How a hydrogen explosion led a teenage founder to become Sequoia's first defense tech investment

As Sequoia Capital’s first defense tech investment, Mach Industries is an industry darling, raising over $80 million since its founding in 2023. Its founder, Ethan Thornton, now 21, began Mach as a teenage MIT student before dropping out to focus full-time on his startup. But a few months be

Google to embrace Anthropic's standard for connecting AI models to data

Just a few weeks after OpenAI said it would adopt rival Anthropic's standard for connecting AI models to the systems where data resides, Google is following suit. In a post on X on Wednesday, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said Google would add support for Anthropic's Model Context Pr

Solid, which claimed to be the 'AWS of fintech,' files for bankruptcy after raising nearly $81M in funding

Banking-as-a-service startup Solid (formerly called Wise) has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, according to documents filed in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware on April 7. Founded in 2018, the fintech company had raised a total of nearly $81 million in fun

OpenAI countersues Elon Musk, calls for enjoinment from ‘further unlawful and unfair action’

The dramatic tiff between OpenAI and its estranged co-founder, billionaire Elon Musk, shows no sign of letting up. In a filing on Wednesday, attorneys for OpenAI and other defendants in the case, including CEO Sam Altman, called for Musk to be enjoined from “further unlawful and unfair actio

a16z backs Base Power in $200M round for home backup batteries

In less than a year, Base Power has grown from a stealthy startup to one of the largest battery fleets in Texas. Now the company has raised $200 million to fund a rapid expansion, including dozens more megawatt-hours of battery storage and plans for a domestic battery factory. The

Meta whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams says company targeted ads at teens based on their 'emotional state'

Meta whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams, the former director of Global Public Policy for Facebook and author of the recently released tell-all book “Careless People,” told U.S. senators during her testimony on Wednesday that Meta actively targeted teens with advertisements based on their

Whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams accuses Meta of colluding with China

Sarah Wynn-Williams, Facebook’s former head of Global Public Policy, testified before the U.S. Senate today about the company’s relationship with China. According to Wynn-Williams, the company now known as Meta worked directly with the Chinese Community Party (CCP) to “undermine

Threads is testing a feature that lets you follow the same creators you follow on X

Meta is starting to test a new feature in Threads that lets users follow the same creators they follow on X, the company confirmed to technewss. “We're currently testing a way for you to find and follow creators from other platforms on Threads, making it easier to connect with the people an

Ilya Sutskever taps Google Cloud to power his AI startup’s research

OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever’s new AI startup, Safe Superintelligence (SSI), is using Google Cloud’s TPU chips to power its AI research, part of a new partnership the companies announced on Wednesday in a press release. Google Cloud says SSI is using TPUs

OpenAI launches program to design new ‘domain-specific’ AI benchmarks

OpenAI thinks AI benchmarks are broken. Now the company is launching a program to fix how AI models are scored. The new OpenAI Pioneers Program will focus on creating evaluations for AI models that “set the bar for what good looks like,” as OpenAI phrased it in a blog post.

Anthropic rolls out a $200-per-month Claude subscription

Anthropic announced on Wednesday that it’s launching a new, very expensive subscription plan for its AI chatbot Claude: Max. An answer to OpenAI’s $200-a-month ChatGPT Pro tier, Max comes with higher usage limits than Anthropic’s $20-per-month Claude Pro subscription, as well as p

Kalshi CEO: ‘State law doesn’t really apply’ to us

Last week, prediction market startup Kalshi sued New Jersey and Nevada after they tried to shut down its recently launched sports trading operation. In the lawsuit, Kalshi claimed that, since they’re a federally regulated platform, state gaming commissions don’t have the authority to se

MIT study finds that AI doesn’t, in fact, have values

A study went viral several months ago for implying that, as AI becomes increasingly sophisticated, it develops “value systems” — systems that lead it to, for example, prioritize its own well-being over humans. A more recent paper out of MIT pours cold water on that hyperbolic notion,

YouTube expands its ‘likeness’ detection technology, which detects AI fakes, to a handful of top creators

YouTube on Wednesday announced an expansion of its pilot program designed to identify and manage AI-generated content that features the “likeness,” including the face, of creators, artists, and other famous or influential figures. The company is also publicly declaring its support for t