Equity podcast Archives - Page 5 of 15

From Meta’s massive offers to Anthropic’s massive valuation, does AI have a ceiling?

Meta is still going all-in on the AI talent war, with Mark Zuckerberg reportedly reaching out to top recruits himself, throwing around jaw-dropping compensation packages that top $1 billion over multiple years. And Meta’s latest target? Mira Murati’s new startup, Thinking Machines Lab. It’s a bold play in an already overheated market. While Zuck eyes […]

From Meta’s massive offers to Anthropic’s massive valuation, does AI have a ceiling? Read More »

Who really benefits from the AI boom?

Government & Policy / Sasandara Dilmina

If you’ve been hearing about Trump’s AI Action Plan and wondering who it actually benefits, you’re not alone. On today’s episode of Equity, Rebecca Bellan caught up with Amba Kak and Dr. Sarah Myers West from the AI Now Institute, a think tank focused on the social implications of AI and the consolidation of power

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Should Silicon Valley celebrate Trump’s AI plans?

AI / Sasandara Dilmina

The big AI companies seem to be in a celebratory mood after President Donald Trump unveiled his AI Action Plan — not surprising, perhaps, since the plan was shaped by Trump’s Silicon Valley allies. Today, on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Max Zeff, and Anthony Ha look at how the Trump administration plans to

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AI’s talent arms race is starting to look like pro sports

AI / Sasandara Dilmina

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,

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OpenAI, Thinking Machines Lab, and the built-in chaos of a $2B seed round

AI / Sasandara Dilmina

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

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Hugging Face bets on cute robots to bring open-source AI to life

AI / Sasandara Dilmina

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.

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Hugging Face’s new robot is the Seinfeld of AI devices

AI / Sasandara Dilmina

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

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SaaS is in the past. The future belongs to agents, says Narada AI’s CEO

Startups / Sasandara Dilmina

“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

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Why Cloudflare wants AI companies to pay for content

AI / Sasandara Dilmina

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

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Robinhood’s co-founder is beaming up (and down) the future of energy

Startups / Sasandara Dilmina

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

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