Tag: In Brief

One of Elon Musk’s longtime VCs is suing his former employer after allegedly being fired

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Josh Raffaelli, who has deep roots as a Silicon Valley investor and has backed a number of Elon Musk companies, is suing his former employer, the massive trillion-dollar AUM Brookfield Asset Management, reports The New York Times. 

Much of Raffaelli’s complaint concerns how Brookfield covered pandemic-related real estate losses and alleges the company fired him after he filed a whistleblower complaint at the SEC. His suit makes allegations like fraud and bribery, while Brookfield vehemently denies any wrongdoing, it told The Times.

In February, Brookfield quietly shuttered the venture capital unit run by Raffaelli and rolled some assets into another unit, Bloomberg reported at the time. One of Raffaelli’s complaints in the suit is that Brookfield didn’t buy as much stock in Musk-owned companies as he had secured the ability to buy.

Raffaelli had deals to buy into Musk companies like SpaceX, xAI, and the Boring Company, the suit alleges. And his Brookfield fund was a big backer of Musk’s takeover of Twitter, Bloomberg reported.

The lawsuit is a very public battle for Raffaelli, who previously worked as a partner at the VC firm then known as Draper Fisher Jurvetson. (Today, it’s a collection of funds.) While at DFJ,  Brookfield helped that firm make investments into Musk companies like SolarCity (acquired by Tesla), SpaceX, and Tesla.

Microsoft reportedly ramps up AI efforts to compete with OpenAI

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Microsoft is accelerating its push to compete with OpenAI, its longtime collaborator, by developing its own powerful AI models and exploring alternatives to power products like Microsoft’s Copilot bot.

Microsoft has developed its own AI “reasoning” models comparable to models like OpenAI’s o1 and o3-mini, the The Information reports. OpenAI is said to have refused Microsoft’s requests for technical details about how o1 works — stoking tensions between the firms.

Microsoft has also developed a family of models called MAI that are competitive with OpenAI’s own, Bloomberg reports, and is reportedly considering offering them through an API later this year. Parallel to those efforts, Microsoft is said to be testing alternative AI models from xAI, Meta, Anthropic, and DeepSeek as possible replacements for OpenAI technology in Copilot.

Microsoft, which has invested around $14 billion in OpenAI to date, has looked to hedge its bets in a number of ways, including hiring DeepMind and Inflection co-founder Mustafa Suleyman to lead the tech giant’s AI efforts.

Elon Musk’s pro-Trump critics claim they’re being censored on X

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Conservatives critical of Elon Musk are accusing the platform he owns of censoring them, CNN reports.

Political activist Laura Loomer sparked an online debate within the Right about work visas known as H-1Bs, which Musk supports. Loomer now claims her account has been unverified and demonetized, accusing Musk of being a “free speech fraud.”

Meanwhile, another conservative activist, Charles C. Johnson, claims X banned his account because he “embarrassed” Musk by writing about his father’s alleged involvement with an emerald mine, something Musk has long denied. (Neither this nor Loomer’s accusations have been substantiated.)

Elon has long publicly supported free speech, posting that it’s “the bedrock of democracy.” But Musk has also been accused of silencing people on the platform, notably in 2022 when X temporarily suspended journalists covering the suspension of an account tracking his jet.

X didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

ChatGPT Search can be tricked into misleading users, new research reveals

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ChatGPT Search, an AI-powered search engine that went live this month, can be fooled into generating completely misleading summaries, U.K. newspaper The Guardian has found.

ChatGPT’s search feature is meant to make browsing faster by doing things like summarizing a web page’s product reviews. But The Guardian found it could get ChatGPT to ignore negative reviews and generate “entirely positive” summaries by inserting hidden text into websites it created. ChatGPT Search could also be made to spit out malicious code using this method.

Such hidden text attacks are a well-known risk for large language models, but this appears to be the first time it’s demonstrated on a live AI-powered search product. Google, the leader in search, has more experience dealing with similar problems, The Guardian noted.

OpenAI didn’t comment about this specific incident when TechCrunch reached out, but said it uses a variety of methods to block malicious websites and is continually improving.

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Built in four days, this $120 robot arm cleans a spill with help from GPT-4o

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Large language models have already proven transformative for robotics. While researchers and companies alike utilize the platforms to supercharge robotic learning, a pair of roboticists at UC Berkeley and ETH Zurich challenged themselves by leveraging generative AI to put a cheap robot arm to work.

Jannik Grothusen and Kaspar Janssen trained a pair of $120 robot arms to clean a spill. Using GPT-4o, the robots were programmed in four days, designing a visual language model for human-robot-interaction (HRI). The motions were trained using roughly 100 demos.

If you’d like a robot to help clean up at home, The Robot Studio has released plans on YouTube for building the arms on a budget.



Hollywood’s Olivia Wilde launches a VC firm

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Actress Olivia Wilde, famous for her roles in “Tron: Legacy” and “Don’t Worry Darling,” quietly launched venture firm Proximity Ventures late last year, according to Bloomberg.

She launched the early- and growth-stage investment fund with Neil Sirni, formerly of Roc Nation’s venture division Arrive; Jason Mack, formerly of Mack Ventures; and Santi White, the musician also known as Santigold.

The firm plans to invest in companies that are in the consumer and enterprise sectors. The firm has already inked four investments, including Pendulum Therapeutics, a biotech company.

Proximity expects to hold a first close next month.

TechCrunch reached out to Proximity Ventures for comment and will update if we hear back.

Classic Christmas song gets authorized Spanish reworking thanks to ‘responsible’ AI

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In the decades following its 1958 release, Brenda Lee’s rockabilly-tinged “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” has attained status as an all-time holiday classic. Sixty-six years later, it’s getting a Spanish language rework courtesy of “responsible” AI.

Universal on Friday announced the release of “Noche Buena y Navidad,” which utilized SoundLabs AI’s MicDrop technology to reconstruct Spanish vocals based on the then 13-year-old Lee’s original.

Lee, now 79, appears to approve. “Throughout my career, I performed and recorded many songs in different languages, but I never recorded ‘Rockin’’ in Spanish, which I would have loved to do,” the singer says. “To have this out now is pretty incredible and I’m happy to introduce the song to fans in a new way.”

With the holiday now exactly two months out, it’s a safe bet music execs are dreaming on an AI Christmas.

Amazon indicates employees can quit if they don’t like its return-to-office mandate

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AWS CEO Matt Garman has harsh words for remote workers: return to the office or quit. The Amazon executive recently told employees who don’t like the new five-day in-person work policy that, “there are other companies around,” presumably companies they can work for remotely, Reuters reported on Thursday.

Amazon’s top boss, Andy Jassy, told employees last month that there will be a full return-to-office starting in 2025, an increase from three days for roughly the last year.

Garman is the latest tech CEO to put his foot down on remote work, but he’s not the first. Earlier this year, Dell reportedly told employees they won’t be considered for promotions if they don’t come into the office. That said, remote work likely isn’t going anywhere for most people. Studies suggest most remote workers would quit if they had to return to the office.

Amazon did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.

OpenAI might raise the price of ChatGPT to $44 by 2029

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ChatGPT could get more expensive to use in coming years.

The New York Times, citing internal OpenAI docs, reports that OpenAI is planning to raise the price of individual ChatGPT subscriptions from $20 per month to $22 per month by the end of the year. A steeper increase will come over the next five years; by 2029, OpenAI expects it’ll charge $44 per month for ChatGPT Plus.

The aggressive moves reflect pressure on OpenAI from investors to narrow its losses. While the company’s monthly revenue reached $300 million in August, according to the New York Times, OpenAI expects to lose roughly $5 billion this year. Expenditures like staffing, office rent, and AI training infrastructure are to blame. ChatGPT alone was at one point reportedly costing OpenAI $700,000 per day.

OpenAI could face a blowback if it increases prices too quickly. While ChatGPT has roughly 10 million paying users today, surveys suggest that many believe the current $20-per-month price is too high.

SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son has been planning his comeback

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A new Financial Times profile of Mayayoshi Son opens with SoftBank’s CEO seeming to hit bottom, staring at his “ugly” face on Zoom and telling himself, “I have done nothing I can be proud of.”

Indeed, Son largely disappeared from the public eye after SoftBank’s Vision Fund took huge losses from investments like WeWork. But FT writer Lionel Barber, whose new biography of Son is called “Gambling Man,” writes that while Son appeared to be “doing penance,” he was actually “plotting a comeback.”

Now SoftBank is betting big on AI, and finding success by taking chip design company Arm public.

There are also some fun personal details in the profile, like Son’s apparent fascination with Napoleon. When an activist investor brought up Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg in a 2020 meeting with Son, he reportedly dismissed them as “one-business guys.”

“The right comparison for me is Napoleon, Genghis Khan or Emperor Qin,” Son said. “I am not a CEO. I am building an empire.”