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

X is raising prices for its top-tier subscription service by 37.5%, marking the largest price increase since the platform’s acquisition by Elon Musk in 2022. The Premium+ service costs $22 monthly in the U.S., up from $16, effective December 21, according to a company statement. Annual subscription cost has increased to $229 from $168. X […]

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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’s 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 train […]

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OpenAI announces new o3 models

OpenAI saved its biggest announcement for the last day of its 12-day “shipmas” event. On Friday, the company unveiled o3, the successor to the o1 “reasoning” model it released earlier in the year. o3 is a model family, to be more precise — as was the case with o1. There’s o3 and o3-mini, a smaller, […]

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Sam Altman once owned some equity in OpenAI through Sequoia

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sat before Congress in 2023 to testify about the dangers of AI. He told American lawmakers at the time that he owns no equity in OpenAI, something he’s said many times, claiming he just runs the company because he loves it. However, Altman recently said he actually did have some equity […]

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K2 Space will fly its extra-large satellite for the first time in 2026

K2 Space is betting that the future of space hardware will be big — really big.  The startup is building massive spacecraft under the assumption that launch costs will continue to drop as SpaceX’s Starship and other heavy-lift vehicles come online. It looks like the Space Force is taking up their side of that bet, […]

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App downloads decline 2.3% in 2024, but consumer spending grows to $127B

The global app economy continued to recover in 2024, after an earlier slowdown in 2022 — at least in terms of consumer spending. In 2024, global consumer spending in mobile apps and games reached $127 billion across the App Store and Google Play, up 15.7% from the prior year. However, those increases were driven by […]

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Who wants ‘Her’-like AI that gets stuff wrong?

Hiya, folks, welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. If you want this in your inbox every Wednesday, smash the link and sign up here. Last week, OpenAI launched Advanced Voice Mode with Vision, which feeds real-time video to ChatGPT, allowing the chatbot to “see” beyond the confines of its app layer. The premise is that […]

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GitHub launches a free version of its Copilot

Microsoft-owned GitHub announced on Wednesday a free version of its popular Copilot code completion/AI pair programming tool, which will also now ship by default with Microsoft’s popular VS Code editor. Until now, most developers had to pay a monthly fee, starting at $10 per month, with only verified students, teachers, and open source maintainers getting […]

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Hauler Hero wants to bring waste-management software into the 21st century

After nearly four years of working in sales at tradesperson software company ServiceTitan, Mark Hoadley (pictured above) was looking for a change and to potentially start something of his own in a similar industry. Hoadley’s brother-in-law and now co-founder, Ben Sikma, was working on M&A in the waste-management space at the time. Sikma discovered how […]

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Flipboard launches Surf, a new app for browsing the open social web

Social magazine app maker Flipboard is reinventing itself for the new era of the open social web. While the company’s original app allowed users to collect content from blogs, news websites, and traditional social media services like Facebook and Twitter in order to create curated magazines, its new app called Surf, launching into invite-only beta […]

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Grubhub to pay $25M for ‘deceptive’ practices against customers, drivers

Grubhub will pay $25 million to settle a lawsuit from the Federal Trade Commission and Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul over unlawful practices, including misleading customers about delivery costs, deceiving drivers about potential earnings, and listing restaurants on its platform without their permission. The agencies claim that Grubhub hid the true cost of its delivery […]

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Bob Lee verdict: Cash App creator’s killer found guilty of second-degree murder

A San Francisco jury has found Nima Momeni guilty of second-degree murder in the stabbing of Bob Lee, the Cash App creator and former CTO of Block, according to NBC Bay Area on Tuesday. The jury found Momeni not guilty of first-degree murder, meaning jurors decided the murder of Lee was not premeditated. Lee was […]

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FTC bans hidden junk fees in short-term lodging, live-event ticket prices

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission passed a rule on Tuesday banning hidden “junk fees” for live events, hotels, and vacation rentals. The agency says the new rule prohibits “bait-and-switch pricing,” and other practices that hide total prices and bury junk fees in the live-event ticketing and short-term lodging industries, noting that these “unfair and deceptive” […]

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Pineapple on pizza is delicious — and if you disagree, you can’t log in to WordPress.org

There are few matters in life that divide a room more than the prudence of putting pineapple on pizza. But if you’re of the persuasion that tropical fruit has no place on a pie, you’ll have to swallow a bitter pill — if you want to access the WordPress.org developer portal and forum, at least. […]

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TechCrunch Space: Sayonara

Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch Space. This will be the final TechCrunch Space newsletter you receive in 2024, so to all our readers, have a wonderful holiday and see you next year. There’s a lot to look forward to next year. I expect to see much more progress from SpaceX on Starship, big changes […]

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Google names its new India chief

Google has appointed Preeti Lobana to lead its India business, filling a key position that had been vacant since Sanjay Gupta’s promotion to Asia-Pacific president in July. Lobana, who was vice president of advertising technology at Google, takes over as the company pushes its AI products in India amid intensifying competition in the digital market. […]

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