Stepping into the top role at Apple this September, CEO John Ternus is pushing back against the narrative that the tech giant is trailing its rivals in the artificial intelligence race. Rather than rushing to deploy generative tools, the company is prioritizing seamless integration over technological spectacle.
OpenAI has recalibrated its latest fundraising strategy, lowering its target to $20 billion as appetite for aggressive AI infrastructure spending cools. While the company initially aimed for a valuation exceeding $1 trillion, recent reports indicate a more restrained reception from major institutional backers in a tightening market.
TikTok is aggressively expanding beyond short-form video, evolving into a digital ecosystem that handles everything from restaurant discovery to financial transactions. By integrating commerce, travel bookings, and local services directly into its interface, the platform is positioning itself to capture the full spectrum of a user’s daily digital activity.
After five days of vacationing with the new iPhone Duo alongside my reliable iPhone 17 Pro Max, I expected to return to the familiar comfort of a standard slab phone. Instead, Apple’s first foldable device—with all its quirks, hinge mechanics, and compromises—managed to shift my daily digital habits entirely.
Limited partners are navigating a high-stakes landscape where the typical rules of diversification have shattered. As valuations for giants like OpenAI and Anthropic skyrocket, the backers providing capital to venture firms are embracing unprecedented concentration, even as they signal caution over the breakneck pace of new fund cycles.
Nvidia is negotiating a multibillion-dollar guarantee for Nscale’s West Virginia data center, a move aimed at stabilizing a project linked to Anthropic. By acting as a cosigner on construction debt, the chip giant is taking an unprecedented step to ensure its hardware reaches one of its most critical customers.
Salesforce is expanding its footprint in the national security sector with the $375 million acquisition of Rune Technologies. The deal integrates the startup’s AI-driven logistics software into Missionforce, Salesforce’s specialized defense unit, marking a strategic pivot from administrative planning to active battlefield operations support.
Ollie, the privacy-centric AI startup, will cease operations on November 6. CEO Bill Lennon announced the closure on X, citing an inability to maintain competitive momentum in a crowded market despite securing $7.5 million in seed funding led by Khosla Ventures just two months ago.
Blackstone now anticipates that Anthropic will land a high-tier junk rating following its upcoming initial public offering. This assessment marks a sharp reversal for the investment giant, which previously projected that the AI laboratory would achieve investment-grade status before 2027, signaling a new layer of financial scrutiny for the startup.
A 28% plunge in Intel shares on Friday wiped $12 billion from the government’s 10% equity position, a stake accumulated over the past year. The chipmaker’s dismal fourth-quarter outlook triggered a broader industry selloff, forcing investors to confront the reality of stagnant cash flow and rising PC costs.
A critical security flaw in Applebee’s Android application left the personal data of millions of customers vulnerable to unauthorized access. By decompiling the app, cybersecurity researcher Robert Wiggins discovered a hardcoded database password buried within the source code, granting potential attackers full entry into the company’s internal user records.
A brutal market sell-off signals that the era of blind optimism for AI infrastructure spending is over. While Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft commit over $740 billion to data centers and chips this year, investors are souring on the resulting negative free cash flow and mounting corporate debt.
If you find yourself costume-less as October 31 approaches, look no further than the latest headlines in artificial intelligence and Silicon Valley vanity. From the existential dread of recursive self-improvement to the unsettling fashion choices of billionaire CEOs, here is how to weaponize your tech hobby for a cheap, effective look.
Two-year-old AI-first law firm Crosby has moved to acquire the brand, trademark, and internal assets of the storied Wall Street firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges. As the 1,200-lawyer institution prepares for a formal dissolution vote, the Silicon Valley startup is also aggressively recruiting its departing legal talent.
Moving beyond the traditional app interface, restaurant discovery startup Zest has debuted an AI-powered concierge that lives directly within text message threads. The tool analyzes a user's transaction history to suggest dining spots and can finalize reservations through integrated platforms like OpenTable, Resy, and SevenRooms without requiring a standalone application.
“Let’s GOOOO,” Rama Afullo exclaimed following a successful orbital test that brings his startup, Satlyt, closer to turning constellations of satellites into distributed data processing networks. The 13-month research project, conducted with the University of Houston, demonstrated the company’s software ability to manage computing tasks across simulated space-based hardware.
A satellite carrying a single Google Tensor Processing Unit is now orbiting Earth, successfully generating poetry from space. Launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9, the Suncatcher prototype aims to demonstrate whether high-performance AI inference can survive the harsh radiation and thermal stressors of low-Earth orbit.
Tyler Shultz, the whistleblower who exposed the Theranos fraud, warns that the current artificial intelligence frenzy creates a fertile environment for similar deception. As investors pour billions into unproven AI ventures, Shultz argues that the difficulty of performing rigorous due diligence makes the industry ripe for repeat manipulation.
A digital heist of unprecedented scale has crippled Binance, with security researchers tracing the theft of at least $6.3 billion to North Korean operatives. The breach, executed in a mere 20 minutes, marks the largest cryptocurrency theft in history, forcing the world’s leading exchange to halt all platform transactions.
While the tech industry buzzes with predictions of autonomous commerce, the reality at DoorDash remains grounded. During its third-quarter earnings call, the delivery giant reported only several hundred orders processed through third-party AI agents, a negligible fraction compared to its massive daily volume of three million deliveries.
The TechCrunch Founder Summit, arriving at Boston’s SoWa Power Station on November 4, aims to replace accidental networking with structured peer-to-peer collaboration. By integrating the Braindate platform into the event, organizers are shifting the focus from casual coffee-line small talk to targeted, problem-solving discussions between founders, investors, and operators.
With only five days remaining before the TechCrunch Founder Summit convenes at Boston’s SoWa Power Station, organizers are pushing a final registration drive. The November 4 event promises a departure from traditional conference formats, favoring interactive roundtables and tactical breakout sessions designed to address the immediate hurdles of company growth.
Runware is pivoting toward an automotive-style assembly line to churn out modular data centers, aiming to reach 30 megawatts of daily capacity by 2028. The startup seeks to bypass the multi-year construction timelines typical of the industry by shipping factory-built pods that can be operational within 48 hours.
Toyota will manufacture electric bZ4X vehicles equipped with Waymo’s self-driving technology at its Takaoka factory, marking a major step toward international expansion. The collaboration targets robotaxi deployments in Japan and the United Kingdom, moving beyond the preliminary research agreements established eighteen months ago.
David Durman, a University of Kentucky administrator and nontheistic Humanist, has successfully obtained a religious exemption from using artificial intelligence in the workplace. His case marks a rare instance where an employee has leveraged legal protections typically reserved for the devout to challenge the integration of AI tools into their professional duties.
Four years after the $8.5 billion acquisition of MGM, Amazon is reaping the rewards of its Hollywood pivot. CEO Andy Jassy confirmed on Thursday that Prime Video has reached a revenue run rate in the tens of billions of dollars, marking the streaming service’s transition into a standalone, profitable powerhouse.
“There has never been a business with a trillion dollars of annual revenue,” Andy Jassy declared during Thursday’s earnings call. The Amazon CEO remains convinced that AWS is on a path to reach that milestone within the next decade, despite investor anxiety over the massive capital expenditures required to fuel such growth.
A potential security breach at Binance has triggered a precautionary suspension of withdrawals across multiple networks, as reports emerge of billions in cryptocurrency being drained from the exchange’s hot wallets. While the company insists user funds remain safe, independent estimates suggest losses could climb as high as $5.7 billion.
Vladimir Putin offered a glowing assessment of Elon Musk at the Russia-Africa Summit, labeling the SpaceX founder a genius. The Russian president confirmed his administration is in contact with the billionaire, framing Musk’s vast constellation of over 5,000 satellites as the benchmark for Russia’s own nascent orbital internet project, Rassvet.
A massive $42.4 billion burn in free cash flow over the last year has rattled investors, even as Amazon’s cloud division outpaced expectations. The company is pouring capital into artificial intelligence infrastructure at a rate that now rivals its entire anticipated holiday-season revenue, signaling a high-stakes bet on future computing dominance.
