No, startups shouldn't always take the highest valuation, seed VCs say

One of the lessons that the wild Silicon Valley venture funding environment of the past few years has clearly taught is this: Bigger valuations are not always better. “I think we’ve all kind of seen the negative impact of having a valuation too high from the last, call it, three years,”

ChatGPT Search is not OpenAI’s ‘Google killer’ yet

Last week, OpenAI released its highly anticipated search product, ChatGPT Search, to take on Google. The industry has been bracing for this moment for months, prompting Google to inject AI-generated answers into its core product earlier this year and producing some embarrassing hallucinations in th

US laws regulating AI prove elusive, but there may be hope

Can the U.S. meaningfully regulate AI? It’s not at all clear yet. Policymakers have achieved progress in recent months, but they’ve also had setbacks, illustrating the challenging nature of laws imposing guardrails on the technology. In March, Tennessee became the first state to prote

X updates block feature, letting blocked users see your public posts

X is rolling out its controversial update to the block feature, allowing people to view your public posts even if you have blocked them. People have protested this change, arguing that they don’t want blocked users to see their posts for reasons of safety. Blocked users still can’t fol

Affirm launches in the UK as ‘buy now, pay later’ market faces regulatory overhaul

Buy now, pay later (BNPL) giant Affirm is launching in the U.K., its first market outside North America. Affirm’s long-anticipated arrival comes as U.K. lawmakers mull new rules to bring BNPL firms into line with other traditional consumer credit services, though such laws aren’t expec

OpenAI has hired the co-founder of Twitter challenger Pebble

Gabor Cselle, the former CEO and co-founder of Pebble (a competitor to X), has joined OpenAI to work on a secret project. Cselle has been employed at OpenAI since October, according to LinkedIn, but he announced the news in a post on X only yesterday. “Will share more about what I’m wo

Founders should seek sector alignment when looking for a family office investor

Family offices invest a substantial amount of capital in startups each year. In the first half of 2023, 27% of overall startup deal value came from deals that included a family office investor, according to a recent report from PwC. Despite their prevalence in startup deals, family offices can be

‘If you actually are solving a problem, you don’t talk about any of the hype,’ investor says

The hype is palpable: As tech folks from near and far converge for technewss Disrupt 2024 in San Fransisco — one of the only places where Waymo is available to the public — there’s ample chatter about the autonomous vehicle service. “If you think about AI hype and all, eve

Wesley Chan on what he looks for as he’s shopping for potential unicorns

Investor Wesley Chan has shown a knack for making very early investments into multi-billion-dollar unicorns, such as Plaid, Gusto, Flexport, and, most recently, Canva. Chan comes from an unconventional background — he grew up in an immigrant family and had only middling grades in high school. Bu

Women in AI: Sophia Velastegui believes AI is moving too fast

As a part of technewss's ongoing Women in AI series, which seeks to give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved (and overdue) time in the spotlight, technewss interviewed Sophia Velastegui. Velastegui is a member of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) national

GenAI suffers from data overload, so companies should focus on smaller, specific goals

“There is no AI without data, there is no AI without unstructured data, and there is no AI without unstructured data at scale,” said Chet Kapoor, chairman and CEO of data management company DataStax. Kapoor was kicking off a conversation at technewss Disrupt 2024 about “new data

Why Wiz really turned down Google's $23B offer

Welcome back to Week in Review. This week, we’re coming at you right off the heels of technewss Disrupt! If you missed it, we're highlighting conversations from Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, and Disney star turned space CEO Bridgit Mendler. Of cour

Quantum Machines and Nvidia use machine learning to get closer to an error-corrected quantum computer

About a year and a half ago, quantum control startup Quantum Machines and Nvidia announced a deep partnership that would bring together Nvidia’s DGX Quantum computing platform and Quantum Machine’s advanced quantum control hardware. We didn’t hear much about the results of this pa

MIT debuts a large language model-inspired method for teaching robots new skills

MIT this week showcased a new model for training robots. Rather than the standard set of focused data used to teach robots new tasks, the method goes big, mimicking the massive troves of information used to train large language models (LLMs). The researchers note that imitation learning — in whi