Author: TechCrunch News

In a new essay on his personal blog, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company is open to a “compute budget,” among other “strange-sounding” ideas, to “enable everyone on Earth to use a lot of AI” and ensure the benefits of the technology are widely distributed…

Construction procurement is highly fragmented, manual, and opaque, forcing contractors to juggle multiple suppliers, endure lengthy negotiations, and deal with delayed payments. In Saudi Arabia, where trillion-dollar infrastructure and real estate projects are underway, these inefficiencies are even more pronounced. To address this, BRKZ, a Riyadh-based construction tech startup…

Elon Musk recently said he is “not chomping at the bit to acquire TikTok.” Musk made those remarks during an interview at the WELT Economic Summit on January 28. A video of the interview was published today. The interview came after President Donald Trump delayed a law requiring parent company ByteDance to sell TikTok or…

In Brief Posted: 9:56 AM PST · February 8, 2025 Image Credits:Kimberly White / Getty Images Fei-Fei Li, the Stanford computer scientist and startup founder sometimes known as “the Godmother of AI,” has outlined “three fundamental principles for the future of AI policymaking” ahead of next week’s AI Action Summit in Paris. First, Li said…

Rapyd Financial Network is reportedly looking to raise $300 million in a new funding at a steep valuation cut from its 2021 high. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only…

The Department of Transportation (DOT) has paused funding for a $5 billion EV charging infrastructure program that Tesla has received at least $31 million from. The move is widely viewed to be illegal. It’s the latest attempt from the Trump administration to hack away at federally funded renewable energy projects around the country…

OpenAI co-founder John Schulman, who left AI startup Anthropic last week after a mere five months, is reportedly joining former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s secretive new startup, per Fortune. It’s not clear what Schulman’s role there will be. Fortune wasn’t able to learn that information, and Murati has been tight-lipped about the venture since she…

Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei is worried about competitor DeepSeek, the Chinese AI company that took Silicon Valley by storm with its R1 model. And his concerns could be more serious than the typical ones raised about DeepSeek sending user data back to China.  In an interview on Jordan Schneider’s ChinaTalk podcast, Amodei said DeepSeek generated…

In Brief Posted: 2:49 PM PST · February 7, 2025 Image Credits:Mike Coppola / Getty Images OpenAI is expanding its footprint to Germany. According to a press release issued Friday, the ChatGPT maker plans to open an office in Munich in the coming months. “Germany is renowned for its technical expertise, academic excellence, and industrial…

A group of more than 100 organizations has published an open letter calling on the AI industry and regulators to mitigate the tech’s harmful environmental impacts just days before leading industry CEOs, heads of state, academics, and nonprofits descend on Paris for a major AI conference…