Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
Foxconn sells former GM factory to mystery buyer after failing to make EVs
Foxconn has sold the former GM factory it has owned for three years after failing to stand up any meaningful, large-scale electric vehicle production there. The pivot marks the second major failure of Foxconn to deliver on its promises to help revive U.S. manufacturing. The iPhone-maker once promised to build a giant LCD factory in…
Google says its AI-based bug hunter found 20 security vulnerabilities
Google’s AI-powered bug hunter has just reported its first batch of security vulnerabilities. Heather Adkins, Google’s vice president of security, announced Monday that its LLM-based vulnerability researcher Big Sleep found and reported 20 flaws in various popular open source software. Adkins said that Big Sleep, which is developed by the company’s AI department DeepMind as…
Mastercard denies pressuring game platforms, Valve tells a different story
The outcry after a recent marketplace crackdown on games with adult content, seemingly due to pressure from payment processors, prompted Mastercard to release a brief statement Friday pushing back against recent headlines. “Mastercard has not evaluated any game or required restrictions of any activity on game creator sites and platforms, contrary to media reports and…
Apple might be building its own AI ‘answer engine’
Apple has formed a new team to build a ChatGPT-like app, according to according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. This team — reportedly called Answers, Knowledge, and Information — is working to build an “answer engine” that can respond to questions using information from across the web. This could be a standalone app or provide search…
Inside OpenAI’s quest to make AI do anything for you
Shortly after Hunter Lightman joined OpenAI as a researcher in 2022, he watched his colleagues launch ChatGPT, one of the fastest-growing products ever. Meanwhile, Lightman quietly worked on a team teaching OpenAI’s models to solve high school math competitions. Today that team, known as MathGen, is considered instrumental to OpenAI’s industry-leading effort to create AI…
SAP is acquiring SmartRecruiters | TechCrunch
SAP announced Friday that it has reached an agreement to acquire recruiting software company SmartRecruiters. In a press release, the European software giant said that SmartRecruiters “powerful, user-friendly interfaces and seamless workflows” will complement SAP’s existing HR tools. Muhammad Alam, the SAP executive board member who leads product and engineering, said in a statement that…
Lina Khan points to Figma IPO as vindication of M&A scrutiny
A surprising figure is celebrating Figma’s successful IPO: Lina Khan, former chair of the Federal Trade Commission. In a Friday afternoon post on X, Khan linked to an article about Figma’s impressive first day of trading and argued the IPO is “a great reminder that letting startups grow into independently successful businesses, rather than be…
Tim Cook reportedly tells employees Apple ‘must’ win in AI
Apple CEO Tim Cook held an hourlong all-hands meeting in which he told employees that the company needs to win in AI, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. The meeting came after an earnings call in which Cook told investors and analysts that Apple would “significantly” increase its AI investments. It seems he had a similar…
What founders should think about if looking to raise a Series C
Startup founders face a perplexing and even contradictory capital market in 2025, according to Sapphire Ventures partner Cathy Gao. “Capital isn’t scarce. But access to that capital is harder than ever,” she said. Gao, who spoke at TechCrunch’s All Stage conference in July, said it’s possible for startup founders, especially those in later Series C…
Anthropic cuts off OpenAI’s access to its Claude models
Anthropic has revoked OpenAI’s access to its Claude family of AI models, according to a report in Wired. Sources told Wired that OpenAI was connecting Claude to internal tools that allowed the company to compare Claude’s performance to its own models in categories like coding, writing, and safety. TechCrunch has reached out to Anthropic for…
Got any book recommendations?