Mantis Ventures, the venture capital firm co-founded by Alex Pall and Drew Taggart of the electronic DJ group The Chainsmokers, has raised $100 million in commitments for its third fund. At $100 million, the firm’s newest fund is 20% larger than Mantis’s previous $80 million fund, a notable achievement at a time when many venture…
Three weeks ago, an engineer named Calvin French-Owen, who worked on one of OpenAI’s most promising new products, resigned from the company. He just published a fascinating blog post on what it was like to work there for a year, including the sleepless sprint to build Codex. That’s OpenAI’s new coding agent that competes with…
Meta has fixed a security bug that allowed Meta AI chatbot users to access and view the private prompts and AI-generated responses of other users. Sandeep Hodkasia, the founder of security testing firm Appsecure, exclusively told TechCrunch that Meta paid him $10,000 in a bug bounty reward for privately disclosing the bug he filed on…
The Venn diagram of engineers that know a little bit about AI, self driving, and mining has a small intersection. Pronto.ai CEO Anthony Levandowski wants as many of those people as possible. And an acquisition is helping him achieve that goal. The San Francisco-based startup, which has developed a self-driving system designed for haulage trucks…
As publishers fret about decreased traffic from Google, the search giant has begun rolling out AI summaries in Discover, the main news feed inside Google’s search app on iOS and Android. Now, instead of seeing a headline from a major publication, users will see multiple news publishers’ logos in the top-left corner, followed by an…
Lucid Motors is set to roll out a software update on July 30 that will enable hands-free highway driving on its Air sedans, a major step forward for the company’s advanced driver assistance system. The rollout will put Lucid Motors on a short list of companies that have made hands-free driving possible in the United…
As AI systems become more capable, speech is fast becoming the default way we communicate with machines. French AI startup Mistral has jumped into the audio race with its first open model, aiming to challenge the dominance of walled-off corporate systems with open-weight alternatives. On Tuesday, Mistral announced the release of Voxtral, its first family…
For 18 months, Rivian and Google engineers worked together. Today, they’re showing off their work. Rivian is pushing out a software update that will bring a unique version of Google Maps into its EVs. It’s the latest step in Rivian’s continued effort to distinguish its vehicles with software — an effort that has helped it…
When xAI launched Grok 4 last week, the company claimed the large language model outperformed several competitors on different benchmarks. But the Grok account on X that runs off the model immediately showed there were some major issues: it started saying its surname was “Hitler”, tweeted antisemitic messages, and seemed to reference Elon Musk’s posts…
Today’s the day! TechCrunch All Stage is lighting up Boston’s SoWa Power Station at 7:30 a.m. ET sharp. The stages are set, the speakers are ready, and the startup community is gathering for one powerful day of insight, innovation, and momentum. In Boston and ready to scale your startup faster and more efficiently? There’s still…
