A message on the Mesa website states that as of December 12, 'all Mesa Homeowners Card accounts are closed,' adding, 'All credit cards have been deactivated and you are no longer able to make any new purchases or earn Mesa Points.' A Mesa FAQ about the shutdown described this as 'a business decision to close the Mesa Homeowners Card Program entirely.' TechCrunch has reached out to Mesa for additional comment on its future plans. The startup launched just over a year ago, in November 2024, with $9.2 million in funding ($7.2 million in equity funding and $2 million in debt). It offered two products ' mortgage loans with 1% cash back, as well as the credit card with rewards including cash back, travel, and offset mortgage payments. Mesa's card shutdown has been covered by travel deals websites like One Mile at a Time and Upgraded Points, which say that Mesa cardmembers have been complaining about declined transactions for the past week, with the company initially claiming this was only a temporary outage....

Whether or not Netflix's $82.6 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. goes through, the deal encapsulates a fraught moment for Hollywood, as the entertainment business is increasingly overshadowed by tech giants. On the latest episode of the Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec and I discussed the deal's implications, both for Netflix and the larger Hollywood ecosystem. Kirsten noted that it's just the latest move bringing more consolidation to the media business, and she wondered whether it's 'too big a risk' for Netflix. Meanwhile, I discussed a call with Netflix executives where Wall Street analysts also seemed to be struggling to wrap their heads around the deal. And then of course there's Paramount's competing hostile bid ' whatever happens, Warner Bros.' days as a standalone company seem to be numbered. Kirsten: I remember when Netflix was just a little baby startup and I got their [DVDs] in the mail. Here they are, all grown up, bidding for a legacy company. Did that run through your head when you saw the news'...

In a small room in San Diego last week, a man in a black leather jacket explained to me how to save the world from destruction by AI. Max Tegmark, a notable figure in the AI-safety movement, believes that 'artificial general intelligence,' or AGI, could precipitate the end of human life. I was in town for NeurIPS, one of the largest AI-research conferences, and Tegmark had invited me, along with five other journalists, to a briefing on an AI-safety index that he would release the next day. No company scored better than a C+. The threat of technological superintelligence is the stuff of science fiction, yet it has become a topic of serious discussion in the past few years. Despite the lack of clear definition'even OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, has called AGI a 'weakly defined term''the idea that powerful AI contains an inherent threat to humanity has gained acceptance among respected cultural critics. Granted, generative AI is a powerful technology that has already had a massive impact on our work and culture. But superintelligence has become one of several questionable narratives promoted by the AI industry, along with the ideas that AI learns like a human, that it has 'emergent' capabilities, that 'reasoning models' are actually reasoning, and that the technology will eventually improve itself....

Senior reporter Sean O'Kane popped over to Palo Alto to check out Rivian's Autonomy & AI Day, which some insiders told us would be the company's most important event. I'm not sure I would categorize it as such, but how about I let the journalist on the ground give his assessment' It was easy to get lost in the buzz words at times during Rivian's 'Autonomy & AI Day' this week. But there was a clear underlying message being shared: Rivian is trying to build a company that is about more than just selling cars. Rivian's hands-free version of its driver-assistance software ' which today can be used on about 135,000 miles of road ' will expand to 3.5 million miles and include surface streets. This expanded capability, which will launch in early 2026 and eventually include point-to-point hands-free (but eyes on) automated driving comes with a cost of $2,500 or $49.99 per month. Then there is its future hands-off, eyes-off system. Rivian revealed it has developed its own custom 5nm processor, which it says will be built in collaboration with both Arm and TSMC. That chip will power Rivian's 'autonomy computer' ' the backbone of an upgraded automated-driving system 'that will debut in the R2 SUV in late 2026....