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• Another VC-backed fintech, Earnin, faces crackdown over allegedly ‘predatory’ loans 2024-11-20
  The attorney general for the District of Columbia is suing instant payday loan fintech Earnin for “deceptively marketing and providing illegal high-interest loans,” the AG alleges. Earnin allows its users to get loans against paychecks. It advertises that users can get $150 a day, up to $750 per pay period, with “no interest, credit check […]
  Julie Bort
• It’s not just you, Reddit is down 2024-11-20
  Social media platform Reddit is experiencing an outage this afternoon, resulting in thousands of users being unable to access its website and app. Reddit confirmed that it’s currently investigating the issue, according to its status page. We discovered the outage ourselves when attempting to visit the homepage, which displayed a black screen with the message: […]
  Lauren Forristal
• FTX CTO Gary Wang avoids prison time 2024-11-20
  Not every former top FTX executive is heading to prison. Gary Wang, former FTX chief technical officer, was spared prison time by U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan today. Judge Kaplan praised Wang’s cooperation with federal authorities. Wang testified against former FTX founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried at his trial last fall. Wang pleaded guilty to […]
  Rebecca Szkutak
• US charges five accused of multi-year hacking spree targeting tech and crypto giants 2024-11-20
  The five alleged hackers are accused of stealing millions of dollars in crypto, and corporate data from several victims all over the world. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
  Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai
• May Mobility to test driverless shuttles in Ann Arbor 2024-11-20
  May Mobility is slowly advancing its driverless capabilities. The startup this week launched a small-scale deployment of autonomous shuttles, which will drive themselves along a fixed route without a human safety driver present. May will initially deploy one to two autonomous Toyota Sienna minivans to ferry employees and “invited guests” across a 2-square-mile area of […]
  Rebecca Bellan
• Benchmark invests $19M in New Lantern, a smarter way for radiologists to use AI 2024-11-20
  Shiva Suri gained a unique perspective into how radiologists work when he quarantined and shared a home office with his mom, a well-regarded radiologist. “I watched her work day in and day out, and she was wasting about seven to eight hours on boring workflow tasks,” Suri said. “Only 5% of her time, she had […]
  Marina Temkin
• Led by Anduril, defense tech funding sets a new record this year 2024-11-20
  Defense tech startups have raised almost $3 billion so far in 2024, surpassing the previous record from 2022 of $2.6 billion.  © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
  Margaux MacColl
• Messenger gets HD video calls, AI backgrounds, and more 2024-11-20
  Meta is introducing new features for Messenger, its messaging app, including AI-powered noise suppression. Messenger is getting HD video calls and voice isolation, both of which can be enabled via the call settings menu. HD calls are now the default for calls placed over Wi-Fi, Meta says, and an option for calls over cellular. Messenger […]
  Kyle Wiggers
• DuckDuckGo calls for EU to widen its Digital Markets Act probe of Google 2024-11-20
  Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo has urged the European Union to widen its Digital Markets Act (DMA) investigation into Google, claiming the search giant is in breach of several areas where the bloc has yet to formally probe the company’s compliance. The EU’s flagship market contestability rulebook has been in force on a handful of tech […]
  Natasha Lomas
• This Week in AI: Congressional commission warns of Chinese AGI 2024-11-20
  Hiya, folks, welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. If you want this in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. America’s AI war with China is intensifying — or at least, the rhetoric around it is. On Tuesday, a U.S. congressional commission proposed a “Manhattan Project-style” effort to fund the development of AI systems with human-level […]
  Kyle Wiggers
• H, the AI startup that raised $220M, launches its first product: Runner H for ‘agentic’ applications 2024-11-20
  H, the Paris startup founded by Google alums, made a big splash last summer when, out of the blue, it announced a seed round of $220 million before releasing a single product. Three months later, still without a product, that splash started to look like a catastrophic flood when three of the company’s five co-founders […]
  Ingrid Lunden
• As Bluesky soars, Threads rolls out custom feeds globally 2024-11-20
  As X competitor Bluesky takes off, topping 20 million users, Meta’s own Twitter-like app, Instagram Threads, has begun rolling out a new feature called custom feeds to its global audience. Hoping to capitalize on user demand for more personalization, custom feeds are meant to allow Threads users to easily build feeds around specific topics or […]
  Sarah Perez
• Federal prosecutors have charged another Forbes 30 Under 30 alum with fraud 2024-11-20
  The FBI unsealed an indictment yesterday that alleges Joanna Smith-Griffin, founder of the AI startup AllHere Education, engaged in “securities fraud, wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft in connection with defrauding investors” out of nearly $10 million. The FBI claims she misrepresented her company’s revenue, customer base, and cash to investors from at least November […]
  Dominic-Madori Davis
• A Chinese lab has released a ‘reasoning’ AI model to rival OpenAI’s o1 2024-11-20
  A Chinese lab has unveiled what appears to be one of the first “reasoning” AI models to rival OpenAI’s o1. On Wednesday, DeepSeek, an AI research company funded by quantitative traders, released a preview of DeepSeek-R1, which the firm claims is a reasoning model competitive with o1. Unlike most models, reasoning models effectively fact-check themselves […]
  Kyle Wiggers
• TV Time points to Apple’s ‘significant power’ over developers after being removed from App Store 2024-11-20
  TV Time, a popular TV and movie tracking and recommendations app with more than 30 million registered users, disappeared from Apple’s App Store for several weeks, leading to questions about its future from the app’s avid fan base. Considering that 2.5 million users use the app every month to track what they’re watching and to […]
  Sarah Perez
• Comcast spins off its cable channels into separate company as it looks for growth 2024-11-20
  Cable television has long been viewed as a stagnant business, showing little promise for growth over the years. However, Comcast believes it has found a new growth opportunity. On Wednesday, the company announced that it’s spinning off NBCUniversal’s cable television networks — such as CNBC, E!, Golf Channel, MSNBC, Oxygen, SYFY, and USA Network — […]
  Lauren Forristal
• Chinese AV startup Pony AI boosts its IPO goal to $260M 2024-11-20
  Pony AI, the Chinese autonomous vehicle startup that’s looking to go public on the Nasdaq stock exchange, now wants to raise around $260 million, according to a new regulatory filing. That’s up from its previous target of around $224 million. To meet the goal, Pony will sell as many as 20 million American depository shares. […]
  Sean O'Kane
• Amazon debuts its largest Echo Show yet 2024-11-20
  Amazon on Wednesday introduced the Echo Show 21, its largest Echo Show yet. The smart display comes with double the viewing area of the existing Echo Show 15, which is also getting an upgrade. The two new devices have better audio quality than the original Echo Show 15, as they come with double the bass […]
  Aisha Malik
• Riding high on open source ERP, Odoo raises $527M via secondaries, lifting its valuation to $5.26B 2024-11-20
  Belgium-based Odoo decided to use open source tools as a way to attack the enterprise resource planning (ERP) software market, going up against giants like SAP. Fast-forward a couple of decades and it’s now picking up €500 million in secondary investment — or around $527 million at current exchange rates — led by CapitalG (Alphabet’s […]
  Mike Butcher
• YC-backed Four Growers builds robots to help solve greenhouse labor shortages 2024-11-20
  When Brandon Contino and co-founder Dan Chi were developing Four Growers’ produce-harvesting robots, they practically lived in a greenhouse for an entire year. They coded at a small desk tucked in the back corner and discovered that fertilizer bags can be comfortable beds. “We actually started just running everything off a laptop, and I would […]
  Rebecca Szkutak