<p>ChatGPT, Sora, and OpenAI&#8217;s developer-facing API were down on Thursday for more than four hours. OpenAI says it started experiencing a major outage at 11 a.m. PT, but now says its services are slowly coming back online as of 3:16 p.m. PT. Frequent users of ChatGPT may recall that the service went down earlier this [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Microsoft and OpenAI have a very specific, internal definition of artificial general intelligence (AGI) based on the startup&#8217;s profits, according to a new report from The Information. And by this definition, OpenAI is many years away from reaching it. The two companies reportedly signed an agreement last year stating OpenAI has only achieved AGI when [&hellip;]</p>

<p>While most seed investors believe founders should spend their raised cash however they want to, those VCs will still be judging founders’ cash management.</p>

<p>Once a startup has raised its seed round, the perennial question becomes how much should the founders pay themselves and their first few employees? Kruze Consulting, a CPA firm that specializes in venture-backed startups, recently analyzed average salary ranges for over 450 seed-stage startups and shared that data with TechCrunch. The following averages are based [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Last month, AI founders and investors told TechCrunch that we&#8217;re now in the &#8220;second era of scaling laws,&#8221; noting how established methods of improving AI models were showing diminishing returns. One promising new method they suggested could keep gains was &#8220;test-time scaling,&#8221; which seems to be what&#8217;s behind the performance of OpenAI&#8217;s o3 model &#8212; [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Coralogix, the well-funded observability platform, on Monday announced that it has acquired Aporia, a startup that focuses on giving businesses tools to observe and secure their AI workloads, as well as set guardrails for them to avoid hallucinations or unintended disclosures. As part of this acquisition, Coralogix will launch a dedicated AI research center, Coralogix [&hellip;]</p>

<p>OpenAI announced a new family of AI reasoning models on Friday, o3, which the startup claims to be more advanced than o1 or anything else it has released. These improvements appear to have come from scaling test-time compute, something we wrote about last month, but OpenAI also says it used a new safety paradigm to [&hellip;]</p>

<p>OpenAI saved its biggest announcement for the last day of its 12-day &#8220;shipmas&#8221; event. On Friday, the company unveiled o3, the successor to the o1 &#8220;reasoning&#8221; model it released earlier in the year. o3 is a model family, to be more precise — as was the case with o1. There&#8217;s o3 and o3-mini, a smaller, [&hellip;]</p>

<p>OpenAI saved its biggest announcement for the last day of its 12-day &#8220;shipmas&#8221; event. On Friday, the company unveiled o3, the successor to the o1 &#8220;reasoning&#8221; model it released earlier in the year. o3 is a model family, to be more precise — as was the case with o1. There&#8217;s o3 and o3-mini, a smaller, [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Principle Venture Partners will write early-stage checks anywhere from $100,000 to “single digit millions.” </p>

<p>Principle Venture Partners will write early-stage checks anywhere from $100,000 to “single digit millions.” </p>

<p>OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sat before Congress in 2023 to testify about the dangers of AI. He told American lawmakers at the time that he owns no equity in OpenAI, something he&#8217;s said many times, claiming he just runs the company because he loves it. However, Altman recently said he actually did have some equity [&hellip;]</p>

<p>OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sat before Congress in 2023 to testify about the dangers of AI. He told American lawmakers at the time that he owns no equity in OpenAI, something he&#8217;s said many times, claiming he just runs the company because he loves it. However, Altman recently said he actually did have some equity [&hellip;]</p>

<p>K2 Space is betting that the future of space hardware will be big — really big.  The startup is building massive spacecraft under the assumption that launch costs will continue to drop as SpaceX’s Starship and other heavy-lift vehicles come online. It looks like the Space Force is taking up their side of that bet, [&hellip;]</p>

<p>K2 Space is betting that the future of space hardware will be big — really big.  The startup is building massive spacecraft under the assumption that launch costs will continue to drop as SpaceX’s Starship and other heavy-lift vehicles come online. It looks like the Space Force is taking up their side of that bet, [&hellip;]</p>

<p>The global app economy continued to recover in 2024, after an earlier slowdown in 2022 — at least in terms of consumer spending. In 2024, global consumer spending in mobile apps and games reached $127 billion across the App Store and Google Play, up 15.7% from the prior year. However, those increases were driven by [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Hiya, folks, welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. If you want this in your inbox every Wednesday, smash the link and sign up here. Last week, OpenAI launched Advanced Voice Mode with Vision, which feeds real-time video to ChatGPT, allowing the chatbot to &#8220;see&#8221; beyond the confines of its app layer. The premise is that [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Microsoft-owned GitHub announced on Wednesday a free version of its popular Copilot code completion/AI pair programming tool, which will also now ship by default with Microsoft&#8217;s popular VS Code editor. Until now, most developers had to pay a monthly fee, starting at $10 per month, with only verified students, teachers, and open source maintainers getting [&hellip;]</p>

<p>After nearly four years of working in sales at tradesperson software company ServiceTitan, Mark Hoadley (pictured above) was looking for a change and to potentially start something of his own in a similar industry. Hoadley&#8217;s brother-in-law and now co-founder, Ben Sikma, was working on M&amp;A in the waste-management space at the time. Sikma discovered how [&hellip;]</p>

<p>After nearly four years of working in sales at tradesperson software company ServiceTitan, Mark Hoadley (pictured above) was looking for a change and to potentially start something of his own in a similar industry. Hoadley&#8217;s brother-in-law and now co-founder, Ben Sikma, was working on M&amp;A in the waste-management space at the time. Sikma discovered how [&hellip;]</p>