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How OpenAI’s bot crushed this seven-person company’s web site ‘like a DDoS attack’

AI /

On Saturday, Triplegangers CEO Oleksandr Tomchuk was alerted that his company’s ecommerce site was down. It looked to be some kind of distributed denial-of-service attack.  He soon discovered the culprit was a bot from OpenAI that was relentlessly attempting to scrape his entire, enormous site.  “We have over 65,000 products, each product has a page,” […]

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Gumloop, founded in a bedroom in Vancouver, lets users automate tasks with drag-and-drop modules

Apps /

Developers Max Brodeur-Urbas and Rahul Behal think that AI has the potential to automate lots of business-relevant tasks, but that many of the AI-powered automation tools on the market today are unreliable and costly. Part of the problem is that users expect too much of AI, Brodeur-Urbas told TechCrunch — for instance, they assume that

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Scale AI hit by its second employee wage lawsuit in less than a month

Startups /

Scale AI relies on an army of workers it categorizes as contractors to do essential AI work like labeling images or rating LLM responses for Big Tech and others. But the AI startup, most recently valued at $13.8 billion, is facing mounting legal challenges over its labor practices. On January 3, 2025, former Scale AI

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PowerSchool says hackers stole students’ sensitive data, including Social Security numbers, in data breach

Security /

Edtech giant PowerSchool has warned customers that hackers accessed its customers’ highly sensitive information — including student Social Security numbers, grades, and medical information — during a recent data breach, TechCrunch has learned.  In an FAQ obtained by TechCrunch that was sent to affected customers this week, PowerSchool says that “sensitive personal information” was accessed during

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Innovaccer aims to become healthcare’s AI powerhouse with $275M Series F

Startups /

When it comes to data, perhaps no sector has as much of it and in as many distinct silos as the healthcare industry. Hundreds of millions of patient records reside within various electronic health records (EHRs) maintained by vendors like Epic, Cerner and Athena. Insurance companies hold extensive data sets on coverage, reimbursement rates, and

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Biosphere zaps germs with UV light to make biomanufacturing cheaper

Fundraising /

Ask any scientist that has worked with cell cultures in a lab: contamination is high on their list of fears. Even one stray bacterium or fungal spore can spoil an entire experiment. Now imagine scaling that risk up to biomanufacturing, which uses living cells to make a range of stuff, including drugs, food ingredients, and

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Indian government websites are still redirecting users to scam sites

Security /

Some Indian government websites continue to allow the planting of scammy links on their official domains months after TechCrunch reported the issue. TechCrunch found more than 90 “gov.in” website links associated with Indian government departments — including the Indian Council of Agricultural Research and India Post, as well as state governments and councils of Haryana

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Nvidia CEO says his AI chips are improving faster than Moore’s Law

AI /

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says the performance of his company’s AI chips is advancing faster than historical rates set by Moore’s Law, the rubric that drove computing progress for decades. “Our systems are progressing way faster than Moore’s Law,” said Huang in an interview with TechCrunch on Tuesday, the morning after he delivered a keynote

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South Park Commons is raising $40M for an India-specific fund

Venture /

South Park Commons, a Silicon Valley collective of engineers, founders, and researchers, is raising an India-specific fund over six months after entering the South Asian market in June, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last week. The exact size of the fund is yet to be determined, though the

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