Anthony Ha, Author at TechCrunch

TechCrunch Minute: Why did Wiz walk away from $23 billion?

Anthony Ha — Fri, 02 Aug 2024 16:00:00 +0000

As widely reported, Wiz recently said no to a $23 billion acquisition offer from Google. At that price, it would have been Google’s biggest acquisition ever. It’s possible the Google team got cold feet during due diligence, or there may have been concerns that regulators would have challenged an acquisition of this size. But all […]

TechCrunch Minute: Investors pour money into non-alcoholic beverages

Anthony Ha — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 16:00:00 +0000

Startups are attracting serious funding to provide fun, alcohol-free drink options at the bar and in other social contexts. Earlier this year, canned water company Liquid Death announced that it has raised $67 million in new funding at a $1.4 billion valuation. And Athletic Brewing Company, which describes itself as America’s largest non-alcoholic brewery, said […]

TechCrunch Minute: Will AI get dumber?

Anthony Ha — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 16:00:00 +0000

Although AI models have made big breakthroughs in the last few years, there’s now a risk that they could get dumber and even collapse, according to a new research paper published in Nature. The phenomenon is described by researchers as “model collapse.” Think of it as a snake eating its own tail — or a […]

TechCrunch Minute: Doomscrolling probably isn’t great for your mental health

Anthony Ha — Mon, 29 Jul 2024 16:05:00 +0000

It turns out that maybe, just maybe, spending a lot of time staring at your phone and reading bad news isn’t great for your outlook on life or humanity. That’s the finding of a recent study published in Computers in Human Behavior Reports, which linked doomscrolling to existential anxiety, despair, distrust and suspicion of others. […]

Dear Google, who wants an AI-written fan letter?

Anthony Ha — Sun, 28 Jul 2024 19:09:27 +0000

The first time I saw Google’s latest commercial, I wondered, “Is it just me, or is this kind of bad?” By the fourth or fifth time I saw it, I’d stopped wondering. It starts innocuously enough, with a father talking about how much his daughter loves Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone (she “might even be the world’s number […]

Ghostery’s CEO says regulation won’t save us from ad trackers

Anthony Ha — Sat, 27 Jul 2024 18:00:00 +0000

With Ghostery turning 15 years old this month, TechCrunch caught up with CEO Jean-Paul Schmetz to discuss the company's strategy and the state of ad tracking.

Apple reaches its first contract agreement with a US retail union

Anthony Ha — Sat, 27 Jul 2024 17:37:56 +0000

Two years ago, workers at an Apple Store in Towson, Maryland, were the first to establish a formally recognized union at an Apple retail store in the United States. Now they’re the first to reach a tentative contract agreement. According to the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers’ Coalition of Organized Retail Employees, which […]

TechCrunch Minute: Microsoft brings more generative AI to Bing

Anthony Ha — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 16:00:00 +0000

Bing is the latest search engine to introduce generative AI into its results, with Microsoft announcing that it’s making Bing generative search available to a small percentage of users. The goal is to give those users the answers they want right in their search results, potentially synthesizing information that they’d otherwise have to click through […]

TechCrunch Minute: What caused last week’s major tech outage?

Anthony Ha — Mon, 22 Jul 2024 16:00:00 +0000

Late last week, there was a worldwide tech outage that affected everything from airports to banks to healthcare. Flights were grounded across the United States. So, what actually happened? The source of all those problems seems to be a popular cybersecurity company called CrowdStrike and its flagship software product Falcon Sensor. Apparently a “defect” in […]

What Kamala Harris has said about AI, tech regulation and more

Anthony Ha — Sun, 21 Jul 2024 21:47:29 +0000

With President Joe Biden dropping out of the race, Vice President Kamala Harris may become the Democrats’ new nominee. In announcing his plans, Biden offered his “full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year,” while Harris said her “intention is to win and earn this nomination.” That said, […]

Joe Biden drops out of presidential race

Anthony Ha — Sun, 21 Jul 2024 20:00:00 +0000

U.S. President Joe Biden has announced he no longer plans to seek reelection, a decision that follows weeks of growing pressure from some Democratic Party supporters, including high-profile tech investors and executives. “It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President,” Biden said in a statement. “And while it has […]

Bethesda Game Studios employees form a ‘wall-to-wall’ union

Anthony Ha — Sat, 20 Jul 2024 20:32:54 +0000

Employees at Bethesda Game Studios — the Microsoft-owned game developer that produces the Elder Scrolls and Fallout franchises — are joining the Communications Workers of America union. Quality assurance testers at Bethesda’s parent organization ZeniMax unionized last year, becoming Microsoft’s first official union in the United States. In its announcement, the CWA calls Bethesda’s new […]

Microsoft says 8.5M Windows devices were affected by CrowdStrike outage

Anthony Ha — Sat, 20 Jul 2024 17:01:19 +0000

Around 8.5 million devices — less than 1 percent of Windows machines globally — were affected by the recent CrowdStrike outage, according to a Microsoft blog post by David Weston, the company’s vice president of enterprise and OS security. These are the first real numbers released by either Microsoft or CrowdStrike around the scale of […]

TechCrunch Minute: OpenAI shrinks its flagship model

Anthony Ha — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 16:00:00 +0000

OpenAI is launching a mini version of its latest AI model. These small AI models are meant to be faster and more affordable than the full version — making them particularly useful for simple, high-volume tasks. That should appeal to smaller developers who don’t necessarily have a lot of money for AI costs but want […]

TechCrunch Minute: A Google robot shows off what Gemini can do

Anthony Ha — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 16:00:00 +0000

Google found a new way to demonstrate what its Gemini AI model can do, with help from a robot. This was a robot from Google’s Everybody Robots Division, which was shut down last year. But apparently the robots are still around, so Google put a yellow bowtie on one of them then used Gemini to […]

Google reportedly in talks to acquire cloud security company Wiz for $23B

Anthony Ha — Sun, 14 Jul 2024 17:44:58 +0000

Google’s parent company Alphabet might be on the verge of making its biggest acquisition ever. The Wall Street Journal reports that Alphabet is in advanced talks to acquire Wiz for around $23 billion. While the deal isn’t finalized, the WSJ says it could come together soon. Wiz offers an all-in-one approach to cloud security, ingesting […]

Meet the soft robots that can amputate limbs and fuse with other robots

Anthony Ha — Sat, 13 Jul 2024 21:19:41 +0000

Roboticists at The Faboratory at Yale University have developed a way for soft robots to replicate some of the more unsettling things that animals and insects can accomplish — say, a reptile self-amputating a limb or ants building bridges by temporarily fusing their bodies. In one demo video, we see a soft quadruped robot crawling […]

Whistleblowers accuse OpenAI of ‘illegally restrictive’ NDAs

Anthony Ha — Sat, 13 Jul 2024 17:37:38 +0000

Whistleblowers have accused OpenAI of placing illegal restrictions on how employees can communicate with government regulators, according to a letter obtained by The Washington Post. Lawyers representing anonymous whistleblowers sent the letter to Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chair Gary Gensler. The letter refers to a separate, formal complaint asking the SEC to investigate OpenAI’s […]

TechCrunch Minute: FTC finds ‘dark patterns’ in subscription apps

Anthony Ha — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 16:00:00 +0000

A new study from the Federal Trade Commission looks at the “dark patterns” that subscription apps and websites use to get more money or data from their users. “Dark pattern” is actually the term used in the FTC report, and it refers to manipulative design techniques that are supposed to make users do something they […]

TechCrunch Minute: How to protect yourself from AI scams

Anthony Ha — Mon, 08 Jul 2024 16:00:00 +0000

You probably like to think of yourself as reasonably sophisticated when it comes to online scams — you’re not opening random email attachments or sending money to Nigerian princes. But of course, scams evolve with new technology. AI makes it even easier to perform these attacks at scale, while introducing a little personalization that makes […]