Welcome back to Week in Review! We’ve got tons of news for you this week, including a hack at Coinbase; YC thinks Google is a ‘monopolist’; layoffs at Microsoft; and much more. Have a great weekend! Uh-oh: Coinbase says that customers’ personal information, including government-issued IDs, was stolen in a data breach. The hackers demanded […]
Laser-powered fusion experiment more than doubles its power output
The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Ignition Facility increased the yield of the experiment in recent attempts.
MIT disavows doctoral student paper on AI’s productivity benefits
MIT says that due to concerns about the “integrity” of a high-profile paper about the effects of artificial intelligence on research and innovation, the paper should be “withdrawn from public discourse.” The paper in question, “Artificial Intelligence, Scientific Discovery, and Product Innovation,” was written by a doctoral student in the university’s economics program. It claimed […]
Microsoft’s Satya Nadella is choosing chatbots over podcasts
While Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says he likes podcasts, he might not actually be listening to them anymore. That tidbit comes towards the end of a longer Bloomberg profile of Nadella, with a focus on Microsoft’s AI strategy and its complicated relationship with OpenAI. To illustrate how much he uses the company’s Copilot AI assistant […]
How Silicon Valley’s influence in Washington benefits the tech elite
Since Donald Trump took office, more than three dozen employees, allies, and investors of Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and Palmer Luckey have taken roles at federal agencies, helping direct billions in contracts to their companies.
Thousands of people have embarked on a virtual road trip via Google Street View
It’s Friday afternoon and I’m listening to Bowdoin College’s radio station, interspersed with ambient car honking noises. I am not in Maine. I am not in a car. I am at my desk. This is Internet Roadtrip. Internet Roadtrip is what I will call an MMORTG (massive multiplayer online road trip game). Neal Agarwal, the […]
OpenAI’s planned data center in Abu Dhabi would be bigger than Monaco
OpenAI is poised to help develop a staggering 5-gigawatt data center campus in Abu Dhabi, positioning the company as a primary anchor tenant in what could become one of the world’s largest AI infrastructure projects, according to a new Bloomberg report. The facility would reportedly span an astonishing 10 square miles and consume power equivalent […]
Build, don’t bind: Accel’s Sonali De Rycker on Europe’s AI crossroads
Sonali De Rycker, a general partner at Accel and one of Europe’s most influential venture capitalists, is bullish about the continent’s prospects in AI. But she’s wary of regulatory overreach that could hamstring its momentum. At a TechCrunch StrictlyVC evening earlier this week in London, De Rycker reflected on Europe’s place in the global AI […]
Fake fired Twitter worker ‘Rahul Ligma’ is a real engineer with an AI data startup used by Harvard
The morning after Elon Musk’s 2022 acquisition of Twitter (now X), reporters encountered two men with boxes outside the company’s headquarters. One introduced himself as recently laid-off Twitter engineer “Rahul Ligma.” His real name is Rahul Sonwalkar but the prank went viral. While he never worked for X, he is actually very much a techy. […]
Viral outrage over Apple’s EU payment warnings misses key fact
Apple says the warning messages now appearing next to EU App Store listings that use third-party payment systems are not actually new. According to a number of recent reports, Apple added a warning with a red exclamation mark next to apps that it found were not using its own “private and secure payment system.” The […]