Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin headed back into space with Big Shepard rocket after accident

California-based startup Perplexity AI, just a year into its journey, has secured $73.6 million in a series B funding round, bringing its total funding to $100 million. The investment comes from IVP, NEA, Databricks, Nvidia, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Kindred Ventures, with notable tech figures like Jeff Bezos and Nat Friedman joining as backers. What sets Perplexity AI apart is its ambition to revolutionise knowledge discovery through the Perplexity AI-native search engine, challenging industry giants Google and Microsoft. The startup, valued at over $500 million, plans to utilise the funding to enhance its AI-driven search engine capabilities. Perplexity co-founder and CEO is the Aravind Srinivas.

Artificial intelligence technology (AI) has grown by leaps and bounds in the last few months, but so has the number of miscreants using it to defraud people. One of the most prominent dangers emerged recently has been deepfake videos. For the unaware, deepfakes are AI-generated videos, images, and audio that are edited or manipulated to make anyone say or do anything that they did not do in real life. Deepfake videos are mostly being used by cybercriminals for illegal purposes. While nations are drafting and amending IT regulations to deal with this threat, malicious threat actors are all out to carry out these illicit activities, and deepfakes have now entered the crypto world too! Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko recently became the latest victim of deepfakes in the crypto world. Know all about it.

NASA, with the help of its advanced space and ground-based telescopes, has recently tracked an asteroid that is set to pass Earth at very close quarters today, January 6, and the US space agency has shed light on details such as its speed, distance of approach, and more. Apart from posing a threat to Earth, asteroids can also provide valuable resources such as water, metals, and other minerals. In fact, it is surmised that water was brought to Earth by asteroids and comets over a period in excess of millions of years. Research on asteroids is critical since it can provide valuable information on the early stages of the solar system and planetary development. Know all about the asteroid that is set to pass Earth in the coming days.

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2024 is a great platform where top tech and gadget companies showcase their new or upcoming innovations and plans for the coming year. The event will be the first big technology showcase of the year that is being organized by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA). During the showcase, Nvidia is expected to make big announcements about its AI initiatives along with the new GeForce RTX 40-series Super GPUs which is the most awaited highlight for the gaming industry. Know what Nvidia might reveal in the upcoming CES 2024 event.

 When the Vulcan rocket lifts off for the first time as soon as next week, multiple billionaires are sure to be watching. Built through a joint venture of Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp., the new vehicle is poised to take on Elon Musk's SpaceX and ferry satellites and cargo for the likes of the Pentagon, NASA, and even Amazon.com Inc.

Jeff Grubb has expressed his belief that Tecmo Koei and Capcom already have Switch 2 dev kits.

Jeff Grubb has shared some follow up speculation to rumors about Metroid Prime 4, in relation to the Nintendo Switch. Or more accurately, its successor.

Kicking off the New Year with a bang, Goddess of Victory Nikke just rolled out a major update. It has a bunch of exciting events, new characters and a generous load of freebies. The main story event titled ‘New Year New Sword’ drops today and runs until January 11, 2024.

Technological innovation in the last couple of decades has brought fame and huge wealth to the likes of Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos. Often feted as geniuses, they are the faces behind the gadgets and media that so many of us depend upon. Sometimes they are controversial. Sometimes the level of their influence is criticised. But they also benefit from a common mythology which elevates their status. That myth is the belief that executive “visionaries” leading vast corporations are the engines which power essential breakthroughs too ambitious or futuristic for sluggish public institutions.

It was a comeback year for the world's wealthiest. The combined net worth of the 500 richest people surged by $1.5 trillion in 2023, fully rebounding from the $1.4 trillion lost the year prior, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Once again, their fortunes were closely correlated to the performance of tech stocks, which rose to fresh records this year despite recession fears, lingering inflation, lofty interest rates, and geopolitical turmoil. Tech billionaires saw their wealth grow by 48% or $658 billion, propelled by intense hype around artificial intelligence. No one did better than Elon Musk, who recaptured the title of world's richest person from French luxury tycoon Bernard Arnault. The Tesla Inc. chief executive officer netted an additional $95.4 billion through Thursday's close, bolstered by the success of Tesla and SpaceX, after losing $138 billion in 2022. His net worth is now more than $50 billion above Arnault's after a global slowdown in demand for luxury goods dented shares of LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE.

This is not investment advice. The author has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Wccftech.com has a disclosure and ethics policy.

Ahead of the new year, the popular decentralized social media platform Bluesky has rolled out a new update. The Bluesky update 1.61 comes less than a week after the previous update which redesigned the logo to a butterfly and made the posts public for even those who did not have an account on the platform. Now, with the new update, Bluesky has added a new in-app video and music player for links. This player will function like the native player on X (formerly Twitter) where users do not have to leave the platform to play a YouTube video and can instead watch it on the platform. Alongside, Bluesky has also added a ‘Hide Post' feature that allows users to hide the posts they do not want to see.