Welcome to TechCrunch AM! This morning, we've got life-changing money for Wiz's early backers, SoftBank's latest buy, and OpenAI's expensive new model. We've also got a spyware data breach, Sequoia's step away from policy, Europe's moves for tech sovereignty, Discord's ads, and why chatbots aren't for fact-checking. Let's go! — Rebecca | | | Image Credits: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg / Getty Images | 1. Ca-ching: Wiz's $32 billion all-cash Google deal means a colossal payday for the firm's early backers. Like Cyberstarts, which took a $6.4 million bet on Wiz in 2020 and is now poised to make $1.3 billion. Read More 2. Deals on deals: SoftBank Group is buying semiconductor designer Ampere Computing for $5.6 billion in cash in a move to broaden investment into AI infrastructure beyond the at-times volatile Arm Holdings. Read More 3. Upgrade? OpenAI's new more powerful version of its o1 "reasoning" AI model, o1-pro, is its most expensive yet. At $150 per million tokens fed into the model, it's 2x the price of GPT-4.5 and 10x the price of o1. Read More | | | Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch | 🕵️ Another reason not to spy: TC has learned that consumer-grade spyware operation SpyX was hit by a data breach last year, the 25th mobile surveillance operation to be hit (by our count) since 2017. Though it's hard to feel anything but schadenfreude for the customers affected. Read More 📪 Politics, shmolitics: Sequoia is shuttering its DC office and laying off its policy team. The move contrasts with other prominent VC firms that are strengthening ties with Capitol Hill and the new Trump admin. Read More ☁️ Cloud sovereignty: Swedish startup Evroc has raised a $55 million Series A to lay the groundwork for "a secure, sovereign and sustainable hyperscale cloud to reimagine the digital future of Europe." Read More 👋 So long, farewell: After more than 12 years at Y Combinator, Michael Seibel has announced that he's transitioning to a "partner emeritus" role. Read More 👐 Open up: European startup Pruna AI is open sourcing its optimization framework. The framework applies efficiency methods such as caching, pruning, quantization, and distillation to a given AI model. Read More | | | 🧐 Using the Tesla playbook for DOGE: And no, not the production scale genius. Road safety researchers who have followed Musk for years say DOGE's reported history of fudging the numbers to look more productive than it is "scream[s] Tesla," per Wired. Read More 🎮 Only a matter of time: Discord is bringing third-party ads to its mobile platform via a pilot for Video Quests, reports The Verge. The mobile ads come amid rumors that Discord is prepping for an IPO. Read More 🔮 Crypto M&A: Crypto exchange Kraken agreed to a $1.5 billion deal for NinjaTrader, a retail futures trading platform, so it can expand its user base and explore other asset classes, per The Wall Street Journal. Read More | | | Image Credits: AndreyPopov / Getty Images | 🕳️ Human fact-checkers are concerned that Grok and other chatbots are spreading misinformation online because people use them for fact-checking. Don't be like those people. Do your own research. Read More | | | Featured jobs from CrunchBoard | | | Has this been forwarded to you? Click here to subscribe to this newsletter. | | | Update your preferences here at any time | | Copyright © 2024 TechCrunch, All rights reserved.Yahoo Inc. 680 Folsom Street,San Francisco,CA | | | | |
