Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

It takes a lot of computing power to run an AI product — and as the tech industry races to tap the power of AI models, there’s a parallel race underway to build the infrastructure that will power them. On a recent earnings call, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang estimated that between $3 trillion and $4…

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. To get this in your inbox, sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! The autonomous vehicle industry is years — maybe decades — from maturing. And so there’s still a Wild West quality to…

From tech giants to startups, South Korean players are developing large language models tailored to their own language and culture, ready to compete with global heavyweights like OpenAI and Google.  Last month, the nation launched its most ambitious sovereign AI initiative to date, pledging ₩530 billion, (about $390 million), to five local companies building large-scale…

Researchers at consulting firm BetterUp Labs, in collaboration with Stanford Social Media Lab, have coined a new term to describe low-quality, AI-generated work: “workslop.” As defined in an article published this week in the Harvard Business Review, workslop is “AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance…

If you’ve been on the New York City subway recently, you’ve probably seen stark white ads promoting a wearable AI device called Friend. CEO Avi Schiffman told Adweek that the company spent more than $1 million on a campaign with more than 11,000 cards on subway cars, 1,000 platform posters, and 130 urban panels. Some…

President Donald Trump declared Friday that Microsoft needs to fire Lisa Monaco, the company’s president of global affairs. Citing her roles as “a senior National Security aide under Barack Hussein Obama, and a Lawfare and Weaponization obsessed Deputy Attorney General under Crooked Joe Biden and Lisa’s Puppet ‘Boss’ Attorney General Merrick Garland,” Trump posted on…

Silicon Valley flooded the news this week with headlines about wild AI infrastructure investments. Nvidia said it would invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI. Then OpenAI said it would build out five more Stargate AI data centers with Oracle and SoftBank, adding gigawatts of new capacity online in the coming years. And it was…

The idea of hiring your “first critical engineer” is getting a serious reality check at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, taking place October 27–29 at San Francisco’s Moscone West. Join Lauri Moore, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners; David Cramer, co-founder and chief product officer at Sentry; and Zach Lloyd, founder and CEO of Warp, on the Builders…

In recent years, people have been increasingly looking for new ways to form platonic connections, as loneliness and social isolation have become more prevalent. In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General went so far as to label this issue a public health crisis. Remote workers, who miss the everyday interactions found in an office, and younger…

For years, “know your customer” checks have become commonplace on the internet, often by way of sharing a copy of your government-issued ID and a selfie to confirm that it’s really you, to access a website or app, or to purchase certain goods.   Nowadays, age-verification laws taking effect across the U.S., the United Kingdom,…