Kyle Wiggers, Author at TechCrunch

Sam Altman returns to OpenAI, Apple adopts RCS, and Binance’s CEO pleads guilty to charges

Kyle Wiggers — Sat, 25 Nov 2023 21:16:46 +0000

Hey, folks, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular recap of the past few days in tech. The headlines have been dominated — nay, overwhelmed — by the drama unfolding at AI startup OpenAI, but plenty else happened in the half-week leading up to Thanksgiving. So much for a sleepy pre-holiday! In this edition […]

Neuralink, Elon Musk’s brain implant startup, quietly raises an additional $43M

Kyle Wiggers — Sat, 25 Nov 2023 16:25:38 +0000

Neuralink, the Elon Musk-founded company developing implantable chips that can read brain waves, has raised an additional $43 million in venture capital, according to a filing with the SEC. The filing published this week shows the company increased its previous tranche, led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, from $280 million to $323 million in early […]

OpenAI, emerging from the ashes, has a lot to prove even with Sam Altman’s return

Kyle Wiggers — Thu, 23 Nov 2023 16:26:20 +0000

The OpenAI power struggle that captivated the tech world after co-founder Sam Altman was fired has finally reached its end — at least for the time being. But what to make of it? It feels almost as though some eulogizing is called for — like OpenAI died and a new, but not necessarily improved, startup […]

ChatGPT: Everything you need to know about the AI-powered chatbot

Kyle Wiggers — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 19:02:39 +0000

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm. What started as a tool to hyper-charge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved into a behemoth used by more than 92% of Fortune 500 companies for more wide-ranging needs. And that growth has propelled OpenAI itself into becoming […]

5 AI-powered tech gifts that are actually fun — and productive

Kyle Wiggers — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 17:00:57 +0000

As the holiday season approaches, I, like everyone else with the means and mental bandwidth, am brainstorming what to get the loved ones in my life. Or rather, I would be… but to be fully transparent, the irksome little procrastinating voice in my head has gotten the better of me this year. So it goes. […]

OpenAI’s initial new board counts Larry Summers among its ranks

Kyle Wiggers — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 16:16:35 +0000

Meet OpenAI’s new board of directors: Bret Taylor, Larry Summers and Adam D’Angelo. Or, more precisely, the board for the time being. We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D'Angelo. We are collaborating […]

A timeline of Sam Altman’s firing from OpenAI — and the fallout

Kyle Wiggers — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 07:10:46 +0000

In a dramatic turn of events late Friday, ex-Y Combinator president Sam Altman was fired as CEO of AI startup OpenAI, the company behind viral AI hits like ChatGPT, GPT-4 and DALL-E 3, by OpenAI’s board of directors. Then, the company’s longtime president and co-founder, Greg Brockman, resigned — as did three senior OpenAI researchers. […]

Crezco aims to make integrating bill payments easier

Kyle Wiggers — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 00:01:06 +0000

Integrating with a payment API is something most — if not all — business-to-consumer platforms are forced to do at some point. It’s practically unavoidable if they wish to take credit card payments. The trouble is, for platforms dealing in bills and invoices, not just one-off charges, few payment APIs have all the features necessary […]

Stability AI gets into the video-generating game

Kyle Wiggers — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 23:39:52 +0000

AI startups that aren’t OpenAI are plugging away this week, it’d seem — sticking to their product roadmaps even as coverage of the chaos at OpenAI dominates the airwaves. See: Stability AI, which this afternoon announced Stable Video Diffusion, an AI model that generates videos by animating existing images. Based on Stability’s existing Stable Diffusion text-to-image […]

Greg Brockman is still announcing OpenAI products for some reason

Kyle Wiggers — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 21:19:04 +0000

Ex-OpenAI president Greg Brockman — who, as far as we’re aware, isn’t currently employed at OpenAI in any capacity — is posting updates about OpenAI products on X, including one today about ChatGPT’s voice narration feature being made available to all ChatGPT users. ChatGPT Voice rolled out for all free users. Give it a try […]

Will the OpenAI chaos boost open source models?

Kyle Wiggers — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 20:30:00 +0000

Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.

OpenAI’s board may be coming around to Sam Altman returning

Kyle Wiggers — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 19:18:01 +0000

OpenAI’s board of directors is reportedly in talks with Sam Altman, ex-Y Combinator president and an OpenAI co-founder, to return to OpenAI as CEO as soon as this week. That’s according to Bloomberg, which in a brief this morning — citing sources close to the matter — said that discussions are happening between Quora CEO […]

A brief look at the history of OpenAI’s board

Kyle Wiggers — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 18:04:42 +0000

Three OpenAI board members stepped down earlier this year within months of each other — yet the startup didn’t line up replacements. One of the current members, former Facebook CTO and Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, launched an AI chatbot platform, Poe, that leverages — but also competes — with OpenAI products. And two members, Tasha […]

Generative AI startup AI21 Labs raises cash in the midst of OpenAI chaos

Kyle Wiggers — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 14:00:13 +0000

One AI startup’s undoing is another’s opportunity. Case in point: Today, AI21 Labs, a company developing generative AI products along the lines of OpenAI’s GPT-4 and ChatGPT, closed a $53 million extension to its previously announced Series C funding round. The new tranche, which had participation from new investors Intel Capital and Comcast Ventures, brings […]

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella suggests that Sam Altman might return to OpenAI

Kyle Wiggers — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 01:22:36 +0000

In interviews on CNBC and Bloomberg TV tonight, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made it clear that it’s possible Sam Altman, who was fired from his role as CEO at OpenAI by the AI startup’s board of directors on Friday, could return to OpenAI in some capacity. That’s despite the fact that Altman announced this morning […]

Investors are souring on OpenAI’s nonprofit governance model

Kyle Wiggers — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 22:34:34 +0000

OpenAI was never quite like other generative AI startups — or other startups period, for that matter. Its governance structure is unique and what ultimately led to the abrupt ousting of CEO Sam Altman on Friday. Even after it transitioned from a nonprofit to a “capped-profit” company in 2019, OpenAI retained an unusual structure that […]

Most of OpenAI’s employees threaten to quit if Sam Altman isn’t reappointed CEO

Kyle Wiggers — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 14:55:46 +0000

The OpenAI saga continues. This morning, Ilya Sutskever, the AI startup’s chief scientist and board director, published a mea culpa of sorts on X (formerly Twitter). Sutskever was among those who pushed to abruptly remove former Y Combinator president Sam Altman as CEO of OpenAI and demote Greg Brockman, the company’s president, from his position […]

LucidLink lands $75M for its on-demand file streaming tech

Kyle Wiggers — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 14:00:30 +0000

LucidLink, a startup offering a platform that enables teams to work on files without having to download or sync them, today announced that it raised $75 million in a Series C round led by Brighton Park Capital with participation from Headline, Adobe Ventures and Baseline Ventures. The tranche brings LucidLink’s total raised to $90 million […]

Sam Altman won’t return as OpenAI’s CEO after all

Kyle Wiggers — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 06:19:07 +0000

Capping off a tumultuous weekend at OpenAI that culminated in investors — and a contingent of employees — attempting to convince the company’s board to hire back former Y Combinator president Sam Altman after firing him on Friday, Altman won’t be returning as CEO, according to a report in The Information. Citing an internal memo […]

OpenAI’s board is no match for investors’ wrath

Kyle Wiggers — Sun, 19 Nov 2023 18:05:45 +0000

On Friday, the board of OpenAI, the AI startup behind ChatGPT and other viral AI-powered hits, did something unexpected but seemingly well within its right: it removed the company’s CEO, Sam Altman. But judging by how the situation’s unfolded, it seems that OpenAI’s investors and partners — and many of its employees — were more […]