Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

Six months after Lip-Bu Tan began his quest to turn around struggling Intel, the semiconductor giant has announced a major hardware upgrade. On Thursday, Intel unveiled a new processor, codenamed Panther Lake. This marks the next generation of the company’s Intel Core Ultra processor family and is the first chip built using Intel’s 18A semiconductor…

Stoke Space announced a massive capital raise on Wednesday that might seem, at first glance, like just another bet on the commercial launch market. The details tell a different story. Led by billionaire Thomas Tull’s U.S. Innovative Technology, a fund that explicitly invests in technologies tied to national security, the $510 million Series D round…

OpenAI is rapidly expanding its affordable ChatGPT Go plan, which costs under $5, to 16 new countries across Asia. The subscription tier is now available in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, East Timor, and Vietnam. In select countries such as Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam,…

Plastic recycling startup Novoloop has inked a deal with a major manufacturer to produce its upcycled thermoplastic polyurethane at commercial scale, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. The agreement helps nudge the Menlo Park-based Novoloop through the so-called “valley of death” that many climate tech startups must slog through.  Startups that depend on hardware are particularly susceptible…

After OpenAI’s video-generating app Sora surged to the No. 1 position on the U.S. App Store, it has now, technically, experienced a bigger first week than ChatGPT on iOS, according to new data from app intelligence provider Appfigures. Its estimates show that Sora saw 627,000 iOS downloads in its first seven days of availability, compared…

Elon Musk will settle a $128 million lawsuit with four Twitter executives whom he fired after taking over the company in 2022. One of Musk’s first moves upon buying Twitter was to fire CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, and top lawyers Sean Edgett and Vijaya Gadde. The four executives never received severance payments, which…

Zelda Williams, daughter of the late actor Robin Williams, has a poignant message for her father’s fans. “Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad. Stop believing I wanna see it or that I’ll understand. I don’t and I won’t,” she wrote in a post on her Instagram story on Monday. “If you’ve got…

British fintech Revolut — now launching in India — says cross-border payments remain one of India’s most underserved financial services. By its estimate, Indians spend about $30 billion overseas every year and lose around $600 million in bank charges — fees its India head calls “criminal.” “It has been the preserve of banks,” Paroma Chatterjee,…

Tesla has spent more than a year teasing that “more affordable models” of its vehicles were on the way, and on Tuesday, the company finally revealed them. The company is now selling a more bare-bones version of the Model 3 sedan and the Model Y SUV, which start at $36,990 and $39,990, respectively. The new…

X announced on Tuesday that Verified Organizations, its premium subscription offering for businesses and governments, is being rebranded and will now be split into two offerings: Premium Business and Premium Organizations. While the Premium Organizations tier comes with a grey checkmark and is intended for governments and multilateral organizations, Premium Business will feature a gold…