Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
Ashton Kutcher is stepping away from Sound Ventures — the firm he co-founded with Guy Oseary 11 years ago — to start a separate VC fund, the Wall Street Journal reported. TechCrunch had separately heard that Kutcher was preparing to leave; the WSJ’s report confirms it and adds new detail on his plans with Beller. The actor and investor’s new firm is being co-founded with Morgan Beller — its name hasn’t been made public yet — who until recently was a general partner at seed-focused VC outfit NFX and previously co-led cryptocurrency project Libra at Meta. Beller also spent nearly…
Cloudflare has just issued the AI industry a new deadline to separate the web crawlers used for traditional search purposes, like Google Search, from those used for AI agents and training. Starting on September 15, 2026, Cloudflare’s default settings will block “mixed-use” crawlers from any pages that host ads, the company announced on Wednesday. That means that the crawlers that blend search, agent use, and training will be blocked from crawling these sites by default, unless the site owner adjusts the settings otherwise. These changes to the defaults will apply to new Cloudflare customers, new sites set up by existing…
Most venture capitalists probably don’t root for the hottest investment theme of the current era to flame out and crash.But in a post on X on June 30, Vijay Pande, founder of VZ.VC, laid out why he’s rooting for the AI-fueled investing bubble to burst. More than that, he argued that everyone should feel this way, making a case for why the bursting of the AI bubble could be the best thing for the broader economy in the longterm.”I’m telling you to root for the crash that torches my own asset class,” Pande wrote. “I mean it. The valuations are…
When Anthropic found itself in a high-stakes standoff with the White House over its newest AI models, it wasn’t CEO Dario Amodei who smoothed the tensions. Instead, one of the company’s quietest cofounders stepped in.Tom Brown, Anthropic’s chief compute officer, helped negotiate a deal that persuaded the Commerce Department to lift export restrictions on the company’s newest flagship models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5. The episode thrust one of AI’s least visible leaders into the spotlight — and revealed how the engineer responsible for securing Anthropic’s computing power has become one of its most important diplomats.It proved to be a…
The dustbin of history is about to get a lot shinier.Sony said Wednesday it plans to stop releasing physical disc copies of PlayStation games starting in 2028.”New games will be available on PlayStation Store and at retailers in digital formats only,” the company said.Sony said the change is a response to evolving industry and consumer trends and won’t affect any titles scheduled for release before 2028.Sony’s PS5 is sold in two formats — one all-digital and one with a disc drive — with the disc drive model costing $50 more. Both offer nearly identical performance.Last week, game studio Rockstar Games told the…
Concerns over the impact of AI chatbots on mental health, personal safety, harassment, and disinformation have forced AI developers to implement safeguards to better control how and what their AI models are allowed to respond or do. But concerns and worries can’t erode demand. AI offers a lot of promise, and people don’t want a faceless tech company to restrict their access to that potential. And if they can preserve their privacy while they use AI models however they want, why not? Venice AI, which offers access to more than 200 AI models while allowing users to retain their privacy,…
Gemini Spark, Google’s AI agent that can help with aspects of your digital life, is now available on Mac. The company on Wednesday said Spark is being added to the existing Gemini desktop app, as well as several updates and new features, including the ability to stay up to date on topics in real time, and connect to more apps like Google Tasks and Google Keep. The macOS launch allows Gemini Spark to better compete with desktop AI agents like Claude Desktop, Microsoft’s Copilot, OpenClaw, and others, as it will be able to work with files on the computer, and…
Palantir is back with another manifesto that makes its AI values crystal clear.On Tuesday, the company posted a 9-point post on X about the importance of “AI sovereignty.” The post urged companies to keep their data in-house, rather than outsourcing to institutions that Palantir paints as untrustworthy.The post also decries “tokenmaxxing,” the practice of spending as much as possible on AI. Palantir wrote that this spending had the “addictive feeling of false progress.”Alex Karp has long been critical of the frontier AI labs. Earlier in June, he said on CNBC that the AI companies “don’t understand how unlikeable they are.”…
The Builders Stage is returning to TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, bringing together founders, startup operators, and investors for practical conversations on what it takes to build and scale successful companies. Hear from startup and venture leaders shaping the tech ecosystem, including Grant Lee, CEO and co-founder of Gamma; Leah Solivan, founder and general partner at Precedent.vc; Robby Stein, VP of Product at Google; and more. Through candid conversations and real-world case studies, speakers will share actionable insights on fundraising, hiring, go-to-market strategy, AI, and the operational decisions that fuel startup growth. Join more than 10,000 founders, investors, startup operators, and technology leaders at Moscone Center in San Francisco on October 13-15. Register…
Meta has spent billions of dollars developing AI and building out data centers to support it. But now, the company may be preparing to put those data centers to a more immediately profitable purpose. On Wednesday, Bloomberg reported that Meta is developing plans for a cloud infrastructure business, selling access to both AI compute power and models. The move would pit it against the big cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Meta’s decision to sell off excess compute comes weeks after SpaceX, via xAI, announced similar plans. In early May, SpaceX signed a deal with…