Technology

Loading the player… The creator economy is evolving fast, and ad revenue alone isn’t cutting it anymore. YouTubers are launching product lines, acquiring startups, and building actual business empires. In fact, MrBeast’s company bought fintech startup Step, and his chocolate business is outearning his media arm. This isn’t just one creator’s strategy. For many, it’s the new playbook.  On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Rebecca Bellan unpack how creators are…

A U.S. federal court has sentenced a Ukrainian man to five years in prison for his part in a long-running identity theft operation that helped overseas North Korean workers gain fraudulent employment at dozens of U.S. companies. U.S. prosecutors brought charges in 2024 against Oleksandr Didenko, 29, a resident of Kyiv, for setting up North…

Abu Dhabi-based tech company G42 has partnered with U.S.-based chipmaker Cerebras to deploy 8 exaflops of computing power via a new supercomputer system in India, the companies said on the sidelines of the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi. The system will be hosted in India and follow local data residency, security, and compliance…

General Catalyst, a Silicon Valley-based venture firm with more than $43 billion in assets under management, has announced it plans to invest $5 billion in India over the next five years, sharply expanding its push into the country’s startup ecosystem less than two years after merging with local venture firm Venture Highway. The commitment, unveiled…

On Thursday, Google released the newest version of Gemini Pro, its powerful LLM. The model, 3.1, is currently available as a preview and will be generally released soon, the company said. Google’s new model may be one of the most powerful LLMs yet. Onlookers have noted that Gemini 3.1 Pro appears to be a big…

If you work in tech, Wired’s new cover story isn’t exactly going to shatter your worldview, but it’s a genuinely great read all the same. Reporter Zoë Bernard spent months talking to 51 people (31 of them gay men) to map out a subculture that’s been an open secret in Silicon Valley for years: gay…

Sam Basu quit his job as a senior software engineer at Google in early 2023, not long after OpenAI released ChatGPT. He took a few stabs at starting new AI businesses, but nothing really stuck until he got a call from a friend who wanted help filling out customs paperwork. Basu got “very curious” and…

OpenAI has partnered with India’s Tata Group to secure 100 megawatts of AI-ready data center capacity in the country, with plans to scale to 1 gigawatt. The move is part of a broader push to deepen the company’s enterprise and infrastructure footprint in one of its fastest-growing markets. OpenAI announced on Thursday that the partnership…

As India pitches itself as a global hub for applied artificial intelligence, OpenAI has partnered with Pine Labs to integrate AI-driven reasoning into the fintech firm’s payments stack, automating settlement and invoicing workflows in a move the companies say could help accelerate AI-led commerce in India. The partnership will see Pine Labs embed OpenAI’s application…

Def Con, one of the largest and longest-running hacking conferences in the world, announced on Wednesday that three people linked to Jeffrey Epstein are no longer allowed to attend.   The conference justified adding Pablos Holman, Vincenzo Iozzo, and Joichi Ito to its public list of banned individuals, citing the three as appearing in the Department…