Snowflake grows startup accelerator with $200M in new capital

Snowflake plans to expand its startup accelerator with $200 million in additional commitments, the tech giant that specializes in cloud-based data storage said Thursday. The new injection of capital follows a string of activity by Snowflake over the past several months that illustrates that compan

Twitch is letting more streamers access its monetization tools

Twitch CEO Dan Clancy published an open letter on Thursday outlining the platform's plans for 2025, which include upcoming features, updates to the mobile experience, as well as a significant change to its monetization policy.   Of note, Clancy revealed that Twitch is opening up subscription

Spyzie stalkerware is spying on thousands of Android and iPhone users

A little-known phone surveillance operation called Spyzie has compromised more than half a million Android devices and thousands of iPhones and iPads, according to data shared by a security researcher.  Most of the affected device owners, who are unknown, are likely unaware that their phone d

OpenAI’s GPT-4.5 is better at convincing other AIs to give it money

OpenAI’s next major AI model, GPT-4.5, is highly persuasive, according to the results of OpenAI’s internal benchmark evaluations. It’s particularly good at convincing another AI to give it cash. On Thursday, OpenAI published a white paper describing the capabilities of its GPT-4.

OpenAI unveils GPT-4.5 ‘Orion,’ its largest AI model yet

Updated 2:40 pm PT: Hours after GPT-4.5’s release, OpenAI removed a line from the AI model’s white paper that said “GPT-4.5 is not a frontier AI model.” GPT-4.5’s new white paper does not include that line. You can find a link to the old white paper here. The original

TikTok sunsets its creator marketplace for TikTok One, a broader solution with AI tools

TikTok is preparing to sunset its creator marketplace in favor of a new, more expanded experience, the company has informed businesses and creators via email. The online platform, which connects brands with creators for collaborating on ads and other sponsorships, will stop allowing creator invitat

Figure will start 'alpha testing' its humanoid robot in the home in 2025

Figure is planning to bring its humanoids into the home sooner than expected. CEO Brett Adcock confirmed on Thursday that the Bay Area robotics startup will begin “alpha testing” its Figure 02 robot in the home setting later in 2025. The executive says the accelerated timeline is a prod

Microsoft Copilot gets a macOS app

Microsoft finally released a macOS app for Copilot, its free generative AI chatbot.  Similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT and other AI chatbots, Copilot enables users to ask questions and receive responses generated by AI. Copilot is designed to assist users in numerous tasks, such as drafting emails,

Stripe says AI startups are growing faster than SaaS ever did, and calling them wrappers 'misses the point'

In its annual letter released Thursday, payments giant Stripe declared that it was “seeing an AI boom” with its data, revealing that artificial intelligence startups are growing more rapidly than traditional SaaS companies have historically. In a chart, Stripe showed that the top 100 AI compan

Lucid loses its CEO, and 'founder mode' comes for Flexport

Welcome back to technewss Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just click technewss Mobility! Lucid Motors delivered a surprise this week when it announced that CEO and CTO Peter Rawlinson was resigning. Speculation about

Apple introduces new child safety initiatives, including an age-checking system for apps

Apple on Thursday announced a range of new initiatives designed to help parents and developers create a safer experience for kids and teens using Apple devices. In addition to easier setup of child accounts, parents will now be able to share information about their kids’ ages, which can then

Archipelo comes out of stealth with $12M funding to secure human and AI-driven code

When it comes to AI software, you can build something clever, but that’s not always the same as building something that is secure. With so much software now getting written by AI, having a window into its security can be a challenge. That's the premise of Archipelo, a San Francisco-based

Workhelix taps years of research to help enterprises figure out where to apply AI

AI has the power to transform how people work, but getting tangible value out of AI isn’t as easy as throwing any AI application at any workflow. It can be hard for enterprises to figure out which AI applications help their business and which are just hype. Workhelix wants to solve that probl

YC grad Deepnight nabs $5.5M for AI night vision software that disrupts a multi-billion-dollar industry

Deepnight co-founders Lucas Young and Thomas Li have been friends since childhood. Both were working as software engineers at Google when Young decided he wanted to crack the code, so to speak, on a problem that had plagued the U.S. military for decades: digital night vision tech. Most night visio