One of the most amusing incidents in the VC world this week came from a piece of rage-bait advertising by General Catalyst.

In a now-famous post on X that mocks the classic Mac vs. PC commercials, the venture firm — commonly referred to as GC — shared a “VC vs GC” video on Wednesday. The VC was portrayed by a tall actor dressed in a loose shirt and vest, sporting an unusually large, bald head — a clear jab at Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Marc Andreessen. (However, the real Andreessen typically doesn’t appear that unkempt).

The GC character was depicted by a man with a voluminous head of dark hair, wearing white sneakers, and exhibiting a tendency to gaze intently into the camera. He was undoubtedly meant to embody the cooler, “hip” Mac character personified by actor Justin Long in the original ads, in opposition to John Hodgman’s more conventional “square” PC figure.

GC inquires about VC’s robotic dog.

VC responds, “This is Woof AI” and then praises the advantages of the digital pet (no need to walk it or break it to the kids when it passes away!) and asserts, “You’ll never wish for a real dog once you’ve had this.” VC mentions that his firm is spearheading the seed round and suggests GC to get involved in the cap table.

GC articulates that people prefer real dogs and notes, “I’d be interested in hearing more, but we have a very high standard regarding responsibility for these things.”

Then VC kicks the AI dog and the dog pursues him off the screen. The post has now amassed 2.4 million views along with numerous shares and comments, and thousands of likes.

I’d have to read extensively between the lines to fully grasp this, but I’ll attempt it nevertheless. The core message, roughly: Other VCs, particularly a16z, are willing to fund anything. GC is not. (I inquired about this. GC has yet to reply.)

If this is indeed the argument, it is a pointed one and not completely unfounded. Andreessen’s firm frequently invests in ventures considered controversial, such as the surveillance company Flock Safety, AI notetaker Cluely, and Adam Neumann’s Flow. However, the same standard could just as well be applied to General Catalyst. GC’s portfolio features Anduril, Percepta, and Polymarket.

My interpretation is that GC aimed to portray an a16z-style character booting a dog, without any actual dog being harmed as that would pose a significant issue.

Many of the reactions to the video appeared to view it, and the decision to share it, as cringe-worthy. However, plenty also expressed their enjoyment.

Compulsive user Andreessen himself couldn’t help but respond repeatedly. He stated it made GC appear “smarmy” and added, “Stay tuned for our upcoming advertisement campaign, ‘We’re the VC who doesn’t scoff at your idea.'” He continued from there. My personal favorite was: “The thing they got right is the relative heights.”

As others pointed out, you know you’ve hit the right rage bait when the target responds.

Numerous a16z partners and staff came to Andreessen’s defense as well. So much so that their responses generated a considerable number of comments. A standout for me in this category was from VSC Ventures VC Jay Kapoor: “GC vs. A16Z feud is akin to Kendrick vs. Drake for those who understand what a 409A valuation is.”

A hotel check-in platform inadvertently exposed over 1 million customer passports, driver’s licenses, and selfie verification images to the public web due to a security oversight. The information is now offline following a notification from TechCrunch to the responsible firm.

The hotel check-in platform, named Tabiq, is operated by the Japan-based tech startup Reqrea. As stated on its website, Tabiq is utilized in various hotels throughout Japan and employs facial recognition and document scanning to facilitate guest check-ins.

Independent security analyst Anurag Sen reached out to TechCrunch earlier this week after finding that the system was exposing sensitive documents of hotel guests globally. Sen explained that the leak occurred because the startup had configured one of its Amazon cloud-hosted storage buckets, which stores customer data for the check-in system, to be publicly accessible. Anyone with a web browser could access the data without a password, simply by knowing the bucket’s name: “tabiq.” 

Sen informed TechCrunch to assist in notifying the company. Reqrea secured the storage bucket after TechCrunch contacted both the firm and Japan’s cybersecurity coordination organization, JPCERT.

This recent incident highlights a frequent issue where businesses unintentionally reveal or leak their customers’ personal information and sensitive documents—not through advanced hacking, but by neglecting fundamental cybersecurity protocols. Alongside a current wave of AI-detected vulnerabilities and fresh cybersecurity features, significant security breaches often arise from human mistakes, misconfigurations, or failure to implement cybersecurity best practices.

In a response acknowledging the leak, Reqrea director Masataka Hashimoto informed TechCrunch: “We are performing a comprehensive review with the aid of external legal counsel and other experts to assess the complete extent of the exposure.”

Reqrea stated it remains uncertain how the storage bucket was made public. Typically, Amazon’s cloud storage buckets are set to private by default. Following a series of exposed customer storage buckets a few years back, Amazon included multiple warning prompts for users prior to making data public, thereby making such lapses more difficult to occur inadvertently.

Hashimoto indicated to TechCrunch that the company intends to inform affected individuals once its investigation concludes. 

It is not yet known if anyone besides Sen accessed the exposed data before it was secured. Hashimoto mentioned that the company is analyzing its logs to see if there was any authorized access before the bucket was locked.

Information about the exposed bucket was also recorded by GrayHatWarfare, a database that allows searches of publicly accessible cloud storage. The bucket listing includes files from as early as 2020 to as recently as this month, containing identity documents of visitors from various countries.

The hotel check-in system’s vulnerability follows other occurrences involving sensitive government-issued documents. Earlier this year, TechCrunch reported on the exposure of driver’s licenses, passports, and other identity documents uploaded by users of the money transfer service Duc App. A data breach at the car rental company Hertz last year resulted in hackers stealing driver’s license details of at least 100,000 clients.

These events arise at a time when governments are increasingly implementing age-verification regulations and private firms are utilizing “know your customer” procedures to authenticate a person’s identity. Both processes depend on adults submitting sensitive documents, often to a third-party service, for verification, despite concerns raised by cybersecurity professionals. Data breaches can escalate the risk of identity theft or misuse of individuals’ likenesses as age-verification mandates become more widespread globally. 

It’s widely acknowledged that AI data centers have been putting pressure on the grid. However, Silicon Valley has been somewhat shielded from these issues due to high land and electricity costs that have prompted hyperscaler initiatives to relocate. 

The tech aristocracy might soon experience the impacts of the power shortage, however. The Bay Area’s leisure destination, Lake Tahoe, has less than a year to secure a new energy provider.

By May 2027, the agreement between Liberty Utilities and NV Energy will conclude. NV Energy’s electricity will be redirected to other areas in Nevada, where the data center industry has been flourishing.

Both Liberty Utilities and NV Energy have indicated that this phase-out has been in the works for a long time, and NV Energy claims that data centers are not responsible. Yet, it is difficult to argue that they do not contribute. NV Energy alone has more than 22 gigawatts of load requests, which, as highlighted by a Bloomberg report, exceeds 40 times Lake Tahoe’s peak usage. 

If data centers were not a factor, it’s plausible to envision a scenario where Liberty Utilities and NV Energy extend their contract. However, with data center clients prepared to pay whatever is necessary for electricity, it was unavoidable that traditional consumers in Lake Tahoe would be left without power.

The timing is particularly unfortunate. The energy markets are currently challenging, strained by soaring demand and diminished supply further complicated by the previous administration’s confrontation with Iran.

Lake Tahoe’s situation is exacerbated by the reality that its power lines are more interconnected with Nevada’s grid than California’s. Consequently, the community must seek another electricity supplier from within NV Energy’s domain or beyond in the West. 

Given that NV Energy has already placed data centers above the mountain community in priority, it is probable that Lake Tahoe residents — along with second-home owners — will need to locate an alternative regional energy producer.

That won’t be a simple task. Just one state away, in Utah, a county commission has recently authorized a 40,000-acre data center project projected to consume up to 9 gigawatts of electricity upon completion. Currently, the entire state of Utah uses about 4 gigawatts. Demand on this scale is almost assured to inflate prices across the region.

The combination of these factors suggests that Lake Tahoe will likely incur higher electricity costs next year compared to today. Local residents will bear the brunt of this increase, but second homeowners in the area, many from Silicon Valley, may also feel the financial strain. 

The irony of the AI energy crisis is that those most affected have had minimal influence over the technology or its deployment. Lake Tahoe’s energy situation indicates that this dynamic is beginning to shift, though probably not significantly enough to effect real change.

Since July 2025, Tesla Robotaxis have experienced at least two crashes while being remotely driven by a teleoperator, as revealed by newly disclosed data submitted to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

Both incidents took place in Austin, Texas, at low speeds. In each event, a safety monitor was in the driver’s seat and no passengers were present.

This new information was released just a few months after Tesla informed legislators that its remote operators could control one of the company’s vehicles as long as the speed remained below 10 miles per hour. “This capability allows Tesla to quickly maneuver a vehicle that might be in a tough situation, reducing the necessity to wait for first responders or Tesla field agents to manually retrieve the vehicle,” the company stated at that time.

Like other firms developing autonomous vehicle technologies, Tesla is obligated to report detailed information about any accidents to the NHTSA. However, unlike most others in that space, Tesla consistently redacted information about its crashes, claiming it was proprietary business information.

It remains uncertain what prompted the change, but Tesla shifted its stance this week, and the latest data released by the NHTSA now includes a detailed account of all 17 crashes Tesla has documented since the inception of its Robotaxi network last year.

In July 2025, shortly after launching the network in Austin, the company’s automated driving system (ADS) reportedly struggled to move forward while stopped on a road. The safety monitor sought assistance from Tesla’s remote help team, leading a teleoperator to “take control of the vehicle and gently accelerate, steering the Tesla ADS to the left side of the street.”

The teleoperator subsequently drove “up onto the curb and struck a metal fence.”

A similar incident occurred in January 2026. The Tesla ADS was proceeding straight on a roadway when the safety monitor “requested support for vehicle navigation.”

“The teleoperator assumed vehicle control when the ADS was halted and continued straight down the street. The Tesla vehicle collided with a temporary barricade set up for construction work at roughly 9MPH, damaging the front-left fender and tire,” according to the data submitted to the NHTSA.

In line with other companies in the autonomous vehicle sector like Waymo, a majority of the newly disclosed crashes involve Tesla Robotaxi vehicles being struck by other vehicles rather than causing accidents themselves.

However, at least two incidents involved a Tesla Robotaxi grazing its mirrors against other cars. One accident from September 2025 saw the Tesla ADS unable to avoid hitting a dog that dashed into the street. (Tesla stated that the dog managed to escape.)

In another September 2025 incident, a Tesla Robotaxi made an unprotected left turn into a parking lot and collided with a metal chain. (The NHTSA recently concluded an investigation into Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software, which occasionally crashes into parking lot barriers, chains, and gates. Waymo also issued a recall last year concerning a similar issue.)

While competitor robotaxi companies such as Waymo and Zoox have reported more accidents than Tesla, Elon Musk’s company operates at a significantly smaller scale. The details unveiled this week in the newly unredacted data may clarify why Tesla is cautiously expanding its early-stage autonomous ride-hailing service. Musk himself acknowledged last month that “ensuring total safety” is the primary limiting factor for Tesla’s expansion, stating that the company is proceeding with “great caution.”

On Friday, OpenAI introduced a fresh suite of personal finance tools in preview for ChatGPT Pro users in the U.S., allowing them to link their accounts and inquire about topics from spending insights to future financial strategies.

OpenAI has collaborated with the financial connection service Plaid to facilitate the account integrations. Users can link to more than 12,000 financial institutions, such as Schwab, Fidelity, Chase, Robinhood, American Express, and Capital One. After linking these accounts, users will be presented with a dashboard displaying their portfolio performance, expenditures, subscriptions, and future payments.

This new offering arrives just a month following OpenAI’s acquisition of the team associated with personal finance startup Hiro, which received backing from firms like Ribbit, General Catalyst, and Restive in April. OpenAI indicated that the financial expertise of the Hiro team contributed to the launch of this offering but did not clarify if the entire feature was developed by them.

OpenAI users can access the feature by clicking “Get started” under the “Finances” option in the sidebar, or by typing “@Finances, connect my accounts” during a ChatGPT conversation. After doing so, the chatbot will assist them in linking accounts via Plaid. The company mentioned plans to support Intuit soon, which would facilitate analysis such as the effects of a stock sale on taxes or the probabilities of credit card approval.

OpenAI reports that over 200 million users pose financial inquiries to ChatGPT each month. The company also highlighted that the new GPT-5.5 model excels at contextual reasoning, which is vital for addressing finance-related queries. The firm stated that it collaborated with finance professionals to establish a benchmark for enhancing the model’s responses to personal finance questions.

With the integration of the new financial tools, users can receive detailed responses to questions like “I feel like my spending has increased lately. Has anything changed?” or “Assist me in devising a plan to prepare for purchasing a home in my area within the next 5 years.”

Users can navigate to Settings > Apps > Finances to disconnect certain accounts if desired. Upon disconnections, the synced data will be purged from ChatGPT within 30 days. Additionally, users can review and delete financial memories from the Finances page.

Generalized chatbots are built to respond to any inquiries, prompting users to ask about sensitive data topics such as health, finance, and personal matters. AI firms are acknowledging this trend and developing specialized products for these domains. Both OpenAI and Anthropic have released tools related to health. Earlier this month, Perplexity introduced its own financial research tool driven by its Computer agent.

OpenAI stated that its personal finance tools will be accessible on ChatGPT on the web and iOS for Pro users. It emphasized that it intends to enhance the product based on feedback from these users before rolling it out to Plus users.

The PJM Interconnection, the largest electrical grid in the U.S., experienced prices that nearly doubled over the past year, as per a report released yesterday by Monitoring Analytics, an independent market overseer acting as a watchdog for the PJM grid. The cause? Data centers.

Wholesale electricity prices for one megawatt-hour surged to $136.53, increasing from $77.78 at the corresponding time last year. Crain’s Chicago Business was the first to cover the price surge. Monitoring Analytics pointed to data centers and PJM’s inability to adequately manage their increasing demand.

The market monitor did not hold back. “The price effects on customers have been extremely significant and cannot be reversed,” Monitoring Analytics stated. “The price effects will be even more pronounced in the short term unless the challenges related to data center load are resolved promptly.” 

PJM is susceptible to such critiques. In 2022, coinciding with the rise in data center construction, the grid operator halted applications for new generating sources, due to a lengthy backlog. It only recently began accepting new requests. Meanwhile, electricity consumption from data centers has surged dramatically. The PJM grid includes Northern Virginia, an area densely populated with data centers.

The price increase serves as a reminder of a more profound issue: The U.S. power grid was not equipped for the electricity demands of an AI-centered economy, and the disparity between what the grid can provide and the industry’s requirements is growing.

Monitoring Analytics asserted that without the heightened demand from data centers, “the capacity market would not have encountered the same stringent supply-demand conditions, nor the elevated prices observed.”

It further noted that “the current capacity supply in PJM is insufficient to satisfy the demand from large data center loads and will continue to be inadequate in the near future.”

Monitoring Analytics criticized PJM’s lack of transparency in decision-making and its delay in essential software upgrades. “These upgrades have faced multiple years of delays and lack a definitive expected implementation timeline,” the report indicated. 

The report follows a white paper published by PJM Interconnection, which explored the future of the grid it oversees. The white paper proposed three possible directions, but none attracted the interest of one of the region’s largest utilities, AEP, which has threatened to exit the PJM grid entirely.

Monitoring Analytics expressed similar dissatisfaction with PJM’s white paper. The group remarked that PJM was utilizing the crisis “as a pretext” for altering the operation of its power market. “The fundamental aspects of the PJM market design remain sound,” it stated, implying that the grid operator had mishandled its reaction to rising demand. The solution, it asserted, “begins with acknowledging that the root of the current problems is data center load.” In other words, it’s the data centers, plain and simple.