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Nvidia completes acquisition of AI infrastructure startup Run:ai

Nvidia has completed its acquisition of Run:ai, an Israeli startup that helps manage and optimize AI hardware infrastructure. As part of the merger, Run:ai said its software, which currently only works with Nvidia products, will be open sourced, meaning Nvidia rivals like AMD and Intel will be able to adapt it for their hardware. “We […]

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UK antitrust watchdog launches review of IBM’s HashiCorp takeover

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the U.K.’s antitrust watchdog, has opened an investigation into whether IBM’s planned acquisition of cloud software vendor HashiCorp would affect competition. The CMA said Monday it was inviting comment on the merger from interested parties by January 16. The regulator set a provisional February 25 deadline to decide whether […]

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Nonprofit group joins Elon Musk’s effort to block OpenAI’s for-profit transition

Encode, the nonprofit organization that co-sponsored California’s ill-fated SB 1047 AI safety legislation, has requested permission to file an amicus brief in support of Elon Musk’s injunction to halt OpenAI’s transition to a for-profit company. In a proposed brief submitted to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California Friday afternoon, counsel for […]

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Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon will face fraud charges in the US

Do Kwon, the co-founder of collapsed cryptocurrency startup Terraform Labs, will be extradited from Montenegro to the U.S. to face federal fraud charges, as first reported by Bloomberg. Kwon faces charges in both the U.S. and South Korea; Terraform Labs’ TerraUSD and Luna cryptocurrencies crashed in 2022, causing investors to lose over $40 billion. Terraform […]

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Why DeepSeek’s new AI model thinks it’s ChatGPT

Earlier this week, DeepSeek, a well-funded Chinese AI lab, released an “open” AI model that beats many rivals on popular benchmarks. The model, DeepSeek V3, is large but efficient, handling text-based tasks like coding and writing essays with ease. It also seems to think it’s ChatGPT. Posts on X — and TechCrunch’s own tests — […]

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OpenAI lays out its for-profit transition plans

OpenAI says its corporate structure must evolve to advance its mission of ensuring artificial general intelligence (AGI) — AI that can complete most tasks humans can — benefits all humanity. The company currently has a for-profit org controlled by a nonprofit, with a “capped profit” share for investors and employees. But in a blog post […]

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The promise and perils of synthetic data

Is it possible for an AI to be trained just on data generated by another AI? It might sound like a harebrained idea. But it’s one that’s been around for quite some time — and as new, real data is increasingly hard to come by, it’s been gaining traction. Anthropic used some synthetic data to […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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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Perplexity has reportedly closed a $500M funding round

AI-powered search engine Perplexity has reportedly closed a $500 million funding round, valuing the startup at $9 billion. Bloomberg, citing sources familiar, reports that the round was led by Institutional Venture Partners and that it closed earlier in December. In an email to TechCrunch, a Perplexity spokesperson declined to comment. The mammoth tranche comes as […]

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A bad experience with an accounting firm spurred this founder to start Aiwyn

Accounting firms are struggling to adopt high-tech solutions. That’s according to a survey earlier this year from Rightsworks, which found that, while 88% of firms believe tech has had a positive impact on their efficiency, 60% are suffering from disconnected systems, inconsistent processes, and a lack of standardized workflows. Startups like Aiwyn are trying to […]

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Ex-Twitch CEO Emmett Shear is founding an AI startup backed by a16z

Emmett Shear, the former CEO of Twitch, is launching a new AI startup, TechCrunch has learned. The startup, called Stem AI, is currently in stealth. But public documents show it was incorporated in June 2023, and filed for a trademark in August 2023. Shear is listed as CEO on an incorporation document filed with the […]

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Google releases its own ‘reasoning’ AI model

Google has released what it’s calling a new “reasoning” AI model — but it’s in the experimental stages, and from our brief testing, there’s certainly room for improvement. The new model, called Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental (a mouthful, to be sure), is available in AI Studio, Google’s AI prototyping platform. A model card describes […]

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New Anthropic study shows AI really doesn’t want to be forced to change its views

AI models can deceive, new research from Anthropic shows. They can pretend to have different views during training when in reality maintaining their original preferences. There’s no reason for panic now, the team behind the study said. Yet they said their work could be critical in understanding potential threats from future, more capable AI systems. […]

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OpenAI brings ChatGPT to your landline

ChatGPT is coming to phones. No, not smartphones — landlines. Call 1-800-242-8478 (1-800-CHATGPT), and OpenAI’s AI-powered assistant will respond as of Wednesday afternoon. “[Our mission at] OpenAI is to make artificial general intelligence beneficial to all of humanity, and part of that is making it as accessible as possible to as many people as we […]

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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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AI startup Odyssey’s new tool can generate photorealistic 3D worlds

Odyssey, a startup founded by self-driving pioneers Oliver Cameron and Jeff Hawke, is developing an AI-powered tool that can transform text or an image into a 3D rendering. The tool, dubbed Explorer, is similar in some ways to the so-called world models recently demoed by DeepMind, World Labs, and Israeli upstart Decart. Given a caption like “a […]

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OpenAI may pay its nonprofit arm ‘billions of dollars’ in conversion to for-profit

OpenAI’s transition away from a for-profit corporation that’s governed by a nonprofit board is well underway — and the nonprofit could be compensated royally for it. That’s according to The New York Times, which reports that OpenAI is in discussions to pay the nonprofit billions of dollars for it to cede control. There’s pressure to […]

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