Author: TechCrunch News

Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch Space. Flagging again that the final agenda for the Space Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt is now live. I’ll be pushing this event for the next few weeks, given that we’re just a bit over a month away! We’d love for you to join us…

A Y Combinator startup named PearAI launched with an X post thread and YouTube video on Saturday and created immediate controversy. And some of that is splashing onto YC itself. PearAI offers an AI coding editor. The startup’s founder Duke Pan has openly said that it’s a cloned copy of another AI editor called Continue,…

11x.ai, a startup that develops AI-powered sales development bots, has secured roughly $50 million in Series B funding, TechCrunch has learned. The new round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, valuing the company at around $350 million, multiple sources told TechCrunch. The recent deal follows the company’s $24 million Series A, which was led by Benchmark…

Elon Musk’s X is now valued at less than a quarter of its $44 billion purchase price, according to a new estimate from investor Fidelity.  The asset manager, which helped Musk acquire the social network formerly known as Twitter, has further reduced the value of its holding in X to a total markdown of 78.7%…

Kevin Ryan has had a long and storied career as a pivotal force of New York City tech. He’s the founder and CEO of investment firm AlleyCorp, which has invested in a wide variety of startups, and is a serial founder, participating in the early stages of companies such as Business Insider…

California Governor Gavin Newsom has vetoed SB 1047, a high-profile bill that would have regulated the development of AI. The bill was authored by State Senator Scott Wiener and would have made companies that develop AI models liable for implementing safety protocols to prevent “critical harms.” The rules would only have applied to models that…

X (formerly Twitter) could soon resume service in Brazil — if it’s willing to pay an additional fine. Reuters and other publications have reported on an order from the country’s Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes stating that the Elon Musk-owned social network could “immediately return to its activities in national territory” if it pays…

Amazon Prime Video could be getting into the live news business, if only for one night. Variety reports that the company is in talks with longtime NBC and MSNBC news anchor Brian Williams to host a live Election Night special, competing with more traditional TV news broadcasts to offer non-partisan coverage of the U.S…

Meta Connect 2024 was this week, showcasing new hardware and software to support two of the company’s big ambitions: AI and the metaverse. CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced new Quest headsets, updates to Meta’s Llama AI model, and real-time video capabilities of Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. The biggest reveal…

In August, a Russian warlord posted a video on Telegram, showing a pair of Cybertrucks patrolling a road in Chechnya, armed seemingly with heavy machine guns. Leaving aside unanswerable (for now) questions about how the vehicles were obtained, Wired thought it worth digging into whether a Cybertruck actually makes sense as a “technical,” the term…