Sundar Pichai faces boos, walkout at Stanford graduation ceremony over Google’s Israel, ICE ties

Sundar Pichai faces boos, walkout at Stanford graduation ceremony over Google’s Israel, ICE ties

Over the weekend, Google CEO Sundar Pichai faced a small revolt when he delivered his commencement speech at Stanford University, where he earned his graduate degree in materials science and engineering. About 200 students from the graduating class reportedly walked out, while others loudly booed the tech executive. The focus of the protest was Google’s…

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Chinese cybercrime operation that used AI to scam ‘hundreds of thousands of victims’ sued by Google

Chinese cybercrime operation that used AI to scam ‘hundreds of thousands of victims’ sued by Google

Google is suing to dismantle the infrastructure behind an alleged massive AI-powered cybercrime operation. On Friday, the tech giant announced a lawsuit against an alleged Chinese cybercrime network called Outsider Enterprise, which Google says uses AI in its campaigns to send scam text messages impersonating Google and other brands to steal passwords and credit card…

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SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI’s hot IPO summer

SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI’s hot IPO summer

The IPO market is back, and it’s not the same companies leading the charge. FAANG had a good run, but a new acronym is taking over: MANGOS — Meta (or Microsoft, depending on who you ask), Anthropic, Nvidia, Google, OpenAI, and SpaceX. Half of that bunch is heading to public markets in the same window, and it’s a stress test for investors, for valuations, and for…

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Alphabet’s record-breaking B raise for Google’s AI business is a helluva good signal

Alphabet’s record-breaking $85B raise for Google’s AI business is a helluva good signal

If Alphabet’s record-breaking $85 billion stock sale signals investor appetite for AI-related offerings — and it does — we can safely say that investors are voracious. Google’s parent company had initially intended to sell a first tranche of $40 billion worth of various equity instruments — two different classes of shares, plus smaller “depositary shares”…

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Making sense of the debate over AI psychosis

Making sense of the debate over AI psychosis

Box founder Aaron Levie got us talking this week with a social media post suggesting that tech CEOs are “uniquely prone to AI psychosis.” On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I did our best to unpack Levie’s comment. For one thing, we noted that he isn’t disavowing AI…

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I put Google’s 24/7 AI assistant Gemini Spark to work, and it’s actually pretty useful

I put Google’s 24/7 AI assistant Gemini Spark to work, and it’s actually pretty useful

Gemini Spark is Google’s new 24/7 agentic assistant, designed to help you help you “navigate your digital life,” which essentially means getting your online to-dos done, summarizing the things you don’t have time to read (like the entirety of your inbox), or organizing something that would have otherwise involved too much screen time-filled manual labor,…

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