The Latest

The halls of power are waking up to the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence. The big question will be how much of an impact they will have on the…

OpenAI, Google and a ‘digital anthropologist’: the UN forms a high-level board to explore AI governance

Like many entrepreneurs, Byterat’s founders realized that the challenges they had faced themselves in the lab were a business opportunity.

Byterat nabs $4M seed round to collect and analyze data for battery labs

This pitch deck makes for some really interesting reading and storytelling, so let’s dive in and see if we can spot what happened and how.

Pitch Deck Teardown: Aether’s $49M Series A deck

Tata Group will start making iPhones in India for the local and global markets, India’s Deputy IT Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar announced on Friday, moments after Wistron’s board approved the sale…

Tata to start manufacturing iPhones in India

On the eve of the one-year anniversary of Musk taking over Twitter (now X), the company published a retrospective blog post examining how it has fared under the new management.…

A year after Musk’s takeover, X says an average user spends 32 minutes per day on the platform

Rapido, the eight-year-old Indian bike taxi startup, is expanding into the cab market in the South Asian nation, where Uber and its homegrown competitor Ola dominate. The Bengaluru-based startup has…

India’s bike taxi startup Rapido is getting into the cab business

India’s fast-growing co-branded credit card market may soon see a new entrant: the country’s most valuable firm. Reliance is working with the state-backed lender SBI to launch two co-branded credit…

India’s Reliance readies credit card debut

Cruise said Thursday evening it has paused all driverless operations, a decision that comes just two days after the California Department of Motor Vehicles suspended Cruise’s deployment and driverless testing…

Cruise pauses all driverless robotaxi operations to ‘rebuild public trust’

Ford is delaying about $12 billion in planned investments on EVs, including construction of a second battery plant with joint venture partner SK On due to softening demand for higher…

Ford delays $12B in EV investments as automaker wrestles with demand

Twitch has had a tense year, in part due to community backlash over policy changes that affect the way creators can monetize their content.  Last year, the company announced that…

Twitch’s money guy talks about the revenue split controversy and its monetization long game

Where we’ll be next

The judge sent the jury home. He first wanted to review Sam Bankman-Fried’s comments before determining whether that testimony could be shared with jurors.

Sam Bankman-Fried takes the stand, but without jurors
Hardware

Magic Leap has a new CEO

1:40 pm PDT • October 26, 2023

Five weeks ago, Magic Leap CEO Peggy Johnson joined me onstage at Disrupt. Much of the conversation focused on the augmented reality hardware company’s full pivot into enterprise applications with…

Magic Leap has a new CEO

Featured Article

Soundboks is scaling high-volume, high-energy speakers across borders and cultures

Denmark-based Soundboks just released its latest $1,000 Bluetooth speaker. Now in its fourth generation, the latest Soundboks speaker is just like the older models: It’s a large, unabashed black box designed to withstand a rowdy, off-the-grid weekend of music. While the speaker has been wildly popular in Denmark and Sweden, co-founder and CEO Jesper Thomsen…

1:14 pm PDT • October 26, 2023
Soundboks is scaling high-volume, high-energy speakers across borders and cultures

ABL Space Systems has been quiet since the company conducted its first launch attempt in January, which resulted in the rocket crashing back down to Earth a little over 10…

ABL Space Systems provides update on the road to second RS1 launch

It’s week four of the Sam Bankman-Fried trial…and he’s taking the stand today at 2 p.m. So keep an eye out for additional coverage. 

SBF testifying, bitcoin rises amid spot ETF speculation and Walmart’s web3 accelerator surfaces

Meta’s X rival, Instagram Threads, is copying a couple more X features today with the launch of support for polls and GIFs. The update comes in rapid succession to other…

Threads isn’t dead and it now has polls and GIFs too

OpenAI today announced that it’s created a new team to assess, evaluate and probe AI models to protect against what it describes as “catastrophic risks.” The team, called Preparedness, will…

OpenAI forms team to study ‘catastrophic’ AI risks, including nuclear threats

It seems that as long as rapid revenue growth is possible in the earliest stages of startup life, valuations are going to be strong.

There could be a simple reason why seed deals are so expensive today

Agora, the company that develops “real-time engagement” APIs, is making its livestream shopping technology widely available to help more brands build live commerce experiences, including shoppable shows, live auctions, personal…

Agora enables brands to host live shopping events and auctions

As artificial intelligence continues to evolve, it’s becoming more adept at generating human-like text.

Spam is about to get even more terrible