The United States Department of Justice argued Wednesday that Google should divest its Chrome browser as part of a remedy to break up the companys illegal monopoly in online search, according to a filing with the U.S District Court of the District of Columbia. Google would not be allowed to re-enter the search market for [] 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

WhatsApp Business has grown toover 200 million monthly users over the past few years. That means there are tons of businesses sending messages to users and some of these messages could be considered as spam. For customers, the only option was to either let them send messages and offers, or block the business account [] 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

OneCell Diagnostics has secured $16 million in a Series A round as it aims to limit cancer recurrence using AI advancements along with scientific ways. 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Arzooo, an Indian startup founded by former Flipkart executives that sought to bring best of e-commerce to physical stores, has sold its assets in distressed sale to Moksha Group. The deal follows Arzooo engaging with several startups, including Bengaluru-headquartered Udaan, for potential merger opportunities, according to people familiar with the matter. Arzooo had raised approximately [] 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Lawyers for The New York Times and Daily News, which are suing OpenAI for allegedly scraping their works to train its AI models without permission, say OpenAI engineers accidentally deleted data potentially relevant to the case. Earlier this fall, OpenAI agreed to provide two virtual machines so that counsel for The Times and Daily News [] 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Nvidia raked in more than $19 billion in net income during the last quarter, the company reported on Wednesday, but that did little to assure investors that its rapid growth would continue. On its earnings call, analysts prodded CEO Jensen Huang about how Nvidia would fare if tech companies start using new methods to improve [] 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Social media platform Reddit experienced an outage this afternoon at around 12:20 p.m. PT (or possibly even earlier), resulting in thousands of users being unable to access its website and app. After four hours, it appears to be working again. Reddit confirmed it fixed the issue and is monitoring the results, according to its status [] 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Cloud giant Snowflake has agreed to acquire Datavolo, a data pipeline management company, for an undisclosed sum. Snowflake unveiled the deal at the close of the market bell on Wednesday, when it also announced its Q3 2025 earnings. The purchase hasnt yet closed, and its subject to customary closing conditions, Snowflake noted in a release. [] 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Billionaire Gautam Adani and several executives at his company, the Indian conglomerate Adani Group, have been indicted over an alleged scheme to pay more than $250 million in bribes to Indian officials in exchange for contracts to a 12 gigawatt solar power project. The indictment, unsealed Wednesday in federal court in Brooklyn, charges Adani, his [] 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Several AI-based study tools are capitalizing on a PDF to Brainrot trend, which will read the text of a document you upload over oddly satisfying videos, like ASMR clips of mixing paint and cutting soap, or gameplay footage from Minecraft and Subway Surfers. Then students can listen to an automated voice read their textbooks to [] 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Startups pursuing fusion power have benefitted from AI's insatiable thirst for electricity. 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The attorney general for the District of Columbia is suing instant payday loan fintech Earnin for deceptively marketing and providing illegal high-interest loans, the AG alleges. Earnin allows its users to get loans against paychecks. It advertises that users can get $150 a day, up to $750 per pay period, with no interest, credit check [] 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Social media platform Reddit is experiencing an outage this afternoon, resulting in thousands of users being unable to access its website and app. Reddit confirmed that its currently investigating the issue, according to its status page. We discovered the outage ourselves when attempting to visit the homepage, which displayed a black screen with the message: [] 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Not every former top FTX executive is heading to prison. Gary Wang, former FTX chief technical officer, was spared prison time by U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan today. Judge Kaplan praised Wangs cooperation with federal authorities. Wang testified against former FTX founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried at his trial last fall. Wang pleaded guilty to [] 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The five alleged hackers are accused of stealing millions of dollars in crypto, and corporate data from several victims all over the world. 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

May Mobility is slowly advancing its driverless capabilities. The startup this week launched a small-scale deployment of autonomous shuttles, which will drive themselves along a fixed route without a human safety driver present. May will initially deploy one to two autonomous Toyota Sienna minivans to ferry employees and invited guests across a 2-square-mile area of [] 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Shiva Suri gained a unique perspective into how radiologists work when he quarantined and shared a home office with his mom, a well-regarded radiologist. I watched her work day in and day out, and she was wasting about seven to eight hours on boring workflow tasks, Suri said. Only 5% of her time, she had [] 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Defense tech startups have raised almost $3 billion so far in 2024, surpassing the previous record from 2022 of $2.6 billion. 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Meta is introducing new features for Messenger, its messaging app, including AI-powered noise suppression. Messenger is getting HD video calls and voice isolation, both of which can be enabled via the call settings menu. HD calls are now the default for calls placed over Wi-Fi, Meta says, and an option for calls over cellular. Messenger [] 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo has urged the European Union to widen its Digital Markets Act (DMA) investigation into Google, claiming the search giant is in breach of several areas where the bloc has yet to formally probe the companys compliance. The EUs flagship market contestability rulebook has been in force on a handful of tech [] 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Hiya, folks, welcome to TechCrunchs regular AI newsletter. If you want this in your inbox every Wednesday, sign uphere. Americas AI war with China is intensifying or at least, the rhetoric around it is. On Tuesday, a U.S. congressional commission proposed a Manhattan Project-style effort to fund the development of AI systems with human-level [] 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

H, the Paris startup founded by Google alums, made a big splash last summer when, out of the blue, it announced a seed round of $220 million before releasing a single product. Three months later, still without a product, that splash started to look like a catastrophic flood when three of the companys five co-founders [] 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

As X competitor Bluesky takes off, topping 20 million users, Metas own Twitter-like app, Instagram Threads, has begun rolling out a new feature called custom feeds to its global audience. Hoping to capitalize on user demand for more personalization, custom feeds are meant to allow Threads users to easily build feeds around specific topics or [] 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The FBI unsealed an indictment yesterday that alleges Joanna Smith-Griffin, founder of the AI startup AllHere Education, engaged in securities fraud, wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft in connection with defrauding investors out of nearly $10 million. The FBI claims she misrepresented her companys revenue, customer base, and cash to investors from at least November [] 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

A Chinese lab has unveiled what appears to be one of the first reasoning AI models to rival OpenAIs o1. On Wednesday, DeepSeek, an AI research company funded by quantitative traders, released a preview of DeepSeek-R1, which the firm claims is a reasoning model competitive with o1. Unlike most models, reasoning models effectively fact-check themselves [] 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

TV Time, a popular TV and movie tracking and recommendations app with more than 30 million registered users, disappeared from Apples App Store for several weeks, leading to questions about its future from the apps avid fan base. Considering that 2.5 million users use the app every month to track what theyre watching and to [] 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Cable television has long been viewed as a stagnant business, showing little promise for growth over the years. However, Comcast believes it has found a new growth opportunity. On Wednesday, the company announced that its spinning off NBCUniversals cable television networks such as CNBC, E!, Golf Channel, MSNBC, Oxygen, SYFY, and USA Network [] 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Pony AI, the Chinese autonomous vehicle startup thats looking to go public on the Nasdaq stock exchange, now wants to raise around $260 million, according to a new regulatory filing. Thats up from its previous target of around $224 million. To meet the goal, Pony will sell as many as 20 million American depository shares. [] 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Amazon on Wednesday introduced the Echo Show 21, its largest Echo Show yet. The smart display comes with double the viewing area of the existing Echo Show 15, which is also getting an upgrade. The two new devices have better audio quality than the original Echo Show 15, as they come with double the bass [] 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Belgium-based Odoo decided to use open-source tools as a way to attack the enterprise resource planning (ERP) software market, going up against giants like SAP. Fast forward a couple of decades and its now picking up 500 million in secondary investment or around $527M at current exchange rates led by CapitalG (Alphabets venture [] 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

When Brandon Contino and co-founder Dan Chi were developing Four Growers produce-harvesting robots, they practically lived in a greenhouse for an entire year. They coded at a small desk tucked in the back corner and discovered that fertilizer bags can be comfortable beds. We actually started just running everything off a laptop, and I would [] 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Manufacturing has been one of the hottest categories in venture this year, but there are still many innovative materials and processes yet to scale. One example is thermoset composites, materials widely used in aerospace and defense due to their high heat resistance and light weight, but which typically have long lead times and high prices [] 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Insurance has been fertile ground for artificial intelligence innovation, working as it does at the nexus of giant datasets, risk assessment, predictive analytics, fintech and customer service. Federato, a startup riding that momentum, has now raised $40 million to expand its business: an AI-powered underwriting platform to help insurers better understand and respond to risk. [] 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

AI is finding its way into every corner of biotech and pharmaceutical research, but like other industries, its never quite as straightforward to implement as one would like. Converge Bio has built a tool for companies to make their biology-focused LLMs actually work, from enriching their data to explaining their answers. The company has raised [] 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

As companies server infrastructure grows, they often run into challenges keeping tabs on the health of their various assets, like cloud instances and local data centers. Monitoring tools, also known as observability tools, can help but lots of tools quickly becomes overwhelming. According to one survey, seven in 10 organizations believe that monitoring is [] 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

AI labs traveling the road to super-intelligent systems are realizing they might have to take a detour. AI scaling laws, the methods and expectations that labs have used to increase the capabilities of their models for the last five years, are now showing signs of diminishing returns, according to several AI investors, founders, and CEOs [] 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

An incident disclosure shared with Finastra's banking and financial customers confirms a hacker stole files from a company system. 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Dual-use drone startup Tekever has raised 70 million ($74 million) to develop its product and expand into new markets, specifically the U.S.. The news is part of a trend of smaller tech-driven startups moving into markets normally dominated by large defense primes. It also shows that unmanned aerial drones are becoming far more sophisticated, in [] 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The U.K. no longer has a supercomputer in the top 50, according to new data from the Top500 project, which ranks the 500 most powerful non-distributed computer systems globally. The countrys current national supercomputer system, Archer2, is approaching end-of-life in 2026. According to the latest figures, its also now sitting in 62nd place globally, down [] 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The U.K. government is not ruling out further beefing up existing online safety rules by adding an Australian-style ban on social media for under 16s technology secretary, Peter Kyle, has said. Back in the summer the government warned it may toughen laws for tech platforms in the wake of riots that were perceived to have [] 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

OpenAI envisions teachers using its AI-powered tools to create lesson plans and interactive tutorials for students. But some educators are wary of the technology and its potential to go awry. Today, OpenAI released a free online course designed to help K-12 teachers learn how to bring ChatGPT, the companys AI chatbot platform, into their [] 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Houses in San Francisco are notoriously expensive, with the average home price hovering around $1.26 million. Its no wonder that a fire-ravaged shack priced at $299,000 in one of San Franciscos southernmost neighborhoods saw at least 20 people tour the property this past weekend, according to The San Francisco Standard. Potential buyers were asked to [] 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Bling Capital, one of the more prolific and well-connected seed VC firms, has nabbed another $270 million for a new flagship, fourth fund. 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

SpaceX conducted the sixth flight test of its massive Starship rocket on Tuesday afternoon, and although the company did not replicate the history-making booster catch, the company did welcome a very special guest: President-elect Donald Trump. Trump, who will soon be sworn into office for his second term, said on X that he was headed [] 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Apple said the security update for Macs, iPhones, and iPads is ecommended for all users. 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech! This week, were diving into PayPals new holiday shopping-friendly feature, Klarnas 2025 IPO ambitions, and sales tax automation startup Kintsugi doubling its valuation in less than a year. If youd like to receive the Fintech newsletter in your inbox every Tuesday, sign up here! The big story PayPal makes group purchases [] 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Security and privacy advocates have long warned that sensitive medical data can be used to train AI models, and can expose personal data down the line. 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Pete Davidson? Kanye West? Step aside. Kim Kardashians new beaux is a Tesla bot named Optimus. The fashion mogul got some hands-on experience with Teslas bipedal, human-shaped robot, which is not yet available to the general public. In Kardashians videos with the robot posted to X and her Instagram story she prompts Optimus [] 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Volkswagen of America has a new CEO: Rivians recently departed chief commercial officer Kjell Gruner. The appointment comes just one week after VW parent company Volkswagen Group formalized a $5.8 billion joint venture with Rivian, which will be focused on EV architecture and software. While Gruners new post isnt really related to that new JV, [] 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Chroma, a startup building a new type of audiovisual entertainment for mobile devices, has been sold. The company, which had financial backing from Twitter and Medium co-founder Biz Stone as well as Pinterest co-founder Evan Sharp, is headed to London-based audio technology company Bronze, an AI music startup. Founded by record producer Lex Dromgoole, whos [] 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.