Drug discovery, the art of identifying new molecules to develop pharmaceuticals, is a notoriously time-consuming and difficult process. Traditional techniques, like high-throughput screening, offer an expensive scattershot approach — one that is not often successful. However, a new breed of biotech companies are leveraging AI and advanced data technologies in an attempt to accelerate and streamline the process. Chai Discovery, an AI startup founded in 2024, is one such company. In a little over 12 months, its young co-founders have managed to raise hundreds of millions of dollars and rally the backing of some of Silicon Valley’s most influential investors,…

Elon Musk’s xAI has been illegally operating dozens of natural gas turbines to power its Colossus data centers in Tennessee, the Environmental Protection Agency ruled Thursday. The AI company has argued that because the turbines were being used on a temporary basis, they were exempt from regulations. The EPA disagreed and issued its final rule on the matter, which has been in the works for over a year, declaring that xAI was in violation. The power plants drew the ire of local communities and legal organizations. The company was facing a lawsuit for contributing more ozone and particulate emissions in…

Earlier this week, the California attorney general’s office announced that it was investigating xAI over reports that the startup’s chatbot, Grok, was being used to create nonconsensual sexual imagery of women and minors. On Friday, the government followed up by sending a cease-and-desist letter to the company, demanding that it take immediate action to stop the production of nonconsensual intimate images and CSAM — child sexual abuse material. “Today, I sent xAI a cease-and-desist letter, demanding the company immediately stop the creation and distribution of deepfake, nonconsensual, intimate images and child sexual abuse material,” said California AG Rob Bonta in a…

Runpod, an AI app hosting platform that launched four years ago, has hit a $120 million annual revenue run rate, founders Zhen Lu and Pardeep Singh tell TechCrunch.   Their startup journey is a wild example of how if you build it well and the timing is lucky, they will definitely come. The story includes bootstrapping their way to over $1 million in revenue; landing a $20 million seed round after VC Radhika Malik, a partner at Dell Technologies Capital, saw some Reddit posts; and gaining another key angel investor, Hugging Face co-founder Julien Chaumond, because he was using the product…

Database provider ClickHouse secured $400 million at a $15 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported, representing about a 2.5x increase from its $6.35 billion valuation last May. The round was led by Dragoneer Investment Group, the startup said, with participation from investors including Bessemer Venture Partners, GIC, Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. ClickHouse, which spun out from Russian search giant Yandex in 2021, develops database software designed to process the massive datasets required by AI agents. The company competes with Snowflake and Databricks. The company also announced the acquisition of Langfuse, a startup that helps developers track and evaluate…

TikTok has quietly released a new standalone short drama app called PineDrama in the U.S. and Brazil. The app offers access to micro dramas, which are essentially bite-sized TV shows that can be watched in a series of one-minute episodes. Think TikTok, but every single video you come across is a short episode of a fictional story. PineDrama is available on iOS and Android. It’s free and currently ad-free, though that could change in the future. The news was first reported by Business Insider. You can find content through the app’s “Discover” tab, where you can sort through “All” or…

An ongoing conversation—both within and outside of the tech community—has been about just how and when OpenAI, which is currently valued at $500 billion, will make money. Well, there’s one surefire way to do that, and that is through advertising. In the near term, that seems to be the AI giant’s plan, as it announced this week that limited ads are headed to certain ChatGPT users. In a blog post published Friday, OpenAI said that it will begin testing ads in the U.S. for both its free and Go tiers. (Go accounts, which cost $8 a month, were introduced globally…

Elon Musk’s X is experiencing its second large-scale outage this week. The site and app, formerly known as Twitter, are either not loading at all or are glitching into life briefly before throwing up error messages like gang signs. The site Down Detector shows nearly 80,000 reports of X being down, starting at around 10 a.m. Eastern time, and is still down at the time of this writing. This is the second major outage at X this week, following an earlier technical issue. It comes as the platform faces criticism after Grok, xAI’s chatbot that is integrated into X, has…

On Tuesday, U.K.-based Iranian activist Nariman Gharib tweeted redacted screenshots of a phishing link sent to him via a WhatsApp message. “Do not click on suspicious links,” Gharib warned. The activist, who is following the digital side of the Iranian protests from afar, said the campaign targeted people involved in Iran-related activities, such as himself. This hacking campaign comes as Iran grapples with the longest nationwide internet shutdown in its history, as anti-government protests — and violent crackdowns — rage across the country. Given that Iran and its closest adversaries are highly active in the offensive cyberspace (read: hacking people),…

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced Friday that his country will slash its 100% import tax on Chinese EVs to just 6.1%, paving the way for companies like Geely, BYD, Xiaomi, and others to establish a second foothold in the North American automotive market. Canada is not going all-in on Chinese EVs, though. The country will initially cap annual imports at 49,000 vehicles. That cap will slowly increase to about 70,000 in around five years, according to the Associated Press. It’s a major shift that comes at a time when China is looking to boost EV exports, especially as the…