Sunday, February 2, 2025

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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently predicted that AI will soon lead to the creation of the first "one-person billion-dollar company."

But what might such a company actually look like? Paul Sawers spoke with several AI startup CEOs to find out. The consensus: AI is definitely helping companies slim down, but it will be tough to automate areas where human-to-human trust is still important.

Plus, despite predictions of a new age of AI-human collaboration, there's the question of how all of us are going to live and work if we truly enter "the era of AI employees."

Keep reading to see what else TechCrunch is covering this weekend.

Weekend news and opinion

Image Credits: Martin Poole / Getty Images

Venture debt lenders could play a big role in 2025: While plenty of startups funded during the VC boom times of 2020 have already failed, we may not have hit bottom yet. And that could mean more venture debt lenders will be pressuring startups to sell and minimize potential losses, Marina Temkin writes. Read more

European Union cracks down on AI systems with "unacceptable risk": Kyle Wiggers reports that today is the first compliance deadline for the EU's AI Act, which means the bloc will actually start enforcing its ban on AI applications that pose "unacceptable risk." These include AI used for social scoring or to predict crimes based on people's appearance. Read more

How to delete X and move on with your life: Amanda Silberling has instructions for anyone who's ready to move on from the former Twitter. (I've deleted my account, but I'm not sure if I'll ever fully move on.) Read more

What else we're reading

📗 "Jurassic Park" author Michael Crichton was one of my favorite authors growing up — and according to The New Yorker, his work still offers lessons about how "technologies often wriggle out of the grasp of their creators." Read more

📕 Also, Defector went to the Consumer Electronics Show and was not impressed. Read more