Reading view

There are new articles available, click to refresh the page.

Instagram tests a way to show you Story Highlights you didn’t get a chance to see

Instagram is testing a way for you to see content from friends that you might have missed. The social network has started displaying unseen Story Highlights from a user’s mutual followers at the end of the Stories tray, which is the area at the top of your feed where you see Stories from your friends. […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

A popular technique to make AI more efficient has drawbacks

One of the most widely used techniques to make AI models more efficient, quantization, has limits — and the industry could be fast approaching them. In the context of AI, quantization refers to lowering the number of bits — the smallest units a computer can process — needed to represent information. Consider this analogy: When […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Yoast CEO calls for a ‘federated’ approach to WordPress repository

Days after web hosting provider WP Engine won a preliminary injunction against WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg and rival hosting provider Automattic, Mullenweg announced that WordPress.org is taking a holiday break. WordPress.com — a site that provides access to WordPress plug-ins, themes, and other artifacts to the community — will take a break from providing free […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Honda and Nissan plan major merger focused on ‘intelligence and electrification’

Japanese car giants Honda and Nissan are working out the details of a major merger that could create the world’s third-largest automaker, as the companies look to survive in an industry faced with uncertainty. The Tesla-led shift toward electric vehicles, and China’s increased importance in the automotive market, have companies like Honda and Nissan feeling […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Prosus buys Despegar for $1.7B, taking a bite out of Latin America’s travel sector

Yet another major investment is going down in the travel sector, underscoring its ongoing rebound after the COVID-19 pandemic. Prosus, the tech conglomerate controlled by Naspers, is paying $1.7 billion to acquire Despegar, one of the biggest online travel agencies in Latin America, to scale up its operations in the region. Despegar’s board of directors […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Pavel Durov says Telegram is now profitable

Telegram founder Pavel Durov said Monday that the company is now profitable. Durov said the chat app’s total revenue surpassed $1 billion in 2024. The company, which launched its premium subscription service in 2022, now has 12 million paid users. Durov also said that the app is finishing the year with more than $500 million […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

X jacks up Premium+ prices by 37.5%, hits some markets harder

X is raising prices for its top-tier subscription service, Premium+, by 37.5% to $22 a month, marking the largest price increase since Elon Musk bought the platform in 2022. The price hike will first affect U.S. users, going up from $16, effective December 21, according to a statement. Annual subscriptions have also climbed to $229 […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Sriram Krishnan named Trump’s senior policy advisor for AI

President-elect Donald Trump has confirmed reports that Sriram Krishnan, until recently a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), will serve as senior policy advisor for AI at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Trump said in a statement that Krishnan will “help shape and coordinate AI policy across government, working with the […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Palantir and Anduril reportedly building a tech consortium to bid on defense contracts

Two big defense tech players, Palantir and Anduril, are talking to tech companies including SpaceX, OpenAI, Saronic, and Scale AI about forming a consortium to bid on Pentagon contracts, according to a report in the Financial Times. The goal, the FT says, is to challenge the dominance of “prime” defense contractors like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Trump says he wants to keep TikTok around ‘for a little while’

With a U.S. TikTok ban scheduled to take effect in less than a month, President-elect Donald Trump said Sunday that he’d like to keep the app around, according to Reuters. “We’re going to have to start thinking because, you know, we did go on TikTok, and we had a great response with billions of views, […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

OpenAI trained o1 and o3 to ‘think’ about its safety policy

OpenAI announced a new family of AI reasoning models on Friday, o3, which the startup claims to be more advanced than o1 or anything else it has released. These improvements appear to have come from scaling test-time compute, something we wrote about last month, but OpenAI also says it used a new safety paradigm to […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The biggest flops and fizzles in 2024 transportation, from Apple Car to Fisker

Autonomous vehicle technology and electrification startups were once the darlings of the VC and corporate world. The two technologies promised billions of dollars in revenue — and a new pathway for automakers to make money beyond building and selling cars.  Those VC-money-printing days have been over for AVs for a while now, with a few […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Apple might be working on a smart doorbell

There’s been a lot of reporting in recent months around Apple’s efforts to expand its footprint in customers’ homes with in-development products like a wall-mounted smart home hub. According to a new report in Bloomberg, that strategy could also include a smart doorbell. This doorbell would use Apple’s FaceID technology to scan people’s faces as […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

OpenAI’s GPT-5 reportedly falling short of expectations

OpenAI’s efforts to develop its next major model, GPT-5, are running behind schedule, with results that don’t yet justify the enormous costs, according to a new report in The Wall Street Journal. This echoes an earlier report in The Information suggesting that OpenAI is looking for new strategies, as GPT-5 might not represent as big […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

❌