AI was prominent in the news cycle this week — yet again.
In this Friday’s episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Mary Ann Azevedo and Becca Szkutak kick off the show dissecting a bill which aims to regulate AI at the model level. Naturally, some VCs and founders as well as students and professors are in an uproar about it. But we have to ask, is regulation in the name of safety such a bad thing? Short answer: It depends.
The trio then jumped into the deals of the week, including OpenAI’s potential new investment in webcam maker Opal. We also discussed some major changes at the executive level within OpenAI and what that could mean about what’s going on internally. Becca brought up a new startup called why?!, which was founded by ex-Clubhouse employees and aims to be a networking, messaging and dating app all in one. And Kirsten drilled down on electric vehicle maker Lucid’s new $1.5 billion capital infusion from the Saudi wealth fund.
We then shifted gears to talk about just how many new unicorns were born in the U.S. so far this year. Our takeaway: There was a surprising diversity of sectors represented in this new batch of unicorns. Lastly, we dug into a couple of notable M&A deals in the fintech space, including one this week in which Payoneer scooped up a five-year-old Singaporean startup called Skuad for $61 million in cash, as well as Stripe’s latest buy.
We had a blast this episode, so give it a listen!
Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. For the full episode transcript, for those who prefer reading over listening, check out our full archive of episodes over at Simplecast.