Senator warns of national security risks after Elon Musk’s DOGE granted ‘full access’ to sensitive Treasury systems

A senior U.S. lawmaker says representatives of Elon Musk were granted “full access” to a U.S. Treasury payments system used to disperse trillions of dollars to Americans each year and warned that Musk’s access to the system poses a “national security risk.” Ron Wyden,

X expands lawsuit over advertiser 'boycott' to include Lego, Nestlé, Pinterest, and others

X is now suing more advertisers in an antitrust lawsuit focusing on what the company's CEO Linda Yaccarino has claimed is a “systematic illegal boycott.” The company formerly known as Twitter first filed the lawsuit against the World Federation of Advertisers and its brand safety initiativ

DeepSeek gets Silicon Valley talking

Welcome back to Week in Review. This week we're looking at DeepSeek's major boost in the U.S.; Elon Musk admitting he was wrong about FSD; teens losing trust in Big Tech; and more! Let's do it. DeepSeek went viral this week after its AI models led Wall Street analysts and technologists

Here are all the IPOs reported to be in the works for 2025

Tech is upbeat about more companies going public this year, thanks in part to a new presidential administration that has promised to ease regulations and embrace industries like crypto and AI.  But there were already early signs of bullishness — especially in fintech — thanks to the wildl

Venture debt lenders will play a big role in fire sales and startup shutdown this year, experts say

When accounting startup Bench abruptly failed last month, the shutdown was forced when the company’s lenders called in the startup's loan. In late 2023, the digital freight company Convoy faced financial challenges, leading venture lending firm Hercules Capital to assume control of the co

Here are the apps battling to be become the ‘TikTok for Bluesky’

TikTok’s potential U.S. ban has sparked a flurry of development within the open social web community. Several new applications are being built that could one day serve as a TikTok replacement for those who favor the open source, decentralized social network Bluesky and the technology that pow

How to delete X and move on with your life

As Elon Musk’s X sees a decline in daily active users, some people are deciding to ditch the social network entirely, whether that’s for Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, or perhaps, better yet, nothing at all. Since the Tesla and SpaceX CEO bought Twitter in 2022, numerous alternatives have

India pledges fresh billion for startups

India announced a new $1.15 billion Fund of Funds for startups on Saturday while unveiling sweeping regulatory reforms and an ambitious nuclear energy program, as New Delhi seeks to boost tech innovation and clean energy in the world’s fifth-largest economy. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharam

Elon Musk is reportedly taking control of the inner workings of US government agencies

People working for, or with, Elon Musk are reportedly taking over the inner workings of multiple government agencies, including the Office of Personnel Management, the Treasury Department, and the General Services Administration. The Washington Post reported Friday that the highest-ranking career

Autonomous vehicle testing in California dropped 50%. Here’s why.

Tech companies developing self-driving vehicle technology have tapped the brakes on testing on California’s public roads, according to new data from the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles. The agency reported Friday a total of 4.5 million autonomous vehicle test miles were logged in

OpenAI used this subreddit to test AI persuasion

OpenAI used the subreddit, r/ChangeMyView, to create a test for measuring the persuasive abilities of its AI reasoning models. The company revealed this in a system card — a document outlining how an AI system works — that was released along with its new “reasoning” model, o3-mini,

Sam Altman: OpenAI has been on the ‘wrong side of history’ concerning open source

To cap off a day of product releases, OpenAI researchers, engineers, and executives, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, answered questions in a wide-ranging Reddit AMA on Friday. OpenAI finds itself in a bit of a precarious position. It’s battling the perception that it's ceding ground in

Mistral board member and a16z VC Anjney Midha says DeepSeek won't stop AI's GPU hunger

Andreessen Horowitz general partner and Mistral board member Anjney “Anj” Midha first spied DeepSeek's jaw-dropping performance six months ago, he tells technewss. That's when DeepSeek introduced Coder V2, which rivaled OpenAI’s GPT4-Turbo for coding-specific tasks, according to

MLCommons and Hugging Face team up to release massive speech dataset for AI research

MLCommons, a nonprofit AI safety working group, has teamed up with AI dev platform Hugging Face to release one of the world’s largest collections of public domain voice recordings for AI research. The dataset, called Unsupervised People's Speech, contains more than a million hours of aud