WhatsApp scores historic victory against NSO Group in long-running spyware hacking case

A U.S. judge had ruled that Israeli spyware maker NSO Group breached hacking laws by using WhatsApp to stealthily infect devices with its Pegasus spyware. In a historic ruling on Friday, a Northern California federal judge held NSO Group liable for targeting the devices of 1,400 WhatsApp users, violating state …...Read More

xAI is testing a standalone iOS app for its Grok chatbot

Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, is testing out a standalone iOS app for its chatbot, Grok, which was available only to X users until now. The app, currently live in Australia and a few countries in beta, can access real-time data from the web and X, and offers generative AI …...Read More

Sriram Krishnan named Trump's senior policy advisor for AI

Incoming president Donald Trump has confirmed reports that Sriram Krishnan, until recently a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), will serve as senior policy advisor for AI at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Trump said in a statement that Krishnan will “help shape and coordinate AI …...Read More

OpenAI trained o1 and o3 to 'think' about its safety policy

OpenAI announced a new family of AI reasoning models on Friday, o3, which the startup claims to be more advanced than o1 or anything else it’s released. These improvements appear to have come from scaling test-time compute, something we wrote about last month, but OpenAI also says it used a …...Read More

The biggest flops and fizzles in 2024 transportation, from Apple Car to Fisker

Autonomous vehicle technology and electrification startups were once the darlings of the VC and corporate world. The two technologies promised billions of dollars in revenue — and a new pathway for automakers to make money beyond building and selling cars. Those VC-money-printing days have been over for AVs for a …...Read More

Tetsuwan Scientific is making robotic AI scientists that can run experiments on their own

Cristian Ponce was wearing an Indiana Jones costume when he met his co-founder Théo Schäfer. It was at a Halloween party in 2023 thrown by Entrepreneur First, a startup program that introduces founders to one another before they launch an idea. The two hit it off, Ponce remembers. Schäfer had …...Read More

OpenAI announces new o3 model - but you can’t use it yet

Welcome back to Week in Review. This week, we’re looking at OpenAI’s last — and biggest — announcement from its “12 Days of OpenAI” event; Apple’s potential entrance into the foldable market; and why Databricks is choosing to wait to go public. Let’s get into it. P.S. We’re off for …...Read More

Google pushes back against DOJ’s ‘interventionist’ remedies in antitrust case

Google has offered up its own proposal in a recent antitrust case that saw the US Department of Justice argue that Google must sell its Chrome browser. US District Court Judge Amit Mehta ruled in August that Google had acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in online search, with the …...Read More

If climate tech is dead, what comes next?

Humans have an innate desire to name things, but to be honest, we’re not always that good at it. Take climate tech: it’s a category of companies and technologies that, broadly speaking, seek to minimize or reverse our impact on the climate while also helping us adapt to its increasing …...Read More

Hollywood angels: Here are the celebrities who are also star VCs

Becoming a venture capitalist has become the latest status symbol in Hollywood. Everyone these days, from Olivia Wilde to Emma Watson, is either launching a venture firm or is in the process of backing the next hottest company. Robinhood, Uber, and Klarna all have some glitzy names on their cap …...Read More