them a popular tool for running on-device AI models like OpenClaw. According to reports this week, the $599 M4 Mac mini base model with 16GB RAM and 256GB of storage is sold out on Apple’s retail website, with no delivery or in-store […]
Nuclear startup X-energy raises $1 billion in data center-led IPO
Nuclear startup X Energy raised $1 billion in an initial public offering yesterday, selling 44.3 million shares for $23 per share, a hefty premium over the $16 to $19 per share the company was seeking. The company originally hoped to raise about $800 million. The stock is scheduled to begin trading on the Nasdaq exchange […]
Another spyware maker caught distributing fake Android snooping apps
Yet another government-backed spyware maker has been arrested after its customers used fake Android apps to install surveillance software on its targets, according to a new report. On Thursday, Osservatorio Nessuno, an Italian digital rights organization that studies spyware, published a report on a new piece of malware called Morpheus. This spyware disguises itself as […]
Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga joins StrictlyVC SF
surprise! StrictlyVC San Francisco, which kicks off this year’s TechCrunch event lineup on April 30th at the Centro Philippine Cultural Center, is adding new participants to its ever-growing roster of speakers. Praveen Neppalli Naga, CTO of Uber, joins us to discuss operating at scale in the age of, you guessed it, AI. However, you’ll need […]
DeepSeek previews new AI model that ‘bridges the gap’ with frontier models
Chinese AI lab DeepSeek has released two preview versions of its latest large-scale language model, DeepSeek V4. This is a long-awaited update to last year’s V3.2 model and the accompanying R1 inference model that took the AI world by storm. According to the company, both DeepSeek V4 Flash and V4 Pro are expert mixed models […]