Deal Dive: Forecasting rain on DTC’s Parade
You don’t need me to tell you that startups haven’t been doing great since the funding slowdown and valuation reset started back in 2022. But while some companies will be able to survive on cash reserves or be propped up on inside funding, others will be forced to either liquidate
Read moreThis week in AI: Amazon ‘enhances’ reviews with AI while Snap’s goes rogue
Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of the last week’s stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn’t cover on their own. This week in
Read moreHow Index Ventures jumped to the front of the AI GPU line
Earlier this week, the New York Times shone a light on some of the desperation that founders are experiencing as they try and fail to secure compute power for their nascent artificial intelligence startups, thanks to the big companies (and even rich nations) racing to snatch them up. One founder
Read moreCruise told by regulators to ‘immediately’ reduce robotaxi fleet 50% following crash
Cruise, the self-driving car subsidiary of GM, has been asked to reduce its robotaxi fleet by 50% in San Francisco following a crash Thursday night with a fire truck. The California Department of Motor Vehicles, the agency that regulates the testing and deployment of autonomous vehicles in the state, requested
Read moreBored Ape Yacht Club creator to block OpenSea in fight over payments
Yuga Labs owns Bored Ape Yacht Club, CryptoPunks, Meebits, and other NFT series. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Two of the biggest names in the NFT space are clashing over the future of how the tokens’ creators get paid. Yuga Labs, the company behind Bored Ape Yacht
Read moreSenators want YouTube investigated over showing targeted ads to kids, again
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A report from ad quality transparency platform Adalytics suggests that YouTube served adult-focused ads on almost 100 videos considered “made for kids.” Some of these ads reportedly involved content inappropriate for children, such as car wrecks, medical injuries, and clips from TV-MA shows.
Read moreZepotha is huge on TikTok, but it’s no Goncharov
The seminal 1987 horror film “Zepotha” is back on TikTok. Reaction videos to the film’s gory forest scenes dominate user feeds. TikTok users are digging through their parents’ wardrobes to recreate the vintage outfits from the movie. Fanart of the characters and convoluted theories about the movie’s ambiguous ending keep
Read moreAI2 drops biggest open dataset yet for training language models
Language models like GPT-4 and Claude are powerful and useful, but the data on which they are trained is a closely guarded secret. The Allen Institute for AI (AI2) aims to reverse this trend with a new, huge text dataset that’s free to use and open to inspection. Dolma, as
Read moreRoblox faces a new class action lawsuit alleging it facilitates child gambling
In a new class action lawsuit filed in the Northern District of California this week, two parents accuse Roblox of illegally facilitating child gambling. While gambling is not allowed on the platform, which hosts millions of virtual games that cater to children and teens, the lawsuit points to third-party gambling
Read moreGoing to TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 is cheaper when you bundle
Anyone with a Costco card knows you save more when you buy in bulk. Now apply that same theory to TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, and you can save a bundle when you take your team, your clients or your star startups to San Francisco in September. Heck, take your family and
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