Welcome, folks, to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter covering this week’s noteworthy happenings in tech. TikTok’s fate in the U.S. looks uncertain after President Joe Biden signed a bill that included a deadline for ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, to divest itself of TikTok within nine months or face …...Read More

Will a TikTok ban impact creator economy startups? Not really, founders say ‘Two years ago, this would have been devastating’ President Joe Biden signed a bill on Wednesday that could ban TikTok – for real this time. After so many false starts and stops, some creator economy founders and their …...Read More

Investors won’t give you the real reason they are passing on your startup Y Combinator's Tom Blomfield says it's usually because your team isn't impressive enough “When an investor passes on you, they will not tell you the real reason,” said Tom Blomfield, group partner at Y Combinator. “At seed …...Read More

Givebutter started in a George Washington University dorm room in 2016 as a software solution to make nonprofit fundraising more transparent and fun. Eight years later, the company is profitable and it just raised $50 million to scale as momentum for nonprofit-focused startups appears to be growing. The company’s co-founder …...Read More

The ‘valley of death’ for climate lies between early-stage funding and scaling up It's easier for climate companies to get enough funding to get started. It's much harder once they need money to scale. Jonathan Strimling faced a dilemma. His company had spent nine years working on chemical processes that …...Read More

A wrestling match over who should control robotaxis is playing out in California The state could set the standard for autonomous vehicle regulation, but in the process could push away Cruise, Waymo, Zoox and others Cities around the country have long been crying out for more control over how autonomous …...Read More

OpenAI’s video generation tool Sora took the AI community by surprise in February with fluid, realistic video that seems miles ahead of competitors. But the carefully stage-managed debut left out a lot of details — details that have been filled in by a filmmaker given early access to create a …...Read More

When Asheem Chandna drove up to Rubrik’s office in Palo Alto on a Friday night in early 2015, he was looking forward to learning what the young company that had yet to build its product would show him. The Greylock partner wasn’t disappointed. The company’s CEO, Bipul Sinha, drew Rubrik’s …...Read More

EyeEm, the Berlin-based photo-sharing community that exited last year to Spanish company Freepik, after going bankrupt, is now licensing its users’ photos to train AI models. Earlier this month, the company informed users via email that it was adding a new clause to its Terms & Conditions that would grant …...Read More

Meta’s new large language model, Llama 3, powers the imaginatively named “Meta AI,” a newish chatbot that the social media and advertising company has installed in as many of its apps and interfaces as possible. How does this model stack up against other all-purpose conversational AIs? It tends to regurgitate …...Read More