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 […]
7 days left until Disrupt 2026 ticket price increase
Super early bird pricing for TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 ends on February 27th at 11:59pm PT. Now you can get one week of the biggest discounts of the year, up to $680 off individual passes and up to 30% off community passes. Sign up now and lock in the lowest rate. From October 13th to 15th […]
As competition intensifies, India’s Sarvam launches Indus AI chat app
Sarvam, an Indian AI startup focused on building models for local languages and users, on Friday launched its Indus chat app for web and mobile users, entering a fast-growing market dominated by global players such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. The announcement comes as India becomes a key battleground for generative AI adoption. Recently, OpenAI […]
Remember HQ? “Quiz Daddy” Scott Rogowski returns to the daily mobile game show TextSavvy
Scott Rogowski is a comedian and knows how to make fun of himself. So he ended up printing his photo like a “Wanted” poster and walking around New York City Comic-Con, filming himself asking strangers, “Have you seen this guy?” These passersby looked at the tall bearded man, like someone they had known in a […]
Great news for xAI: Grok is now pretty good at answering questions about Baldur’s Gate
Different AI labs have different priorities. For example, OpenAI has traditionally focused on consumer users, while rival Anthropic tends to target enterprises. Elon Musk’s xAI, which we recently discovered, has a particular focus on video game walkthroughs. On Friday, Business Insider’s Grace Kay published a detailed and extensive report on xAI, the AI startup recently […]
Ukrainian man jailed for identity theft for helping North Korean get job at US company
A U.S. federal court has sentenced a Ukrainian man to five years in prison for his role in a long-running identity theft operation that helped overseas North Korean workers gain fraudulent employment at dozens of U.S. companies. In 2024, U.S. prosecutors indicted Oleksandr Didenko, a 29-year-old resident of Kyiv, on charges of stealing the identity […]