Author: TechCrunch News

There are three inevitabilities in life: death, taxes, and tech platforms making design changes that are universally disliked. The latest victim to this phenomenon is the Apple Mail app, which got a major redesign in iOS 18. This update is also rolling out on iPads and MacBooks…

Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Ben Horowitz has donated a fleet of Tesla Cybertrucks to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police, the department has confirmed to TechCrunch. The Cybertruck fleet is the latest entry in a list of gifts Horowitz has given to the Las Vegas police — a relationship TechCrunch revealed in detail late last year…

Researchers have developed small robots that can work together as a collective that changes shape and even shifts between solid and “fluid-like” states — a concept that should be familiar to anyone still haunted by nightmares of the T-1000 robotic assassin from “Terminator 2.” A team led by Matthew Devlin of UC Santa Barbara described…

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek recently declared that its AI models could be very profitable — with some asterisks. In a post on X, DeepSeek boasted that its online services have a “cost profit margin” of 545%. However, that margin is calculated based on “theoretical income.” It discussed these numbers in more detail at the end…

Longevity is a hot trend in Silicon Valley these days, driven by rising interest — especially among the wealthy — in preventing disease through regular testing. A new player, Biograph, has just emerged from stealth, and it’s co-founded by one of the biggest names in longevity science: Dr. Peter Attia. Attia is a Canadian-American physician…

OpenAI intends to eventually integrate its AI video generation tool, Sora, directly into its popular consumer chatbot app, ChatGPT, company leaders said during a Friday office hours session on Discord. Today, Sora is only available through a dedicated web app OpenAI launched in December, which lets users access the AI video model of the same…

Meta has fired “roughly” 20 employees for leaking confidential information, The Verge reports. “We tell employees when they join the company, and we offer periodic reminders, that it is against our policies to leak internal information, no matter the intent,” Meta told the publication. “We recently conducted an investigation that resulted in roughly 20 employees…

One of Sequoia’s most prominent investors, managing partner Roelof Botha, sees signs of another greed cycle brewing in venture capital, one where the least sophisticated investors will likely get most hurt. He posted a warning on X on Thursday, writing, “We remain destined to repeat the mistakes of the past! SPVs are making a come-back,…

Snowflake plans to expand its startup accelerator with $200 million in additional commitments, the tech giant that specializes in cloud-based data storage said Thursday. The new injection of capital follows a string of activity by Snowflake over the past several months that illustrates that company’s growth ambitions. The Snowflake Startup Accelerator, formerly known as the…

Former North Carolina Congressman Patrick McHenry announced Wednesday that he landed a job with VC firm Andreessen Horowitz. He will be a Senior Advisor. His post on X said little about what the job entails, except to be advocating for startups (which a16z likes to call “little tech”) with policymakers…