From Lime to Uber to Hertz: Free and discounted Election Day rides
Election Day is nearly here, and if you haven’t already mailed in your ballot or gone in for early voting, you might need a ride come November 5. Here’s a roundup of all the freebies, discounts, and information on getting to the polls that transportation companies are offering. Micromobility Lime
Read moreOpenAI has hired the co-founder of Twitter challenger Pebble
Gabor Cselle, the former CEO and co-founder of X (formerly Twitter) challenger Pebble, has joined OpenAI to work on a secretive project. Cselle, who according to LinkedIn has been employed at OpenAI since October, announced the news in a post on X yesterday. “Will share more about what I’m working
Read moreFounders should seek sector alignment when looking for a family office investor
Family offices invest a substantial amount of capital in startups each year. In the first half of 2023, 27% of overall startup deal value came from deals that included a family office investor, according to a recent report from PwC. Despite their prevalence in startup deals, family offices can be
Read more‘If you actually are solving a problem, you don’t talk about any of the hype,’ investor says
The hype is palpable: As tech folks from near and far converge for TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 in San Fransisco — one of the only places where Waymo is available to the public — there’s ample chatter about the autonomous vehicle service. “If you think about AI hype and all, everyone
Read moreWesley Chan on what he looks for as he’s shopping for potential unicorns
Investor Wesley Chan has shown a knack for making very early investments into multi-billion-dollar unicorns, such as Plaid, Gusto, Flexport, and, most recently, Canva. Chan comes from an unconventional background — he grew up in an immigrant family and had only middling grades in high school. But he landed a
Read moreWomen in AI: Sophia Velastegui believes AI is moving too fast
As a part of TechCrunch’s ongoing Women in AI series, which seeks to give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved (and overdue) time in the spotlight, TechCrunch interviewed Sophia Velastegui. Velastegui is a member of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) national AI advisory committee and the former chief AI officer at Microsoft’s
Read moreGenAI suffers from data overload, so companies should focus on smaller, specific goals
“There is no AI without data, there is no AI without unstructured data, and there is no AI without unstructured data at scale,” said Chet Kapoor, chairman and CEO of data management company DataStax. Kapoor was kicking off a conversation at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 about “new data pipelines” in the
Read moreWhy Wiz really turned down Google’s $23B offer
Welcome back to Week in Review. This week, we’re coming at you right off the heels of TechCrunch Disrupt! If you missed it, we’re highlighting conversations from Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, and Disney star turned space CEO Bridgit Mendler. Of course, we’ve got news from the
Read moreQuantum Machines and Nvidia use machine learning to get closer to an error-corrected quantum computer
About a year and a half ago, quantum control startup Quantum Machines and Nvidia announced a deep partnership that would bring together Nvidia’s DGX Quantum computing platform and Quantum Machine’s advanced quantum control hardware. We didn’t hear much about the results of this partnership for a while, but it’s now
Read moreMIT debuts a large language model-inspired method for teaching robots new skills
MIT this week showcased a new model for training robots. Rather than the standard set of focused data used to teach robots new tasks, the method goes big, mimicking the massive troves of information used to train large language models (LLMs). The researchers note that imitation learning — in which
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