A complete list of all the known layoffs in tech, from Big Tech to startups, broken down by month throughout 2024.
Category: Tech Crunch
ChatGPT: Everything you need to know about the AI-powered chatbot
ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm since its launch in November 2022. What started as a tool to supercharge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved into a behemoth with 300 million weekly active users. 2024 was a big year for OpenAI, from its partnership...
OpenAI’s new reasoning AI models hallucinate more
OpenAI’s recently launched o3 and o4-mini AI models are state-of-the-art in many respects. However, the new models still hallucinate, or make things up — in fact, they hallucinate more than several of OpenAI’s older models. Hallucinations have proven to be one of the biggest and most difficult problems to solve in AI, impacting even today’s...
OpenAI launches Flex processing for cheaper, slower AI tasks
In a bid to more aggressively compete with rival AI companies like Google, OpenAI is launching Flex processing, an API option that provides lower AI model usage prices in exchange for slower response times and “occasional resource unavailability.” Flex processing, available in beta for OpenAI’s recently released o3 and o4-mini reasoning models, is aimed at...
Carbon removal startup Holocene bought by oil and gas giant Occidental
The deal was executed through Oxy Low Carbon Ventures for an undisclosed amount.
Ramp is trying to get the US government as a customer after seeing a tweet from DOGE
Expense management startup Ramp is being considered for a charge card pilot program by the U.S. government’s General Services Administration, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Thursday. The government’s internal expense card program, dubbed SmartPay, is a $700 billion program. It is estimated that the charge card pilot program contract for which Ramp is being...
Defense tech Theseus landed Y Combinator, the US Special Forces, and $4.3M from a tweet
On February 18, 2024, Ian Laffey posted on X that he and two others he’d just met built a cheap drone at a hackathon that calculated its coordinates simply by using its camera and Google Maps. He and his colleagues, Sacha Lévy and Carl Schoeller, were all engineers under the age of 25. The tech...
OpenAI pursued Cursor maker before entering into talks to buy Windsurf for $3B
When news broke that OpenAI was in talks to acquire AI coding company Windsurf for $3 billion, one of the first questions on the mind of anyone following the space was likely: “Why not buy Cursor creator Anysphere instead?” After all, OpenAI Startup Fund has been an investor in Anysphere, the maker of Cursor, since the...
Chapter, a Medicare startup with links to Vance, Thiel, and Ramaswamy, just raised a round at $1.5B valuation
Chapter, a Medicare advisory startup co-founded by former Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy, has closed a $75 million funding round at a valuation of $1.5 billion led by private equity and venture firm Stripes. The startup helps seniors choose Medicare health plans analyzing doctors, hospitals, and prescription drug coverage. Unlike many other Medicare insurance brokers,...
Zoom restores service after an hours-long outage
Zoom says its platform is back online after suffering an outage for much of Wednesday afternoon. “Service has now been restored after the earlier outage, and we sincerely appreciate your patience and understanding,” Zoom said in a post on X at around 2 p.m. Pacific. The trouble began around 11:40 a.m., according to The Verge,...