AI is entering a new phase where access to top talent is becoming as important as, if not more important than, compute or data. The market for AI researchers is so overheated, it’s starting to look a lot like pro sports — complete with outsized contracts and unprecedented infrastructure needs. On today’s episode of Equity, […]
AI’s talent arms race is starting to look like pro sports Read More »
OpenAI’s former chief technology officer, Mira Murati, just raised one of the largest seed rounds in history. Murati secured $2 billion in that seed round for Thinking Machines Lab — a startup so early, it hasn’t even revealed what it’s working on yet. The move is raising eyebrows across Silicon Valley, and it’s only the
OpenAI, Thinking Machines Lab, and the built-in chaos of a $2B seed round Read More »
Just five days after opening up orders on its Reachy Mini robots, AI developer platform Hugging Face says it has logged $1 million worth of sales. That’s not a bad start for a company that’s just recently expanded into robotics, and is largely known for letting developers download open source AI models off the internet.
Hugging Face bets on cute robots to bring open-source AI to life Read More »
Hugging Face’s new programmable Reachy Mini bots launched this week. The AI robots are open source, Raspberry Pi-powered, and come with cartoonish antennae and big googly eyes. They don’t do much out of the box. And that’s kind of the point. Today, on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Max Zeff, and Anthony Ha dig
Hugging Face’s new robot is the Seinfeld of AI devices Read More »
“SaaS is going away,” said Dave Park, co-founder and CEO of Narada AI. The company is betting big on a different future for enterprise software, one powered by agentic AI. Change is coming “in the not-too-distant future,” Park said on Equity, TechCrunch’s flagship podcast. “The typical knowledge worker today deals with anywhere from 17 to
SaaS is in the past. The future belongs to agents, says Narada AI’s CEO Read More »
Cloudflare wants AI companies to pay up. The cloud infrastructure provider, which powers around 20% of the web, is launching a new experiment that would let publishers charge AI firms every time their bots scrape a site. It’s called Pay per Crawl, and it could reshape how content is accessed and monetized online. Today on
Why Cloudflare wants AI companies to pay for content Read More »
Robinhood’s Baiju Bhatt has a new mission: solar power from space. Fresh off a $50 million Series A raise, Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt is going all-in on space-based solar power. His new startup, Aetherflux, wants to launch solar power-collecting satellites into low Earth orbit, with a demo flight set for 2026, and to transmit clean
Robinhood’s co-founder is beaming up (and down) the future of energy Read More »
This week, two major AI companies scored early wins in court, with federal judges siding with Meta and Anthropic in separate lawsuits over how their models were trained on copyrighted material. The decisions represent the first real legal validation of AI companies’ argument that training models on books, images, and other creative works can be
Big Tech lands an early win in legal battles against publishers Read More »
OpenAI recently announced a $200 million deal with the U.S. Department of Defense, which has us wondering: Could this further strain the company’s relationship with its biggest backer, Microsoft? After all, there have been numerous reports about growing tensions between the two companies, particularly as they become more competitive over enterprise deals. Today, on TechCrunch’s
Could OpenAI fill Microsoft’s shoes? Read More »
AI investments hit $110 billion in 2024, and the funding landscape in 2025 is more competitive than ever. For early-stage startups, that means more money in the market, but also more pressure to stand out. At TechCrunch Sessions: AI, Rebecca Bellan sat down with three experienced investors: Jill Chase, Partner at CapitalG; Kanu Gulati, Partner
Seed to Series C: What VCs actually want from AI startups Read More »
