When you’re building at breakneck speed, hiring a trusted team is crucial for an early-stage startup. In this episode of Build Mode, Isabelle Johannessen sits down with Isaiah Granet, the CEO and co-founder of Bland, a voice AI company that has grown from pre-seed to Series B in just 10 months. Their team has ballooned…
This is one of those Silicon Valley real-life episodes that seem pulled from the HBO satire show. This week, some really atrocious malware was discovered in an open source project developed by Y Combinator graduate LiteLLM. LiteLLM gives developers easy access to hundreds of AI models and provides features like spend management. It’s a breakout…
Autonomous military aircraft maker Shield AI has raised $1.5 billion in Series G funding at a $12.7 billion post-money valuation, the company announced on Tuesday. The deal was led by PE firm Advent (which has a $1 billion budget to invest in defense tech, it says) and a JPMorganChase investment group. In addition, Shield AI…
Two U.S. senators on Thursday fired the latest salvo in an increasingly active front against data centers and their energy use. Senators Josh Hawley and Elizabeth Warren sent a letter to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) asking it to collect details on energy use from data centers — and how that use is affecting the…
Google announced on Thursday that “Live Translate,” its AI-powered Google Translate feature that lets you hear real-time translations in your headphones, is expanding to iOS and to more countries. With this expansion, the feature is now available on iOS and Android in the U.S., India, Mexico, Germany, Spain, France, Nigeria, Italy, the United Kingdom, Japan, Bangladesh,…
David Sacks has used up his days as Donald Trump’s AI and crypto czar. Speaking with Bloomberg on Thursday, the longtime entrepreneur, investor, and podcaster, confirmed that his non-consecutive 130-day stint as a special government employee is over and that he’s moving on to co-chair the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST)…
A federal judge has sided with Anthropic in its twisty legal battle with the Trump administration, awarding the tech company an injunction against the government’s recent order that labeled it a “supply chain risk,” the Wall Street Journal reports. On Thursday, Judge Rita F. Lin of the Northern District of California ordered the Trump administration…
When it comes to AI chatbots, there’s currently a war on for consumer attention. All the big chatbot providers are looking to increase their user count and, in a minor coup for itself, Google just made it significantly easier for users of those other chatbots to defect to Gemini. On Thursday, the company announced what…
Netflix has quietly hiked its prices once again. The streaming giant’s most affordable, ad-supported tier now costs $8.99 per month, up from the previous $7.99 monthly subscription fee, Netflix confirmed to TechCrunch in an email. The standard plan without ads also now costs $19.99 per month, a $2 increase from the previous $17.99 subscription fee,…
As AI makes inroads into the worlds of editorial and media, websites are scrambling to establish ground rules for its usage. This week, Wikipedia banned the use of AI-generated text by its editors—although it stopped short of banning AI outright from the site’s editorial processes. In a recent policy change, the site now states that…