Airchat Is Silicon Valley’s Latest Obsession

Ravikant said most of the funding for Airchat has come from his own fund, as well as from Jeff Fagnan, a founding partner at Accomplice Ventures. “[OpenAI CEO] Sam Altman threw in a check, kind of blindly,” Ravikant said. He communicated all of this to me in a public response on Airchat, after politely declining … Read more

Eric Schmidt Warned Against China’s AI Industry. Emails Show He Also Sought Connections to It

In November 2019, the US government’s National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), an influential body chaired by former Google CEO and executive chairman Eric Schmidt, warned that China was using artificial intelligence to “advance an autocratic agenda.” Just two months earlier, Schmidt was also seeking potential personal connections to China’s AI industry on a … Read more

This Woman Will Decide Which Babies Are Born

Walk me through your own decision to do this—to use Orchid’s technology on yourself. I mean, I started the company because I wanted to test my own embryos. Because of your mom, or because of who you are as a person? Both. Reproduction is one of the most fundamental things in life. It’s like you … Read more

Beeper Took On Apple’s iMessage Dominance. Now It’s Been Acquired

During the early days of the pandemic, Migicovsky became fixated on fragmented messaging—the generally recognized fact that most people have to use a variety of different apps to keep in touch with their contacts. Migicovsky and Murray started building a service that would collate all messaging in one app container, using an open source, decentralized … Read more

Inside the Creation of DBRX, the World’s Most Powerful Open Source AI Model

This past Monday, about a dozen engineers and executives at data science and AI company Databricks gathered in conference rooms connected via Zoom to learn if they had succeeded in building a top artificial intelligence language model. The team had spent months, and about $10 million, training DBRX, a large language model similar in design … Read more

Perplexity’s Founder Was Inspired by Sundar Pichai. Now They’re Competing to Reinvent Search

Aravind Srinivas credits Google CEO Sundar Pichai for giving him the freedom to eat eggs. Srinivas remembers the moment seven years ago when an interview with Pichai popped up in his YouTube feed. His vegetarian upbringing in India had excluded eggs, as it had for many in the country, but now, in his early twenties, … Read more

Reddit IPO Filings Reveal the Company’s Hopes—and Fears

The amount of time Reddit reports that users spend with its service hasn’t significantly budged either. In September 2021, the company said that US users on average engaged for 28 minutes a day. It ticked up to 30 minutes that December. In December of 2023, the company specified a figure only for “logged-in” US users, … Read more

Y Combinator’s Chief Startup Whisperer Is Demoting Himself

When Michael Seibel lost his position at the startup incubator Y Combinator, he didn’t find out in typical tech industry fashion, which might entail an email calling him to a Zoom meeting where the bad news would be delivered. He did it to himself. Today Seibel is announcing that he’s stepping down as YC’s managing … Read more

A Startup Will Try to Mine Helium-3 on the Moon

Two of Blue Origin’s earliest employees, former president Rob Meyerson and chief architect Gary Lai, have started a company that seeks to extract helium-3 from the lunar surface, return it to Earth, and sell it for applications here. The company has been operating in stealth since its founding in 2022, but it emerged on Wednesday … Read more

Startups can make India m-cap grow to $50 trillion in 20 years: NSE CEO

India’s market capitalisation can grow from $4.8 trillion now to $50 trillion in the next 20 years, National Stock Exchange (NSE) CEO Ashish Chauhan has predicted. If India must reach a market cap of $50 trillion in next 20 years, it will come on the back of tech-driven startups that will lead wealth creation, National … Read more