TopTechTrends

A16z hires acquitted former Marine Daniel Penny as an investor 

February 4, 2025

Powerhouse venture firm Andreessen Horowitz has hired Daniel Penny as an investor, its webpage confirms.  Penny is the former Marine who was tried last year and found not guilty of criminally negligent homicide in the death of a homeless man on a New York City subway. After the man acted erratically, Penny held him in […]

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AMD pulls up the release of its next-gen data center GPUs

February 4, 2025

AMD says that it plans to launch its next major data center GPUs, the AMD Instinct MI350 series, sooner than originally announced. During the company’s Q4 2024 earnings call Tuesday, AMD CEO Lisa Su said AMD plans to sample the MI350 with “lead customers” this quarter, and “accelerate” production shipments to “mid-year.” “So, we had […]

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Miist, founded by a 25-year-old, wants people to vape their way out of smoking addiction and migraines

February 4, 2025

As a university student, Dalton Signor was troubled by how many people around him smoked or vaped, including his grandmother and 14-year-old sister. Signor (pictured center) felt that existing smoking cessation medicines, whether patches, gums, or lozenges, are not very effective because they take too long to start working. “They take about 30 minutes to […]

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Google removes pledge to not use AI for weapons from website

February 4, 2025

Google removed a pledge to not build AI for weapons or surveillance from its website this week. The change was first spotted by Bloomberg. The company appears to have updated its public AI principles page, erasing a section titled “applications we will not pursue,” which was still included as recently as last week. Asked for […]

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Spyware maker Paragon confirms U.S. government is a customer

February 4, 2025

Israeli spyware maker Paragon Solutions confirmed to TechCrunch that it sells its products to the U.S. government and other unspecified allied countries. Paragon’s executive chairman John Fleming said in a statement to TechCrunch on Tuesday that, “Paragon licenses its technology to a select group of global democracies — principally, the United States and its allies.” […]

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Okta competitor SailPoint races toward $11.5B IPO

February 4, 2025

Cybersecurity company SailPoint is hoping to sell $1 billion worth of stock in its upcoming IPO and offer another signal that IPOs will become hot again.

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Figure drops OpenAI in favor of in-house models

February 4, 2025

Figure AI founder and CEO Brett Adcock announced Tuesday that the humanoid robotics firm is exiting a deal with OpenAI. The Bay Area-based robotics company has instead opted to focus on in-house AI, owing to a “major breakthrough.” Adcock was tightlipped in terms of specifics, but he promised to deliver “something no one has ever […]

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Hugging Face researchers aim to build an ‘open’ version of OpenAI’s deep research tool

February 4, 2025

A group of developers at AI dev platform Hugging Face, including Thomas Wolf, the company’s co-founder and chief scientist, say they’ve built an “open” version of OpenAI’s deep research tool. Deep research, which OpenAI unveiled during an event Sunday, crawls the web to compile research reports on any subject. While impressive, deep research is currently […]

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