AI search engine Perplexity has offered to buy Chrome from Google for $34.5 billion cash in an unsolicited offer, and Perplexity has confirmed to TechCrunch. Perplexity says the terms of the offer include a commitment to keep Chrome’s underlying engine, Chromium, open source and continue to invest in it. Perplexity’s offer includes a promise to invest $3 billion into the open source project.

Financial services provider Brex on Thursday announced that it achieved a major milestone: It is now licensed in the European Union. That means it can now directly issue credit and debit cards and offer its spend management products to any business in all 30 EU countries with “no workarounds required,” as co-founder and CEO Pedro Franceschi wrote in a blog post.

Tesla is breaking up the team behind its Dojo supercomputer, ending the automaker’s play at developing in-house chips for driverless technology. Tesla’s decision to shut down Dojo, which Musk has been talking about since 2019, is a major shift in strategy. Musk has said that Dojo would be the cornerstone of Tesla’s AI ambitions and its goal to reach full self-driving due to its ability to “process truly vast amounts of video data.” He talked about Dojo, albeit briefly, as recently as the company’s second-quarter earnings call.

EXTRA NEWS

Slow Ventures’ Creator Fund has invested $2 million into Jonathan Katz-Moses, a popular woodworking content creator with around 600,000 followers, nearly 75 million video views, and his own line of woodworking tools.

Fashion resale marketplace Poshmark announced on Monday that its founder, Manish Chandra, is stepping down as CEO. Namsun Kim, who has served as executive chairman since April, has been appointed as his successor.

GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke announced on Monday that he’s stepping down from his role. Dohmke will remain at the Microsoft-owned company until the end of the year, after which he will depart to become “a founder again,” he wrote in a blog post. Axios reports that Microsoft will not directly replace the position and that GitHub leadership will now report to several Microsoft executives.

Robert Keele said this week that he has stepped down as xAI’s head of legal after just over a year, saying he wants to spend more time with his children. In his announcement, Keele also acknowledged “daylight between our worldviews” with boss Elon Musk, who hasn’t commented on Keele’s exit. Keele’s departure fits an ongoing pattern of executive turnover across Musk’s empire. X CEO Linda Yaccarino left last month, and Tesla has lost several top executives recently.

Audio series platform maker Pocket FM is giving its writers an AI tool set that can do things like suggest better endings to an episode or make the narrative more engaging. The hope is that the tools will speed up the story-writing process.