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Check out the companies making headlines in midday trading: Booz Allen Hamilton — Shares of the consulting firm lost 15% after Booz Allen Hamilton said it would cut roughly 2,500 jobs, or 7% of its workforce, citing a slowdown in some government spending under the Trump administration and expected ongoing pressure on its business in the first half of the fiscal year. Intuit — Shares of Intuit, which owns TurboTax and QuickBooks software, popped 7.5% after the company reported strong quarterly results . Intuit said its revenue in the fiscal third quarter increased 15% to $7.8 billion. Apple — The…

OpenAI just made its biggest acquisition yet, scooping up Jony Ive and Sam Altman’s secretive device startup, io, in a $6.5 billion all-equity deal. Ive, the legendary designer behind the iPhone and other iconic Apple products, will now lead creative and design work at OpenAI through his firm LoveFrom. The goal? To take AI “beyond the screen” and build a new generation of AI-powered consumer devices. Beyond the tech, there’s a clear narrative play here. OpenAI is framing Altman as the Jobs-esque visionary and Ive as the design genius who makes it all real. Social media had a field day…

Web3 developer platform Alchemy has acquired HeyMint, a California-based non-fungible token (NFT) launchpad, in a move designed to enhance the company’s smart wallet infrastructure. The undisclosed funding deal will see HeyMint’s infrastructure embedded within Alchemy as it seeks to simplify user onboarding for Web3 applications, the company disclosed on May 23. HeyMint’s co-founder and chief technology officer, Flor Ronsmans De Vry, joins Alchemy as part of the deal. While not a household name in crypto, HeyMint attracted more than 1 million users over its first two years of operations. It was the launchpad behind $38 million in NFT sales and supported the…

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm since its launch in November 2022. What started as a tool to supercharge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved into a behemoth with 300 million weekly active users. 2024 was a big year for OpenAI, from its partnership with Apple for its generative AI offering, Apple Intelligence, the release of GPT-4o with voice capabilities, and the highly-anticipated launch of its text-to-video model Sora. OpenAI also faced its share of internal drama, including the notable exits of high-level execs like co-founder and longtime chief…

The top 220 holders of US President Donald Trump’s memecoin met yesterday at the president’s golf course in Virginia for an exclusive dinner and purported meet-and-greet.Attendees spent a grand total of $148 million for an “ultra-exclusive VIP reception with the president,” which crypto industry advocates and critics alike saw as a potential opportunity to discuss crypto policy with the president. The crowd contained a number of foreign crypto executives and influencers who otherwise would not have access to the US president, raising questions around corruption and foreign influence. Concerns were further augmented when White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt declined to release…

CNN  —  Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said he does not expect negotiations with the United States over Tehran’s nuclear program to “reach a conclusion” as Washington toughens its conditions for a deal. “During (former President Ebrahim) Raisi’s time there were also indirect negotiations that didn’t result in anything, and now we also doubt we will reach a conclusion, and we don’t know what will happen,” he was cited as saying on his website. Khamenei called the US demand that Iran not enrich uranium a “big mistake,” saying that Tehran won’t wait for American permission. Addressing American negotiators, he…

As generative AI becomes faster, cheaper, and more convincing, the ethical stakes are no longer theoretical. What happens when the tools to deceive become widely accessible? And how do we build systems that are powerful — but safe enough to trust? At TechCrunch Sessions: AI, taking place June 5 at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, Artemis Seaford, Head of AI Safety at ElevenLabs, and Ion Stoica, co-founder of Databricks and professor at UC Berkeley, will take the main stage to unpack the ethical challenges of today’s AI. Their conversation will cut to the heart of one of the most urgent questions…

The bounty offer to recover stolen funds from Sui-based decentralized exchange (DEX) Cetus closely resembles a successful strategy used by a Solana project three years ago.It turns out that Cetus shares the same development team as Crema Finance, a Solana-based DeFi project that suffered a $9-million hack in 2022 but recovered most of the funds by negotiating with its hacker. Now, Cetus is relying on the same strategy.Cetus is asking the hacker to return all but $6 million, or 2,324 Ether (ETH), of the stolen funds in exchange for a promise not to pursue legal action. The protocol lost $223…

George Town, Grand Cayman — Ledn, one of the longest-standing digital asset lenders, today announced a sweeping update to its platform to discontinue any lending of client assets to generate interest, meaning that client assets will never be exposed to third party lending credit risk. Going forward, Ledn will only offer its Custodied Bitcoin loan structure, under which client bitcoin collateral will remain fully in custody either with Ledn or its trusted funding partners. As part of this strategic shift, Ledn will also remove support for ETH, doubling down on Bitcoin as its sole digital asset focus. These changes were…

A registered sex offender who did nine years in prison for a Bronx rape and is currently on parole was ordered held without bail Friday night after being arrested for savagely beating Queens single mom Diana Agudelo as she rode her e-bike through Randall’s Island. The victim was left unconscious on the ground for nearly six hours before she was discovered by a passerby the next morning. On Friday, detectives charged Miguel Jiraud, 30, with attempted murder for the brutal May 16 attack. The ex-con, who was just released from prison in September and wore an ankle monitor, was living…