Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

The appetite for alternative clouds has never been bigger. Case in point: CoreWeave, the GPU infrastructure provider that began life as a cryptocurrency mining operation, this week raised $1.1 billion in new funding from investors including Coatue, Fidelity and Altimeter Capital. The round brings its valuation to $19 billion post-money, …...Read More

The Rabbit r1 shipped half-baked, but that's kind of the point

I finally received the rabbit r1 (the company insists on this lowercase styling) I’ve been writing about since its debut at CES in January. And I was able to tell within about 30 seconds of turning it on that it was shipped a couple months too soon — but honestly…that’s …...Read More

Google lays off workers, Tesla cans its Supercharger team and UnitedHealthcare reveals security lapses

Welcome, folks, to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter that recaps the week that was in tech. This edition’s a tad bittersweet for me — it’ll be my last (for a while, anyway). Soon, I’ll be shifting my attention to a new AI-focused newsletter, which I’m super thrilled about. …...Read More

Human composting and timber marketplaces: talking “industrial” VC with investor Dayna Grayson

While the venture world is abuzz over generative AI, Dayna Grayson, a longtime venture capitalist who five years ago co-founded her own firm, Construct Capital, has been focused on comparatively boring software that can transform industrial sectors. Her mission doesn’t exclude AI, but it also doesn’t depend on it. Construct …...Read More

Women in AI: Tara Chklovski is teaching the next generation of AI innovators

To give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved — and overdue — time in the spotlight, TechCrunch has been publishing a series of interviews focused on remarkable women who’ve contributed to the AI revolution. We’re publishing these pieces throughout the year as the AI boom continues, highlighting key work …...Read More

Farewell, dunks? Threads launches quote controls for all users

Threads users can now exert more control over who can quote their posts. This builds on a feature that already allows Threads users to limit who can reply to their posts (competing services like X and Bluesky offer similar reply controls). Threads outlined its plans for quote controls last month, …...Read More

Amae Health is building an in-person approach to mental healthcare in an increasingly digital space

When Sonia García and Stas Sokolin decided to launch Amae Health to solve the broken care system for people with severe mental illness, they were already intimately familiar with the industry’s issues. “I started thinking about this problem a very long time ago,” said Sokolin, Amae’s CEO. “I grew up …...Read More

Why RAG won't solve generative AI's hallucination problem

Hallucinations — the lies generative AI models tell, basically — are a big problem for businesses looking to integrate the technology into their operations. Because models have no real intelligence and are simply predicting words, images, speech, music and other data according to a private schema, they sometimes get it …...Read More

This Week in AI: Generative AI and the problem of compensating creators

Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn’t cover on their own. By the way …...Read More

Iconiq raises $5.15B toward seventh flagship fund

Iconiq Capital has raised $5.15 billion across two funds associated with the seventh growth fund family, according to SEC filings. The firm, which launched in 2011 as a private office managing capital of some of the most prominent and wealthiest people in tech, including Mark Zuckerburg and Jack Dorsey, originally …...Read More