GitLab, the popular developer and security platform, has named a new CEO, Bill Staples, effective immediately. Staples, who’s also been appointed to the company’s board of directors, succeeds CEO Sid Sijbrandij, who’s battling a rare form of cancer. Sijbrandij will transition to executive chair of the board. “I believe [Bill’s] passion for software, commitment to customers, and strong … [Read more...]

OpenAI finally released the full version of o1, which gives smarter answers than GPT-4o by using additional compute to “think” about questions. However, AI safety testers found that o1’s reasoning abilities also make it try to deceive humans at a higher rate than GPT-4o — or, for that matter, leading AI models from Meta, Anthropic, and Google. That’s according to red team research published by … [Read more...]

Incoming President Donald Trump has a new crypto and AI “czar”: ex-PayPal COO David Sacks. Trump announced Sacks’ appointment Thursday in a post on Truth Social, Trump’s social networking platform. “[Sacks] will work on a legal framework so the Crypto [sic] industry has the clarity it has been asking for, and can thrive in the US,” he wrote. Sacks, a member of the so-called “PayPal … [Read more...]

Some believe Klarna’s planned IPO in 2025 could set the stage for other fintech startups to go public. But with the tech IPO market still sluggish, one of the candidates hotly tipped to follow suit has instead just announced a fundraise, and its CEO says going public is “not a priority.” Zopa, the UK neobank that provides loans, credit cards and savings accounts to some 1.3 million customers, has … [Read more...]

Turning sunflower seeds into sustainable, cocoa-free chocolate has netted Munich-based B2B foodtech startup Planet A Foods (formerly QOA) a $30 million Series B funding round. Now, the Y Combinator alum is gearing up for industrialization, with the funds set to be deployed to scale its production capacity by around 7.5x. The round fast follows a $15.4 million Series A back in February. Currently, … [Read more...]

Uber has 30 days to require certain drivers to get fingerprinted if the ride-hail giant intends to continue transporting unaccompanied teens in California.  The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) issued a ruling Thursday that requires taxi and ride-hail drivers who are carrying unaccompanied minors in the state to pass a fingerprint background check. The ruling also requires … [Read more...]

The first Lucid Motors Gravity SUV has rolled off the company’s production line in Casa Grande, Arizona, according to a post on X. The company will now set its aim on ramping up production of the new electric vehicle and making the first deliveries — though the company is staying quiet about when it will hand those first vehicles over to customers. It’s a crucial milestone for Lucid, which is … [Read more...]

In what has become a bit of an annual tradition, I sat down with Amazon CTO Werner Vogels at AWS re:Invent this week. Another annual tradition now is that Vogels, who joined Amazon in 2004, publishes a series of predictions for the next year. It’d be easy to think that this year’s predictions are all about AI, but instead, Vogels focuses on how millennials and Gen Z think about being part of the … [Read more...]

Recycling today kind of sucks. People are generally confused about what can be recycled and where. As a result, only about 32% of eligible waste actually gets recycled. It would be a lot easier if people could dump everything into one bin and let the waste-management companies deal with it, but that’s proven to be too expensive with humans in the loop.  Enter robots. Myriad companies, … [Read more...]

If OpenAI has its way, the next online course you take might have a chatbot component. Speaking at a fireside on Monday hosted by Coeus Collective, Siya Raj Purohit, a member of OpenAI’s go-to-market team for education, said that OpenAI might explore ways to let e-learning instructors create custom “GPTs” that tie into online curriculums. “What I’m hoping is going to happen is that … [Read more...]

xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, has raised $6 billion, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday. The Wall Street Journal previously reported that Valor Equity Partners, Sequoia Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz were expected to contribute to the round, along with Qatar Investment Authority, Qatar’s sovereign-wealth fund. The new cash brings xAI’s total … [Read more...]

Getting into the holiday spirit but still stuck at work? A cute new macOS called Festivitas can help you decorate your Mac computer screen with twinkling, holiday lights that are strung up from your menu bar and illuminate your dock. This whimsical holiday treat was dreamed up by software developer Simon B. Støvring, the maker of other iOS apps favored by developers like text editor … [Read more...]

Threads is testing the ability for users to see how well their individual posts performed on the social network. Up until now, Threads’ “Insights” feature only showed you aggregated metrics for all of your posts. Now, the feature can show you metrics for each post. If you’re in the test, you can sort posts by the highest or lowest number of views, likes, and replies that they received. Plus, you … [Read more...]

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! Your usual host Kirsten is out this week, so I’ll be taking you through the last couple weeks’ worth of mobility news.  Top of mind this week is a Delaware judge’s decision to uphold her previous ruling denying the … [Read more...]

OpenAI has launched a new subscription plan for ChatGPT, its AI-powered chatbot platform — and it’s very, very expensive. Confirming leaks this morning, OpenAI announced ChatGPT Pro, a new $200-per-month subscription tier that provides unlimited access to all of OpenAI’s models, including the full version of its o1 “reasoning” model. “We think the audience for ChatGPT Pro … [Read more...]

OpenAI is in the holiday spirit, it seems. The ChatGPT creator announced “12 Days of OpenAI,” a series of reveals that will be livestreamed starting December 5, 2024 at 10 a.m. PT and continue for the next 12 weekdays. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says the company event will feature announcements ranging from new demos to product launches, and even “stocking stuffers.” While we don’t know what OpenAI … [Read more...]

Google says its new AI model family has a curious feature: the ability to “identify” emotions. Announced on Thursday, the PaliGemma 2 family of models can analyze images, enabling the AI to generate captions and answer questions about people it “sees” in photos. “PaliGemma 2 generates detailed, contextually relevant captions for images,” Google wrote in a blog post shared with TechCrunch, … [Read more...]

Rivian has opened a new charging station in Joshua Tree, California, that is open for other EV owners can use — a first for the company. It’s part of a plan to build out a much larger interoperable charging network across the U.S., though the company is still very early in that process. The new station still uses the CCS charging plug that was the standard until automakers gradually Tesla’s … [Read more...]

Ladder, an Austin, Texas-based fitness startup that makes a popular strength-training app, is accusing Peloton of ripping off its work with the launch of Peloton’s new Stength+ app, which exited beta on Wednesday. After receiving feedback from Peloton’s beta testers that the app looked, felt, and functioned much like Ladder’s own, the company says it further investigated and found that 15 … [Read more...]

A startup with founders who previously served in the German military has created a product akin to an Amazon Firestick for legacy defense equipment, complete with a software stack. ARX Robotics claims its system can turn old equipment into AI-driven devices, such as autonomous-driving trucks.  Back in June this year ARX raised a €9 million seed funding round with the NATO Innovation Fund as … [Read more...]