It’s a good time to be a highly in-demand AI engineer. To lure leading researchers away from OpenAI and other competitors, Meta has reportedly offered pay packages totalling more than $100 million. Top AI engineers are now being compensated like football superstars. Few people will ever have to grapple with the question of whether to…
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When you hear the word “neurotechnology,” you may picture Black Mirror headsets prying open the last private place we have — our own skulls — or the cyber-samurai of William Gibson’s Neuromancer. That dread is natural, but it can blind us to the real potential being realized in neurotech to address the long intractable medical…
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Earlier this month, Elon Musk said he wanted to form a new political party. He’d been teasing the idea ever since clashing with President Donald Trump over his “big, beautiful bill,” which Musk accused of exploding the deficit. In June, Musk ran a poll on X asking users whether it was “time to create a…
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New York City-based Betaworks has closed its $66 million Fund III, which will focus on investing in early-stage AI companies. Betaworks has been investing in AI since at least 2016 and, through its investment program Camp, has backed companies such as Huggingface and Granola. Jordan Crook, a partner at the firm (and former TechCrunch employee),…
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Los Angeles-based Nevoya came out of stealth last year with the ambitious goal of breaking the EV truck adoption logjam. Nevoya made enough progress on its goal to attract investors — and a $9.3 million seed round — to help it move even faster. The young company, which buys electric trucks and offers them to…
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Owners of the Lucid Air sedan will be able to charge their luxury EVs at thousands of Tesla Supercharger stations in North America starting July 31, nearly two years since the automakers reached an agreement. But there is a notable caveat: Lucid Air vehicles won’t be able to charge as fast as Tesla vehicles. Lucid…
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Enterprise design startup Figma has entered the next step of its IPO journey. Figma announced Monday it is kicking off its IPO roadshow. The company plans to offer more than 36 million shares of class A stock that are expected to be priced between $25 and $28 a share. This offering includes a mix of…
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Silicon Valley is doubling down on defense as geopolitical tensions rise and appetite for modernizing warfare grows. And while many of the startups garnering large valuations are focused on hardware and weaponry — think Anduril, Shield AI, and Skydio — Rune Technologies wants to tackle AI-enabled software for military logistics. “The U.S. military runs on…
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Developers of Unite, an app that offers customized web app management on Mac, on Monday released a new app called Quip, a clipboard app for the Apple ecosystem. The app includes features for organizing text clips, support for shortcuts to trigger text snippets, duplicate prevention, and code formatting, among other things. Its goal is to…
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Grok’s raunchy, unfiltered AI companions may be making headlines for their unhinged and often NSFW responses, but it’s Grok 4, xAI’s latest model, that’s been driving the app’s revenue of late. Elon Musk’s xAI launched Grok 4 late on July 9, and by Friday, July 11, Grok’s gross revenue on iOS had jumped a whopping…
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