Technology

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. I’m coming in with a hot take this week: plastics might just be the most useful inventions of the 20th century.  Before you get out the pitchforks, let me take you on a…

Badili, a Kenya-based smartphone re-commerce startup, has raised $2.1 million pre-seed funding to scale its operations within Africa; one of the fastest-growing mobile phone market in the world. The Venture Catalysts, V&R Africa, Grenfell holdings, and SOSV, participated in the round, as did family offices and angel investors from Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and India. […]

Smartphone re-commerce startup Badili raises $2.1M pre-seed funding by Annie Njanja originally published on TechCrunch

DeHaat, a startup that offers a wide-range of agricultural services to farmers in India, has raised $60 million in a new funding round as it looks to deepen its penetration in the country and reach break-even profitability within two years. Sofina Ventures and Temasek co-led the Patna and Gurgaon-headquartered startup’s Series E funding, it said, […]

Indian agritech DeHaat tops $700 million valuation in $60 million funding by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch

“I’ve had a bad month,” Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) said on stage. The crowd instantly broke out in laughter. The former CEO and founder of disgraced crypto exchange FTX, SBF’s month probably got worse today. In his first public interview since his company imploded, New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin didn’t go easy on him […]

SBF says journalists are good, actually by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch

Microsoft may have long had OpenAI as its trusty partner (after its sizable investment), but AWS today announced that Stability AI, one of the hottest new upstarts in the generative AI space and the company behind Stable Diffusion, is doubling down on its cloud, making it its “preferred cloud provider to build and scale its […]

Stability AI doubles down on AWS by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch

European Union regulators have fired another warning shot at Elon Musk over his erratic piloting of Twitter since his takeover last month — saying he has “huge work” ahead if the social media site is to avoid falling foul of major new governance rules for digital services which entered into force earlier this month. Reminder: […]

Musk at Twitter has ‘huge work’ ahead to comply with EU rules, warns bloc by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch

3 proptech investors explain how reducing emissions can trim a building’s carbon footprint and offer new opportunities for returns.

Proptech in Review: 3 investors explain why they’re bullish on tech that makes buildings greener by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch

Cruise, GM’s self-driving technology subsidiary, has started the long and winding regulatory process to test its next-generation ‘Origin’ robotaxi on public roads in San Francisco. The company has applied for a permit with the California Department of Motor Vehicles to test its custom-built driverless vehicle on public roads. The news first reported by the Wall […]

GM’s Cruise pursuing permit to test its custom-built ‘Origin’ robotaxi in San Francisco by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch

Buzz around GPT-4, the anticipated but as-yet unannounced follow-up to OpenAI’s ground-breaking large language model, GPT-3, is growing by the week. But OpenAI is not yet done tinkering with the previous version. The San Francisco-based company has released a demo of a new model called ChatGPT, a spin-off of GPT-3 that is geared towards answering…

Elon Musk’s brain-computer interface company Neuralink likes to give progress reports via theatrically staged events that it livestreams. Its next event, scheduled for tonight at 6 pm Pacific time, was announced by the company via a brief video invitation in which the words “please join us for show and tell” appeared as if they were…