Tag: Start-ups

Sam Bankman-Fried Sentenced to 25 Years in Prison

Sam Bankman-Fried, the former cryptocurrency mogul who was convicted of fraud, was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Thursday, capping an extraordinary saga that upended the multi-trillion-dollar crypto industry and became a cautionary tale of greed and hubris. Mr. Bankman-Fried’s sentence was shorter than the 40 to 50 years that federal prosecutors had recommended, […]

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How Sam Bankman-Fried’s Sentence Compares With Other White-Collar Cases

Two years in prison for tax and securities violations. Eleven years for deceiving investors. A 150-year sentence for the largest Ponzi scheme in history. The country’s most notorious white-collar fraudsters — like Bernie Madoff and Elizabeth Holmes — have received a range of punishments for their crimes, from relatively short prison terms to effectively a […]

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Amazon Adds $2.75 Billion to its Stake in Anthropic

Amazon said on Wednesday that it had added $2.75 billion to its investment in Anthropic, a start-up that competes with companies like OpenAI and Google in the race to build cutting-edge A.I. systems. The investment comes six months after Amazon invested $1.25 billion in Anthropic, making the San Francisco start-up Amazon’s most important A.I. partner. […]

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Inside Amira Yahyaoui’s Claims about Mos, a Student Aid Start-Up

As a Tunisian human rights activist in the 2000s, Amira Yahyaoui staged protests and blogged about government corruption. In interviews, she described being beaten by police. When she was 18, she said, she was kidnapped from the street, dropped off at the Algerian border and placed in exile for several years. Ms. Yahyaoui’s compelling background […]

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Reddit Opens Up 38%, as Shares Begin Trading

Reddit shares opened up about 38 percent on Thursday in their first day of trading, in a sign of investor eagerness that set the stage for more tech companies to reach the stock market this year. Shares of the social media company began trading on the New York Stock Exchange at $47 after pricing at […]

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Reddit Said to Price IPO at $34 a Share, in a Positive Sign for Tech

Reddit on Wednesday priced its shares at $34 for its initial public offering, at the high end of expectations, in a sign of investor demand for growing tech companies. The San Francisco-based social media company had estimated that its shares would be priced at $31 to $34. The $34 price put Reddit’s value at $6.4 […]

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Young Entrepreneurs Find a Way to Indulge Their C.E.O. Dreams

Edward Silva grew up wanting to be a chief executive. In 2018, Mr. Silva enrolled at the Stanford Graduate School of Business with the goal of starting his own company. “I was going to live the Stanford dream,” he said. “I was going to find an engineer — we were going to find a venture […]

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Taiwan Is Building a Satellite Network Without Elon Musk

In Taiwan, the government is racing to do what no country or even company has been able to: build an alternative to Starlink, the satellite internet service operated by Elon Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX. Starlink has allowed militaries, power plants and medical workers to maintain crucial online connections when primary infrastructure has failed in emergencies, […]

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Reddit’s Long, Rocky Road to an Initial Public Offering

During a leadership crisis in 2015, Reddit asked Steve Huffman, one of its founders, to return to run the social media platform. Mr. Huffman, who was working on a travel site, was not eager to come back. Reddit was a headache. It was experiencing a revolving door of chief executives. Its sprawling community of users […]

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In Silicon Valley, Venture Capital Meets a Generational Shift

Reid Hoffman, a founder of LinkedIn and a longtime venture capitalist, is no longer the public face of the venture firm Greylock. Michael Moritz, a force at Sequoia Capital for 38 years, officially separated from the investment firm last summer. And Jeff Jordan, a top investor at Andreessen Horowitz for 12 years, left in May. […]

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How the A.I. That Drives ChatGPT Will Move Into the Physical World

Companies like OpenAI and Midjourney build chatbots, image generators and other artificial intelligence tools that operate in the digital world. Now, a start-up founded by three former OpenAI researchers is using the technology development methods behind chatbots to build A.I. technology that can navigate the physical world. Covariant, a robotics company headquartered in Emeryville, Calif., […]

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Marc Lore Is Trying to Build the Amazon of Food Delivery

When Marc Lore, the e-commerce billionaire, left his position as the chief executive of Walmart.com in 2021, he began to dabble in a variety of long-odds attempts to change the world. He backed a nuclear fusion start-up, and another designing flying taxis. Frustrated with the current state of capitalism, he embarked on plans to build, […]

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These Startups Want to Make Palm Oil. In a Lab. Without Palm Trees.

A handful of startups are trying to reinvent one of the most ubiquitous, but also environmentally destructive, ingredients in our diets: palm oil. Palm oil is in bread, instant noodles, Girl Scout cookies, lipstick, Nutella and ice cream, to name a few. People around the world use it to cook daily. But to make all […]

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Big American Tech Profits From Chinese Ad Spending Spree

The trade relationship between China and the United States has plenty of friction. But at least one area is booming: Chinese start-ups looking to establish a presence in the West are spending billions of dollars for advertisements on services owned by some of Silicon Valley’s biggest technology companies. Temu, the international arm of the Chinese […]

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Anthropic Challenges OpenAI and Google With New Chatbot

The high-profile A.I. start-up Anthropic released a new version of its Claude chatbot on Monday, saying it outperforms other leading chatbots on a range of standard benchmark tests, including systems from Google and OpenAI. Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive and co-founder, said the new technology, called Claude 3 Opus, was particularly useful when analyzing scientific […]

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When Eyes in the Sky Start Looking Right at You

For decades, privacy experts have been wary of snooping from space. They feared satellites powerful enough to zoom in on individuals, capturing close-ups that might differentiate adults from children or suited sunbathers from those in a state of nature. Now, quite suddenly, analysts say, a startup is building a new class of satellite whose cameras […]

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In Big Election Year, A.I.’s Architects Move Against Its Misuse

Artificial intelligence companies have been at the vanguard of developing the transformative technology. Now they are also racing to set limits on how A.I. is used in a year stacked with major elections around the world. Last month, OpenAI, the maker of the ChatGPT chatbot, said it was working to prevent abuse of its tools […]

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Hard Fork: Bluesky’s Big Bet, and Are Deals Dead in Silicon Valley?

Listen and follow ‘Hard Fork’Apple | Spotify | Amazon | YouTube Bluesky, the Twitter spinoff, is now open for public sign-ups. Can its dreams of decentralization fix social media? We talk with the company’s chief executive, Jay Graber. Then, the New York Times reporter Erin Griffith on how Adobe’s failure to acquire Figma has spooked […]

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Cultivated Meat’s Empty Promise of Revolution

It is a gleaming vision of a world just beyond the present: a world in which meat is abundant and affordable with almost no cost to the environment. Animal slaughter is forgotten. Global warming is restrained. At the heart of the vision is a high-tech factory housing steel tanks as tall as apartment buildings and […]

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After Figma’s $20 Billion Windfall Evaporated, It’s Picking Up the Pieces

On Dec. 18, a $20 billion deal by Adobe, the software giant, to buy Figma, a San Francisco start-up darling, fell apart after more than a year of regulatory scrutiny. In a blog post that day, Dylan Field, Figma’s chief executive and co-founder, painted an optimistic picture of what would come next. “Figma’s best, most […]

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A.I. Fuels a New Era of Product Placement

Product placement, one of the oldest tricks in advertisers’ toolbox, is getting an A.I. makeover. New technology has made it easier to insert digital, realistic-looking versions of soda cans and shampoo onto the tables and walls of videos on YouTube and TikTok. And a growing group of creators and advertisers is grabbing at the chance […]

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Can This A.I.-Powered Search Engine Replace Google? It Has for Me.

For my entire adult life, whenever I’ve had a question about the world or needed to track down something online, I’ve gone to Google for answers. But recently, I’ve been stepping out on Google with a new, A.I.-powered search engine. (No, not Bing, which is dead to me after it tried to break up my […]

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Focused Cuts and Fewer Layers: Tech Layoffs Enter a New Phase

Last year, Mark Zuckerberg declared 2023 to be a “year of efficiency.” His company, Meta, soon laid off a third of its employees. Amazon, Google and Microsoft also cut tens of thousands of workers. Their worlds did not stop. Not only that, the companies were rewarded. Their stock prices soared. Some divisions were more productive. […]

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Moon Lander Malfunctions After Launch, Raising Questions for NASA

The first NASA-financed commercial mission to send a robotic spacecraft to the surface of the moon will most likely not be able to make it there. The lunar lander, named Peregrine and built by Astrobotic Technology of Pittsburgh, encountered problems shortly after it lifted off early Monday morning from Cape Canaveral, Fla. The launch of […]

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The Messenger, Which Aimed to Transform Media, Faces Dire Financial Straits

Shortly before the media start-up The Messenger launched last year, its president said the company planned to generate more than $100 million of revenue in 2024. It will need a major turn in fortune to get there. The site generated about $3 million in revenue last year, according to two people with knowledge of the […]

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New Spin on a Revolving Door: Pentagon Officials Turned Venture Capitalists

When Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III and other top officials assembled for an event this month at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, they walked into a lesson in how the high-stakes world of Pentagon lobbying is being altered by the rise of defense technology startups. Inside, at this elite gathering near Los Angeles of […]

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The First Secret Asteroid Mission Won’t Be the Last

For generations, Western space missions have largely occurred out in the open. We knew where they were going, why they were going there and what they planned to do. But the world is on the verge of a new era in which private interests override such openness, with big money potentially on the line. Sometime […]

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No Oversight: Inside a Boom-Time Start-Up Fraud and Its Unraveling

After Manish Lachwani founded the Silicon Valley software start-up HeadSpin in 2015, he inflated the company’s revenue numbers by nearly fourfold and falsely claimed that firms including Apple and American Express were customers. He showed a profit where there were losses. He used HeadSpin’s cash to make risky trades on tech stocks. And he created […]

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E.V. Start-up Founder Could Get Prison Term in Fraud Case

The founder of an electric truck company is expected to face significant prison time when he is sentenced on Monday in a fraud case that highlights the financial carnage left behind by a crop of electric vehicle start-ups and their promoters. A federal judge in Manhattan will sentence Trevor Milton, the founder and former chief […]

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