Accenture announced today that it would acquire the learning platform Udacity as part of an effort to build a learning platform focused on the growing interest in AI. While the company didn’t specify how much it paid for Udacity, it also announced a $1 billion investment in building a technology learning platform it’s calling LearnVantage.While it could also offer more general technology training, the company made clear that it is particularly interested in offering training to get workers up to speed on AI ...

During Target’s investor event on Tuesday, the retail giant announced it is launching a paid membership program, Target Circle 360, on April 7 to compete with rivals Amazon and Walmart. The subscription tier includes unlimited free same-day delivery for orders over $35 and two free-day shipping, along with other perks like exclusive partnerships and product offerings. The same-day delivery is provided by Target’s delivery service Shipt, which the company acquired in 2017.Target Circle 360 acts as the paid v ...

Tesla’s factory outside Berlin, Germany will likely be shut down for days and cost the automaker more than $100 million, after a suspected arson attack on the local power grid.The fire didn’t spread to Tesla’s factory and nobody was harmed, though employees were evacuated. Thousands of residents in the area also briefly lost power as a result.A purported activist organization calling itself the “Volcano Group” took credit for the fire in a letter posted online Tuesday. Authorities have not confirmed their i ...

Google has trailed another bundle of product tweaks ahead of Thursday’s deadline for compliance with the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA).The DMA applies to Alphabet, Google’s parent, which is one of six designated “gatekeepers” under the ex ante competition reform. The pan-EU regulation, which is intended to open up digital markets with measures to promote fairness and contestability, applies a set of up-front operational ‘dos and don’ts’ across in-scope “core platform services”. Penalties for vi ...

Apple’s €1.84B fine, new AI rules in India, and the latest pre-IPO roundListen here or wherever you get your podcasts.Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.This is our Monday show, in which we take a look back at the weekend and what’s ahead in the week. Over the weekend we had a great chat with Nubank’s CEO, which you can find here. OK, onto the show notes! We are back Wednesday, see you then! ...

Owners of Ford EVs now have access to more than 15,000 Tesla superchargers across the U.S. and Canada, nine months after the two automakers struck a deal that would eventually ripple through the rest of the automotive industry.New and existing Ford EV owners can receive a free adapter to access Tesla’s fast charging stalls, but they must be enrolled in Ford’s BlueOval Charge Network and order the adapter by June 30, 2024 at Ford.com/FastChargingAdapter. Future Ford EV customers will be able to buy the adapt ...

Apple is scuttling its secretive, long-running project to build an autonomous electric car, according to Bloomberg. The company has already started laying off some people who worked on the project, TechCrunch has learned.The scope of the layoffs could not immediately be determined. Many of the nearly 2,000 employees who were still working on the project will be shifted to Apple’s generative AI projects, Bloomberg reported.The decision to kill the project comes at a time when major automakers are reevaluatin ...

Chinese tech companies are gathering all sorts of resources and talent to narrow their gap with OpenAI, and experiences for researchers on both sides of the Pacific Ocean can be surprisingly similar. A recent X post from an Alibaba researcher offers a rare glimpse into the life of developing large language models at the ecommerce firm, which is amongst a raft of Chinese internet giants striving to match the capabilities of ChatGPT.Binyuan Hui, a natural language processing researcher at Alibaba’s large lang ...

On the heels of Microsoft’s investment and partnership with French Large Language Model startup Mistral AI, the company continues to work hard to try to dispel the image that it’s blocking competition through its deep partnership (and financial stake) in OpenAI. Today the company launched a new framework it’s calling “AI Access Principles” — an eleven-point plan that Microsoft said will “govern how we will operate our AI datacenter infrastructure and other important AI assets around the world.”The points co ...

We’ve already started to see big M&A, as in multi-billion deals, finally pick up this year after a slow period last year. Today, KKR added to that growing total when it announced it was going to acquire Broadcom’s end user computing business for $4 billion.These pieces include VMware Workspace One and VMware Horizon, two remote desktop applications that had been part of the VMware family of products. You may recall that Broadcom spent $61 billion to buy VMware last year and has been looking to recoup some o ...