TechCrunch Industry News

Some users on X are turning to Grok for fact-checking, raising concerns among fact-checkers.

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There’s a controversy brewing over “AI-generated” studies submitted to this year’s ICLR, a long-running academic conference focused on AI. At least three AI labs — Sakana, Intology, and Autoscience — claim to have used AI to generate studies that were accepted to ICLR workshops. At conferences like ICLR, workshop organizers typically review studies for publication

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The Citizen Lab said it believes several governments may be customers of spyware maker Paragon Solutions.

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Waymo has been given permission to map roadways at the San Francisco International Airport (SFO) via a temporary permit — the first step in the Alphabet company’s bid to unlock a potentially lucrative use case for its robotaxis

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If you’ve ever spent way too long scrolling through endless feeds about nothing, you may have been advised to touch grass. It’s a tongue-in-cheek suggestion, basically telling you to log off and go outside. But one developer took the concept to the next level. Rhys Kentish launched an iOS app last week called Touch Grass,

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Social network Bluesky recently published a proposal on GitHub outlining new options it could give users to indicate whether they want their posts and data to be scraped for things like generative AI training and public archiving.

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Meta won a legal victory this week against Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former employee who recently published a memoir of her time at the company titled “Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism.”

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U.S. bipartisan lawmakers say the U.K. order gagging Apple from disclosing the demand is unconstitutional. Also, SoftBank is marching ahead on its ambitions to build out a major AI operation in its home market of Japan, on its own steam and in strategic partnership with others like OpenAI.

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Amidst geopolitical tensions and volatile markets, the question of Europe’s ability to weather the storms ahead, especially as President Trump seems intent on having his pound of tariffs from the continent, is looming large.

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In the same way that genome sequencing determines the genetic makeup of an organism, Bryan Johnson — the investor and founder behind the Don’t Die movement – wants to start “foodome” sequencing.

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A rush of agentic AI solutions is hitting the enterprise market, and now one of the bigger players in automation has scooped up a startup in the space in hopes of taking a bigger piece of that business

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Cybersecurity firm Lookout found several samples of a North Korean spyware it calls KoSpy.

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Elliot Wolf, the executive producer and son of “Law & Order” creator Dick Wolf, is entering a new venture aimed at engaging true crime fans.  He, along with co-founders Andrew Adashek (CEO) and Noah Rosenberg (CTO), are developing Wolf Games, a new startup that leverages AI to generate daily murder mystery games.

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Zolve, a neobanking startup targeting global citizens seeking credit, has raised $251 million in a new round to expand into Canada and launch loans.

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Reshape Energy is betting on a more integrated approach to accelerate the decarbonization of the built environment. Founded in Munich, Germany back in May 2024, the startup is led by a team with expertise scaling energy businesses, including the German division of Octopus energy and energy price comparison platform Verivox.

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ServiceNow said on Monday that it has agreed to acquire Moveworks, which develops enterprise-focused automation and AI tools. ServiceNow will pay $2.85 billion for Moveworks in a mix of cash and stock. The former expects the deal to close in the second half of 2025.

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Russian crypto exchange Garantex has yet to directly address the international law enforcement operation that resulted in the seizure of its domains, and criminal charges against two of its administrators.

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Just weeks after Google said it would review its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, the Google for Startups Founders Fund webpage is peppered with changes. Most notably Google is now using past tense to describe all of its fund programs for underrepresented founders.  This is a change that took place after December.

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Scale AI is being investigated by the U.S. Department of Labor for compliance with the Fair Labor Standards Act.

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With the rise of AI companions who serve as online friends or romantic interests, experts are questioning how the technology affects our real-world social connections and relationships. According to Kasley Killam, author of the social health-focused book “The Art and Science of Connection: Why Social Health is the Missing Key to Living Longer."

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Private search engine DuckDuckGo is leaning further into the generative AI opportunity. The non-tracking search engine has been dabbling with expanding the role of AI assistance in its product for the past year, including launching a chatbot-style interface last fall — available at Duck.ai.

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An international coalition of law enforcement agencies seized the official website of Garantex, which has previously been sanctioned by the U.S. and E.U. governments.

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Anthropic has quietly removed from its website several voluntary commitments the company made in conjunction with the Biden Administration in 2023 to promote safe and “trustworthy” AI. The commitments, which included pledges to share information on managing AI risks across industry and government and research on AI bias and discrimination, were deleted from Anthropic’s transparency

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Ryan Breslow is once again the CEO of Bolt, the fintech company told TechCrunch on Wednesday. Bolt shared a communication that recently went out to investors in which Breslow wrote that “following a challenging few years,” he had been reinstated as Bolt’s CEO with “unanimous approval” of the board of the one-click checkout company.

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Venture investment to startups founded by women in Europe declined 12% in 2024, but it was in line with the 11% decrease in venture investment overall.

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Colossal Biosciences, known for its outlandish goal to resurrect the woolly mammoth by 2028, is claiming steady progress. It’s evidence: Genetically engineering mice to have mammoth-like fur. To engineer the woolly mouse, the company’s scientists found mouse versions of mammoth genes and then used CRISPR to edit mice embryos.

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HackerPulse builds dashboards of information pulled from engineering tools to show how and where engineers spend their time.

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Billionaire investor Mark Cuban waded into the latest government tech shake-up on Saturday, posting an unexpected offer of support for newly laid-off federal workers on the social network Bluesky. His message, which quickly gained traction, urged the displaced engineers and designers to turn the upheaval to their advantage.

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After kickstarting the market for making calls over the internet 23 years ago, Skype is closing down. Microsoft, which acquired the messaging and calling app 14 years ago, said it will be retiring it from active duty on May 5 to double down on Teams.

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Mozilla has responded to user backlash over the Firefox web browser’s new Terms of Use, which critics have called out for using overly broad language that appears to give the browser maker the rights to whatever data you input or upload.

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The automated logic behind many financial decisions — for example, decisions that determine whether a client is approved for a credit line — is hard-coded.

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Inception, a new Palo Alto-based company started by Stanford computer science professor Stefano Ermon, claims to have developed a novel AI model based on “diffusion” technology. Inception calls it a diffusion-based large language model, or a “DLM” for short.

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There’s no sure-fire approach to sales enablement, the process of providing a sales team with the resources it needs to close deals. Some teams are deficient on the prospecting side — that is, identifying and contacting potential customers. Others require help getting deals over the finish line.

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Framework, the company that is better known for its modular, repairable laptops, just released its first desktop computer. It’s a small desktop PC that punches above its weight. The most interesting part is what’s inside the device. Framework is one of the first companies to use AMD’s recently announced Strix Halo architecture.

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On Tuesday, Google introduced a new, free consumer version of its AI code completion and assistance tool, Gemini Code Assist, and which the company calls Gemini Code Assist for Individuals. The company also rolled out Gemini Code Assist for GitHub, a code review “agent” designed to automatically look for bugs in code and offer suggestions

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Adobe announced on Tuesday it’s bringing its popular design and editing software Photoshop to mobile, starting with iOS. The company plans to launch a Photoshop for Android app later this year. With the new Photoshop for iPhone app, users can access both free and paid features through a mobile-friendly design that’s accessible on the go.

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The U.S. government is leaning hard on tech companies to make more commitments to building their businesses in the country, and Big Tech is falling in line.

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Palantir co-founder and CEO Alexander Karp opens his new book with a provocative declaration: “Silicon Valley has lost its way.” Over the past decade or so, as the data analytics company rose to prominence for its work with U.S. military and intelligence, Karp has largely stayed out of the limelight.

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Rivian’s cost–cutting measures have gotten it a lot closer to profitability, but the company is warning that 2025 could still be a challenging year – especially because of the whorl of uncertainty caused by the new Trump Administration.

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Google is pulling its AI assistant Gemini from the main Google app for iOS devices. The move is meant to encourage users to download the standalone Gemini app instead, which would allow Google to more directly compete with other consumer-facing AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity.

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A study by the Pew Research Center found that Americans’ views of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg skew more negative than positive. While Zuckerberg has sparked chatter in Silicon Valley with his sudden interest in high fashion, the Meta CEO is less popular than President Trump’s right-hand man, Elon Musk, the report found.

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Recommendation algorithms operated by social media giants TikTok and X have shown evidence of substantial Far Right political bias in Germany ahead of a federal election that takes place Sunday, according to new research carried out by Global Witness

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Career product manager Amanda DeLuca has launched a parenting management app, Riley, born out of her own experience with parental anxiety and feedback from other families. DeLuca, who previously at Google, Nerdwallet, and Eventbrite, in addition to Etsy, became pregnant three years ago.

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It has been more than two years since ChatGPT burst on the scene. Shortly after that, it seemed like almost every email app integrated AI-powered email writing and summaries. Some also introduced AI-powered search for you to sift through your inbox quickly.

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Researchers found that PirateFI was never designed to be a real game, but a vehicle to infect gamers with malware and steal their passwords with an infostealer called Vidar.

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Amazon is shutting down “Inspire,” its TikTok-like, short-form video and photo feed that was previously available in its mobile app. The feed allowed users to discover products and shop from content created by influencers, brands, and other customers.

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As gaming platforms like Roblox and Minecraft continue to grow in popularity among young children, and with platforms like YouTube consuming hours of their daily screen time, edtech companies face challenges in capturing their attention.

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Copyright claims against AI companies just got a potential boost. A U.S. federal judge last week handed down a summary judgment in a case brought by tech conglomerate Thomson Reuters against legal tech firm Ross Intelligence.

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ICON, which builds homes using 3D printing, has closed on $56 million in Series C funding co-led by Norwest Venture Partners and Tiger Global, the company has confirmed to TechCrunch exclusively. The raise represents a first close for the Austin-based ICON, according to a spokesperson.

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Airbnb is planning to first introduce AI to its customer support system.

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A new startup founded by a former Google DeepMind scientist is exiting stealth with $50 million in funding. Latent Labs is building AI foundation models to “make biology programmable,” and it plans to partner with biotech and pharmaceutical companies to generate and optimize proteins.

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Information security company CyberArk has acquired identity access and governance platform Zilla Security in a deal worth up to $175 million. Founded in 1999, Boston-based CyberArk specializes in access management, including privileged access security which helps organizations protect sensitive data and critical infrastructure from external (and internal) threats.

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ChatGPT, OpenAI’s chatbot platform, may not be as power-hungry as once assumed. But its appetite largely depends on how ChatGPT is being used, and the AI models that are answering the queries, according to a new study

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E-commerce startups built around food continue to gobble up funding as investors look for sticky consumer concepts that can scale without breaking the bank.

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HR giant Workday is launching a new way for enterprises to keep track of all of their AI agents in one place. It’s also launching a few more AI agents of its own, for good measure. Silicon Valley-based Workday announced on Tuesday the release of Workday Digital Workforce Management, which is meant to help customers

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In a statement on Tuesday, Dario Amodei, the CEO of AI startup Anthropic, called the AI Action Summit in Paris this week a “missed opportunity,” and urged the AI industry — and government — to “move faster and with greater clarity.”

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Security experts say the ‘draconian’ order would have global ramifications that make this a privacy ‘emergency for us all’

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Ride-hail giant Lyft plans to bring fully autonomous robotaxis, powered by Mobileye, to its app “as soon as 2026” in Dallas, with more markets to follow, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. The news comes a day before Lyft shares its fourth-quarter and full-year 2024 earnings report

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A number of startups are racing to make vehicle inspections faster, easier, and cheaper. Self Inspection, a startup based in San Diego, thinks it has them all beat with its AI-powered service — and now it has convinced outside investors.

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France’s public investment bank announced that it plans to invest as much as €10 billion (around $10.3 billion at current exchange rates) in the artificial intelligence ecosystem in France.

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As cancer rates in the West, and globally, tack upwards due to lifestyle and environmental pollution, so does the need for the nuclear isotopes used in detecting those cancers in a medical setting.

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After consumer protection scrutiny dialed up on fast-fashion giant Shein in the European Union on Wednesday, the bloc’s executive announced Thursday that it’s sent a fresh request for information to the ecommerce platform under the Digital Services Act (DSA), a pan-EU online governance framework

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Modern Synthesis’s fibers can be manipulated in ways that simple plant fibers cannot.

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Both startups and big tech companies have aggressively used AI to help developers write code or learn programming better. People have used chatbots to prepare for different scenarios in life, like interviews. Tech assessment platform CodeSignal, which introduced a learning platform for technical subjects with AI assistants last year, launched soft skill courses on its platform

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On a clear spring evening in Michigan, the stars aligned — just not in the way Upfront Ventures partner Nick Kim expected. He’d just led a $9.5 million seed round for OurSky, a software platform for space observational data, and was eager to see what its telescope partner PlaneWave Instruments could do. 

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Norway-based browser maker Opera on Tuesday launched a new browser called “Opera Air,” which focuses on mental well-being and mindfulness with features like break reminders, breathing exercises, soundscapes, and binaural beats for better focus.

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People often use multiple apps for notes, schedule management, and to-dos. But why not combine them all in one app? That’s the ethos behind Hero, an all-in-one productivity app with an AI assistant (of course!). The iOS app was developed by former Meta employees Brad Kowalk and Seung W. Lee.

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As of Sunday in the European Union, the bloc’s regulators can ban the use of AI systems they deem to pose “unacceptable risk” or harm. February 2 is the first compliance deadline for the EU’s AI Act, the comprehensive AI regulatory framework that the European Parliament finally approved last March after years of development.

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Apple CEO Tim Cook said DeepSeek’s AI models represent “innovation that drives efficiency” on an earnings call on Thursday while fielding questions from analysts about the iPhone maker’s ambitions around AI. “In general, I think innovation that drives efficiency is a good thing.

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The Meta-owned company said the campaign was linked to Israeli spyware maker Paragon.

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SoftBank is in talks to invest up to $25 billion in OpenAI as part of a broader partnership that could see the Japanese conglomerate spend more than $40 billion on AI initiatives with the Microsoft-backed startup, according to Financial Times.

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Web-based party games are making a comeback, now with the infusion of generative AI. Among the startups joining the trend, the current forecast looks good for one startup, Little Umbrella, which leverages AI for its social party games.  The company announced on Thursday its $2 million seed funding round.

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When it comes to the world of cybersecurity, identity is often thought of as a “perimeter” around an organization. So many breaches begin through techniques like password theft, phishing, and credential stuffing; ergo, securing the identities of not only users, but also applications and machines, is the key to securing the whole system. 

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Martin Fengler knows a lot about the weather. Fengler got his Ph.D. in mathematics, focused on numerical weather prediction, before working for Meteomedia AG, a network of weather stations in Switzerland and Germany.

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AI dev platform Hugging Face has partnered with third-party cloud vendors including SambaNova to launch Inference Providers, a feature designed to make it easier for devs on Hugging Face to run AI models using the infrastructure of their choice.

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Audio streaming company Spotify said Tuesday that it paid $10 billion to the music industry last year. The company added that it has given nearly $60 billion in industry payouts since its inception. This is another effort from Spotify to dispel reports that the company doesn’t reward artists properly for their work.

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Replacing inexpensive fossil fuels is a tall hurdle, but Lydian thinks it has cracked the problem

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Since Chinese AI company DeepSeek released an open version of its reasoning model R1 at the beginning of this week, many in the tech industry have been making grand pronouncements about what the company achieved, and what it means for the state of AI.

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LG Electronics is betting on robotics as its next big growth driver. The South Korean electronics company said on Friday that it has agreed to acquire an additional 30% stake in Bear Robotics, a California-based startup it previously backed that is building AI-powered server robots for restaurants.

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Flip is a social commerce app that lets shoppers become creators. They can share honest reviews and earn cash based on engagement on the platform.

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Streaming service Plex has long since grown beyond its original focus of being a home for personal media to offer a more comprehensive solution for discovering, streaming, and sharing content across services, including Plex’s own ad-supported free TV and movies.

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The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is launching so-called “strategic market status” (SMS) investigations into the mobile ecosystems of Apple and Google. The investigations constitute part of the new Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act (DMCCA) which passed last year and came into effect in January.

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A four-year-old London startup backed by Peter Thiel has raised a $55 million Series B round as it sets about “fixing the broken clinical trial industry.” The announcement comes as artificial intelligence is shaping up to revolutionize drug discovery and development.

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Truecaller for iOS has been updated with live caller ID support for its premium iPhone users.

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French startup Karmen has secured a small funding round so that it can improve its instant financing products. The company offers short-term loans to small companies facing a working capital crunch. It’s a €9 million equity-and-debt round ($9.4 million at today’s exchange rates) with Seventure Partners buying a stake in the small startup.

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Friend, a startup creating a $99, AI-powered necklace designed to be treated as a digital companion, has delayed its first batch of shipments until Q3. Friend had planned to ship devices to pre-order customers in Q1. But according to co-founder and CEO Avi Schiffman, that’s no longer feasible.

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Top LLMs performed poorly on a high-level history test, a new paper has found.

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Leading AI developers, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, are threading a delicate needle to sell software to the United States military: make the Pentagon more efficient, without letting their AI kill people.

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A new AI orchestration startup from the founders of Lithuanian unicorn Nord Security is setting out to help enterprises put their AI projects into production, with an initial focus on bringing greater visibility, security and adaptability to large language models (LLMs).

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Climate tech may have had a down year in 2024, but new data also shows a maturing sector with larger deal sizes. Venture investment in the climate tech sector was down 7% to $12.9 billion, $1 billion shy of 2023’s tally, according to data in a new PitchBook report.

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Google has agreed to purchase 100,000 tons of carbon dioxide removal credits from Indian startup Varaha.

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The Russia-linked ransomware group is threatening to leak data stolen from almost 60 Cleo Software customers if ransoms aren't paid

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Hinge today launched a new AI-powered feature called “Prompt Feedback,” which aims to improve your dating profile by analyzing how you answer prompts and assessing if it needs to be more specific or authentic. 

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Former SoftBank exec Akshay Naheta's startup, Distributed Technologies Research, is trying to bridge the gap between banking and blockchain tech.

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App stores are filled with different services that are designed to help you cut down on your screen time and count your steps. A new iOS app called Steppin combines these two ideas to help users do both at the same time to bridge the gap between physical and mental health

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Shortly after OpenAI released o1, its first “reasoning” AI model, people began noting a curious phenomenon. The model would sometimes begin “thinking” in Chinese, Persian, or some other language — even when asked a question in English. Given a problem to sort out — e.g. “How many R’s are in the word ‘strawberry?'”

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OpenAI on Monday published what it’s calling an “economic blueprint” for AI: a living document that lays out policies the company thinks it can build on with the U.S. government and its allies.

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In 2023, the U.K. made a big song and dance about the need to consider the harms of AI, giving itself a leading role in the wider conversation around AI safety.

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It’s a new year, but drama in the WordPress community keeps going. Automattic, the company that runs WordPress.com, said that it would reduce its contribution to WordPress core, the open-source project that acts as the backbone of most of Automattic’s products and ensures the longevity of WordPress as a technology and community.

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TV providers and streamers’ real competition isn’t each other, it’s social video. Or at least that’s what the president of Comcast Advertising, James Rooke, said during an interview on Wednesday at CES 2025 in Las Vegas.

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Automattic CEO and WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg has deactivated the accounts of several WordPress.org community members, some of whom have been spearheading a push to create a new fork of the open source WordPress project.

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Nvidia unveiled a prototype AI avatar at CES 2025 that lives on your PC’s desktop. The AI assistant, R2X, looks like a video game character, and it can help you navigate apps on your computer.

The R2X avatar is rendered and animated using Nvidia’s AI models, and users can run the avatar on popular LLMs of their choice, such as OpenAI’s GPT-4o or xAI’s Grok. Users can talk with R2X through text and voice, upload files to it for processing, or even enable the AI assistant to view what’s happening live on your screen or camera.

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The old chestnut passed around by industry watchers for the past decade was that CES — one of the world’s largest consumer tech trade events — had turned into an auto show. Maybe even the most important auto show of the year. And there was ample evidence of that.

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Walk up to someone wearing a pair of Halliday’s smart glasses, and you might not notice they’re looking at smartphone notifications, live language translations, or advice from an AI assistant.

The only giveaway is the tiny green dot of light on their eyeball.

Wearables startup Halliday launched a pair of smart glasses at CES 2025 that projects a 3.5-inch round display into your line of sight. The device creating the display is called the DigiWindow, and it’s a tiny round module — smaller than your pinky nail — that sits on the inside of the Halliday’s frames just above your right eye.

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If a user’s heart rate stops suddenly, and their body temperature and blood oxygen level also drop dramatically, the smart ring knows that its user has died and sends a signal to the In Case of Death app to trigger the ‘Death Protections’ chosen by the user when they first enrolled in the app and set it up. Davy Robot’s Datic 1 nabbed a good bit of attention this week at CES 2025, as attendees lined up to shoot some hoops on the busy show floor. The bot sits under a hoop, rebounding the ball after you take a shot. And San Francisco startup Based Hardware announced the launch of a new AI wearable, Omi, to boost productivity during the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas this week.

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Honda unveiled Tuesday at CES 2025 the latest EV in its so-called 0 Series — a mid-sized SUV prototype dubbed, surely enough, the 0 SUV. Honda’s take on the SUV will join the 0 Saloon that the automaker showed off at last year’s show; At CES 2025, German Bionic announced the Apogee Ultra, a new robotic exoskeleton it claims is the “world’s most powerful.” What did the system do to earn such a lofty title? It offers up to 80 pounds of dynamic lift assistance. That means a payload of 70 pounds feels more like nine to 11 pounds to the lifter’s lower back; and Beatbot makes robotic pool cleaners. In fact, the company is showing off a new one with a docking station this week at CES 2025. What really caught our eye on the show floor, however, is RoboTurtle, because, well, it’s a robot that looks like a turtle. The turtle, sadly, seems to very much be in the concept stages, as the firm focuses on more commercial endeavors.

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As Peacock continues to trail behind major players in the entertainment industry like Netflix, TikTok, and YouTube, the streaming service is adopting strategies similar to its rivals with two new initiatives: mini-games and a short-form vertical video feed. The company previewed these experiments at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Monday; Reddit unveiled new trends tools aimed at businesses and a new ad format for its Ask Me Anything (AMA) Q&A sessions; As a part of a significant overhaul of its content moderation policies announced on Tuesday, Meta admitted that its approach to limiting political content across its platforms had been “pretty blunt” and would now be addressed. The company said it would once again phase in political content into Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, allowing people who want political content in their feeds to see more of it.

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Japanese automaker Toyota is “exploring rockets,” chairman Akio Toyoda announced on stage at CES 2025 on Monday, while hinting at the idea of moving people through space. The rocketry mention on the CES 2025 stage came while Toyoda was in the middle of explaining how he views his company’s myriad technologies as “invention by kakezan,” or “invention by multiplication.” John Deere has a bunch of new products that it just showed off at CES 2025, including an electric robot lawnmower meant for commercial-grade landscaping. Powered by a 21.4kWh battery — roughly a quarter the size of what you’d find on a passenger EV — the company says the mower is supposed to be able to operate for up to 10 hours. It uses four pairs of stereo cameras, two on each side, to see in 360 degrees.

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Therabody, the maker of popular massage guns and other wellness devices, announced at CES 2025 that it’s launching an AI-powered digital recovery app called Coach by Therabody. While Therabody’s flagship app is designed to give you easy-to-follow proprietary routines, Coach takes recovery and wellness a step further by using data to understand users’ current needs; Agriculture, which consumes about 70% of global freshwater, is grappling with increased water scarcity and inefficient irrigation systems. Traditional methods of irrigation not only lead to wasted water and nutrients, but also contribute to lower crop yields, food insecurity, and unnecessary carbon emissions; Amazon announced a partnership with Kidde at CES 2025 on Monday that brings its Ring technology to the home safety stalwart’s smoke alarms. There will be multiple versions of the hybrid smoke and CO2 detectors, ranging in price from $55 to $75; In a surprising deal announced on Monday, Disney is set to combine its Hulu Live TV business with Fubo, the live TV streaming service known for its extensive sports coverage. Under the terms of the deal, Disney will own about 70% of Fubo, which will continue to be available to viewers as a separate offering.

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CES is this week in Las Vegas. Timekettle unveiled its latest earbuds, the W4 Pro. The product aims to up the ante on the startup’s focus by bringing real-time two-way translation to phone and video calls; Smart ring maker Circular announced its next-gen Ring 2 with ECG (electrocardiogram) functionality and AFib (atrial fibrillation) detection. The wearable is set to go on sale in February or Mach for $380; Birdify is showcasing the Bath Pro, taking a cue from products like the Bird Buddy and applying them to a big saucer of water with a solar-powered fountain in the middle; Roborock announced the Saros Z70. The Roomba competitor showcases what the company believes will be the next big step in robovac evolution: an arm.

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U.S. officials say the sanctioned Chinese firm provided botnet infrastructure for the China-backed hacking group Flax Typhoon

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When a company releases a new AI video generator, it’s not long before someone uses it to make a video of actor Will Smith eating spaghetti. It’s become something of a meme as well as a benchmark: Seeing whether a new video generator can realistically render Smith slurping down a bowl of noodles.

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The data was found exposed on an Amazon cloud server, and contained precise location data on thousands of vehicles. Also, the Competition and Markets Authority, the U.K.’s antitrust watchdog, has opened an investigation into whether IBM’s planned acquisition of cloud software vendor HashiCorp would affect competition. The CMA said Monday it was inviting comment on the merger from interested parties by January 16; Apple is allowing anyone to access its Apple TV+ streaming service for free this weekend, from January 3 to 5. The company made the announcement on Monday alongside a short video featuring its most popular TV shows, including “Severance,” “Slow Horses,” “Shrinking,” and more; Samsung Electronics said on Tuesday that it has become the largest shareholder of South Korea-based robotics maker Rainbow Robotics, increasing its stake from 14.7% to 35% for KRW 267 billion (about $181 billion). The electronics giant, which paid KRW 86.8 billion for the 14.7% stake in 2023.

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On December 27, a Waymo robotaxi and a Serve Robotics sidewalk delivery robot collided at a Los Angeles intersection, according to a video that’s circulating on social media. The footage shows a Serve bot crossing a street in West Hollywood at night and trying to get onto the sidewalk. Also, Treasury officials attributed the December theft of unclassified documents to China ... and Nearly a quarter century after its founding, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin is gearing up to launch an orbital rocket for the first time — and finally enter the competitive launch industry that is currently dominated by SpaceX. 

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Ah, 2024: the year we debated how to pronounce “hawk tuah,” pondered the health benefits of eating rocks, and held space for a Broadway showstopper. It was a year when the discourse could feel shockingly pure and joyful — at least for a few minutes, before we all came tumbling back down to reality.

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These simple cybersecurity resolutions can help keep your startup protected from most malicious hackers.

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Three crypto industry groups — the DeFi Education Fund, the Blockchain Association, and the Texas Blockchain Council — are suing the Internal Revenue Service to block new regulations that require decentralized finance (DeFi) entities to report customer information. The IRS has been finalizing crypto tax regulations as part of the Biden Administration’s Infrastructure Investment.

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A year after Onyx Motorbikes owner James Khatiblou died suddenly, leaving customers with unfulfilled orders and millions in unpaid debts, the brand has been revived by its original founder.

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While most seed investors believe founders should spend their raised cash however they want to, those VCs will still be judging founders’ cash management.

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Principle Venture Partners will write early-stage checks anywhere from $100,000 to “single digit millions.”

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Before the elections, the cybersecurity team of U.S. vice president and then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris reached out to Apple asking for help, according to Forbes, after a tool that’s designed to detect spyware on iPhones flagged anomalies on two devices belonging to campaign staffers. Apple declined to forensically analyze the phones.

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With 25M users, Bluesky launches a $1M fund to take on social media and AI. The fund will offer grants to those building on BlueSky’s open source AT Protocol. Apple and Meta go to war over interoperability vs. privacy. The two are warring in Europe over the balance between interoperability and privacy, Reuters reports. The fight focuses on the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), a competition regulation that requires designated gatekeepers (including Apple and Meta) not to restrict rivals’ access to so-called core platform services. California can ban new gas cars starting in 2035. California’s phase out would begin in 2026, when the state will require 35% of automakers’ sales to be zero emissions vehicles. Bugs in a major McDonald’s India delivery system exposed sensitive customer data. McDonald's India exposed the personal information of customers and drivers due to security flaws impacting its APIs. Tracker firm Hapn spilling names of thousands of GPS tracking customers. A security researcher found customer names and workplace affiliations spilling directly from Hapn's servers.

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There’s an ocean of meme coins beyond Dogecoin, and a new startup called Neverless wants to make it easier to get started with trading crypto, with a particular focus on providing access to small-cap tokens. This is an interesting new crypto startup, founded by three former executives at Revolut, the London-based fintech juggernaut.

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The US government is calling on a Perplexity executive to help make its case that Google is a monopolist.

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Many sites saw their organic traffic decline in 2024, in big part due to the rise of AI-generated search results. Many queries no longer lead to click-throughs, and even when users click, it is hard for companies to get more context on searches made within apps like ChatGPT or Perplexity.

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There are few matters in life that divide a room more than the prudence of putting pineapple on pizza. But if you’re of the persuasion that tropical fruit has no place on a pie, you’ll have to swallow a bitter pill — if you want to access the WordPress.org developer portal and forum, at least. Waymo will begin testing its autonomous vehicle technology in Tokyo in early 2025, the first time the Alphabet company’s robotaxis have driven on public roads outside the U.S. The move to Japan is part of Waymo’s “road trips,” a development program that involves bringing its technology to a variety of cities. TikTok and ByteDance asked the United States Supreme Court to block the law that forces TikTok to be sold off or banned in the United States, according to an emergency filing with America’s top court on Monday. The social media company requested that the Supreme Court consider blocking the sell-or-ban law passed earlier this year. ChatGPT Search, OpenAI’s AI-powered web search experience, is now live for all ChatGPT users — with several new features in tow. By default, ChatGPT will automatically determine which questions to route through ChatGPT Search, or users can tap a new “Search the web” icon in the ChatGPT interface.

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Google DeepMind, Google’s flagship AI research lab, wants to beat OpenAI at the video generation game — and it might just, at least for a little while. On Monday, DeepMind announced Veo 2, a next-gen video-generating AI and the successor to Veo, which powers a growing number of products across Google’s portfolio.

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On Monday, the U.K.’s internet regulator, Ofcom, published the first set of final guidelines for online service providers subject to the Online Safety Act. This starts the clock ticking on the sprawling online harms law’s first compliance deadline, which the regulator expects to kick in in three months’ time.

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Regardless of how they're defined, the agents are for helping complete tasks in an automated way with as little human interaction as possible.

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Now with 25 million users, Bluesky is facing a test that will determine whether or not its platform will still be seen as a safe space and place of refuge from the toxicity of X. Also, OpenAI is blaming one of the longest outages in its history on a “new telemetry service” gone awry. On Wednesday, OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot platform, ChatGPT; its video generator, Sora; and its developer-facing API experienced major disruptions starting at around 3 p.m. Pacific.

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The European Union’s executive body is facing an embarrassing privacy scandal after it was confirmed on Friday that a Commission ad campaign on X (formerly Twitter) breached the EU’s own data protection rules.

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Arriving in time for holiday travel and potentially lost luggage, a new feature that allows Apple AirTag owners to share the location of a lost item is now integrated with the customer service systems of two major airlines. United and Air Canada are the first launch partners for Apple’s “Find My Share Item Location” feature,

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Google is slowly peeling back the curtain on its vision to, one day, sell you glasses with augmented reality and multimodal AI capabilities. The company’s plans for those glasses, however, are still blurry.

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The spyware, called EagleMsgSpy, has been used by Chinese law enforcement, according to cybersecurity firm Lookout.

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The startup has been working to imbue the humble brick with the ability to transform electricity into heat and store it for hours on end.

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Advances in robotics and seabed electrification have enabled a trio of startups to pursue deep sea reverse osmosis.

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Yelp is releasing several new features as part of its year-end release, including AI-powered review insights, a personalized home feed with new content types, and a redesigned inbox for business owners. When it comes to user-facing features, the company is now highlighting reviews in different categories, including food quality, service, and ambiance.

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Many VCs, particularly newer firms, readily admit that 2024 has been a challenging year for raising fresh capital. Dimension Capital, a two-year-old venture outfit, had a different experience when raising its second fund.   “Every investor from fund one came back very quickly."

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ByteDance and TikTok filed an emergency motion on Monday asking an appeals court to temporally block the law that would ban TikTok in the U.S. unless the social network divests from Chinese ownership by January 19. Also, Apple is being sued over its decision not to implement a system that would have scanned iCloud photos for child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The lawsuit argues that by not doing more to prevent the spread of this material, it’s forcing victims to relive their trauma, according to The New York Times; A U.S. breast-screening program claims to demonstrate the potential benefits of using artificial intelligence (AI) in mammography screening, with women who paid for AI-enhanced scans 21% more likely to have cancer detected. DeepHealth, an AI firm owned by radiology giant RadNet, presented its findings at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America; When it comes to market capitalization, Nvidia is currently the second-biggest public company in the world, behind Apple. That’s why all eyes are on Nvidia these days. And now, as Bloomberg spotted, China Central Television, a public TV broadcaster, is reporting that China’s market regulator has opened a probe into Nvidia’s acquisition of Mellanox; Nikola Corp., a producer of battery and hydrogen-electric trucks, has taken several steps to repay its debts and raise equity, including offering up to $100 million in a common stock sale. 

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Former NBA Lakers star Metta Sandiford-Artest (formerly known as Metta World Peace), has teamed up with Stephen Stokols, the former CEO of Boost Mobile, to launch Tru Skye Ventures, a firm looking to invest in sports and health tech, according to Sportico. Also, The first Lucid Motors Gravity SUV has rolled off the company’s production line in Casa Grande, Arizona, according to a post on X. The company will now set its aim on ramping up production of the new electric vehicle and making the first deliveries. Recently, Amp Robotics changed its business model to focus on running entire facilities that sort recyclables. Fly Ventures, the Berlin-based VC that invests in seed-stage European startups within enterprise and deep tech, has launched its third fund at €80 million. The firm raised its last €53 million fund in 2020. Aiming at technical founders, the firm claims Fund III was oversubscribed and raised in a single closing.

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OpenAI finally released the full version of o1, which gives smarter answers than GPT-4o by using additional compute to “think” about questions. However, AI safety testers found that o1’s reasoning abilities also make it try to deceive humans at a higher rate than GPT-4o.

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Waymo is partnering with Moove, an African mobility fintech that offers vehicle financing to gig workers, to handle fleet management operations for its robotaxi service in Phoenix and, soon, Miami.  The partnership marks several firsts, like Waymo’s entry into Miami.

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Bluesky has blown up this year thanks to a vibrant community of posters, user customization choices, and a decentralized protocol that doesn’t lock users into the choices of a billionaire CEO.

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There’s a new connected fitness device in town and it’s called Growl. Inspired by hardware companies like Peloton or Tonal, Growl is building a boxing bag that you can attach to your wall at home. Users can then start immersive, gamified boxing classes from the comfort of their home.

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Spotify Wrapped, the streamer’s highly anticipated annual listening recap, has arrived. In addition to its usual personalized summary detailing your favorite artists, songs, podcasts, and more, the company this year is introducing two new features, including most notably, an AI-powered podcast of your 2024 Wrapped created with Google’s AI summarization tool, NotebookLM.

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Millions of Americans will pop open their laptops to buy gifts this holiday season, but tech companies are racing to turn the job of online shopping over to AI agents instead. Perplexity recently released an AI shopping agent for its paying customers in the United States.

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The U.S. consumer protection agency said it's closing the loophole to block the "widespread evasion" of federal law by data brokers.

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As more publishers cut content licensing deals with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, a study put out this week by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism — looking at how the AI chatbot produces citations (i.e. sources) for publishers’ content — makes for interesting, or, well, concerning, reading

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As more celebrities and popular influencers join Bluesky, the fast-growing social media service has been facing more concerns around impersonation and verified identity. The Bluesky Safety team posted Friday that the company has updated its impersonation policy to be “more aggressive,” adding that “impersonation and handle-squatting accounts will be removed.”

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Intentional phone usage is a tricky habit to develop. Operating systems like iOS and Android, along with social media networks like Instagram and TikTok, have built timers, nudges, and controls around the usage of the apps or the platform.

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Meta, the parent of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is the second-biggest driver of internet usage globally. Its properties — and their billions of users — account for 10% of all fixed and 22% of all mobile traffic. Meta’s investments into artificial intelligence stand to boost that usage even further.

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A new paper from the Federal Trade Commission found that many smart device makers fail to disclose to consumers how long they will provide software updates for their products.

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India-based audio platform Pocket FM has more than 200,000 hours of content on the service. However, the company’s CEO, Rohan Nayak, believes that the platform still has room to grow in terms of creating original content and expanding its library to multiple genres and sub-genres.

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The U.S. Department of Commerce today confirmed it has awarded $7.865 billion to chip giant Intel under the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act, a federal statute signed into law by President Joe Biden in 2022 to boost domestic semiconductor manufacturing.

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London is putting the brakes on the mess of e-bikes that litter the streets of the city. Today, the local transportation authority, Transport for London, announced a new enforcement policy that will restrict parking for the tens of thousands of e-bikes rented on-demand from companies like Lime, HumanForest and Dott.

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It’s not exactly a secret that Apple has explored the possibility of building a television. Before his death in 2011, co-founder Steve Jobs famously told biographer Walter Isaacson that he’d “finally cracked it,” but no full-fledged Apple TV (as opposed to the Apple TV set-top box) has emerged in the years since; The Australian government has withdrawn a bill that would have fined online platforms up to 5 percent of their global revenue if they failed to stop the spread of misinformation. The bill, which was backed by the Labor government, would have allowed the Australian Communications and Media Authority to create enforceable rules around misinformation; Brightcove, a cloud platform that helps businesses manage and monetize video content, is being taken private by Italian technology company Bending Spoons, in a deal valued at $233 million. Founded in 2004, Brightcove develops tools and services for creating, hosting, streaming, marketing, and monetizing video content; Now you can appear to be on a Zoom call in your office, even when you’re sipping a margarita in a hammock far, far away. Courtesy of a months-old startup called Pickle.

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Meet the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W, a tiny board designed around a microcontroller that lets you build hardware projects at scale. Raspberry Pi is once again using the RP2350, its own, well-documented microcontroller. But what is a microcontroller again? As the name suggests, microcontrollers let you control other electronic components or devices

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Brave announced on Thursday that it’s introducing an AI chat mode for follow-up questions based on initial queries on Brave Search. Earlier this year, the company launched “Answer with AI” summaries that appear above search results after you submit a query to give you an easy-to-read answer in response to a question.

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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced on Thursday he is opening an investigation into the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) to determine whether the trade group’s members conspired to boycott “certain social media platforms.”

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AI may be the hottest thing since sliced bread. But that doesn’t mean it’s getting easier to develop and run. According to a recent Boston Consulting Group poll, 74% of organizations are struggling to derive value from their AI investments

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Several AI-based study tools are capitalizing on a “PDF to Brainrot” trend, which will read the text of a document you upload over “oddly satisfying” videos, like ASMR clips of mixing paint and cutting soap, or gameplay footage from Minecraft and Subway Surfers.

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Kim Kardashian’s new beaux is a Tesla bot named Optimus. The fashion mogul got some hands-on experience with Tesla’s bipedal, human-shaped robot, which is not yet available to the general public. In Kardashian’s videos with the robot — posted to X and her Instagram story; Volkswagen of America has a new CEO: Rivian’s recently departed chief commercial officer Kjell Gruner. The appointment comes just one week after VW parent company Volkswagen Group formalized a $5.8 billion joint venture with Rivian, which will be focused on EV architecture and software; Apple said the security update for Macs, iPhones, and iPads is "recommended for all users."; Meta hired Salesforce’s CEO of AI, Clara Shih, to lead a new organization building AI tools for businesses that use Meta’s apps to reach consumers, according to a LinkedIn post from Shih on Tuesday. Meta confirmed the appointment and the new Business AI group in a statement to TechCrunch

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The U.K. government is not ruling out further beefing up existing online safety rules by adding an Australian-style ban on social media for under 16s technology secretary, Peter Kyle, has said.

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Generative AI has upended how we write things… or even if we write at all. Now a startup wants to be the main character in the next chapter of that story: AI that replaces the role of the publisher. Spines is a self-publishing platform that claims that — thanks to being powered by artificial intelligence

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After building out Google Lens to help users shop online more easily, Google is now updating the product to help people shop when they’re in a physical store by offering product insights, price comparisons, and local inventory availability.

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Roblox will not let users under the age of 13 message others outside of games and experiences on the platform, the company said Friday. Roblox also announced a series of other built-in protections for young users, such as age-gating certain experiences, along with enhanced parental controls. 

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Bluesky is having a moment — a moment that’s already stretched on for nearly three months. Over the summer, the social media app saw a wave of new signups in Brazil after X (formerly Twitter) was temporarily banned there.

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If you’re an hourly worker, the number of go-to options you have for finding new jobs is shrinking a little. JobGet — a Boston startup that operates an hourly job-hunting site with social features built in, a la LinkedIn — is acquiring Snagajob, one of its rivals in the U.S. market.

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Social networking rivals continue to benefit from the user exodus from X. Spill, the social app founded by two former Twitter employees, released a statement claiming it has also seen a jump in users after the U.S. Presidential election, following similar news by Bluesky, which gained more than 2 million users during that time.

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Spotify announced on Wednesday that it will start paying podcast hosts who make popular videos on its streaming platform, as the company looks to take on YouTube’s dominance in the video podcast space.

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PayPal is launching a few features that let users in groups pool money with friends or family, to collectively pay for trips, travels, gifts, and anything else. The company is launching this feature in the U.S., Germany, the U.K., Italy, and Spain

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Many feared that the 2024 election would be affected, and perhaps decided, by AI-generated disinformation. While there was some to be found, it was far less than anticipated. But don’t let that fool you: the disinfo threat is real — you’re just not the target.

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The future of aircraft may look very similar to today’s superficially — but under the hood (or sitting next to the tailfins) they will likely be quite different. That’s the future NASA is hoping to nurture with five research awards worth $11.5 million.

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Red Hat, the IBM-owned open source software firm, is acquiring Neural Magic, a startup that optimizes AI algorithms to run on commodity processors. The transaction is subject to applicable regulatory reviews and other customary closing conditions.

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There’s an AI chip battle brewing among the major cloud vendors. Google’s Trillium, a custom chip for training and running AI models, recently entered preview, and Microsoft’s Maia is expected to follow in short order. Not to be outdone, Amazon Web Services has AI chips, too: Trainium, Inferentia, and Graviton.

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Over the years, numerous startups have gained traction by designing, making and selling standing desks as part of a workspace innovation trend to promote better health, and a lot of executives swear by them, including Apple CEO Tim Cook, who once called sitting “the new cancer.”; Social network X has so far limited its AI chatbot Grok (built by Elon Musk’s other company xAI) to its premium, paying users. However, the platform is seemingly preparing to open up the chatbot to free users; After a chip manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company was found inside a Huawei processor, the US Department of Commerce has ordered the company to halt shipments of advanced chips to Chinese customers, according to a report in Reuters; Former Apple engineer Alex Ruber and former Twitter and Asana engineer Parth Chopra first met on Y Combinator’s founder match platform, then met in person at a thrift store for shopping. They later went on a thrift store shopping trip where they talked about solving problems with finding the right product in the online space.

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A founder who was an early mover in the race to build autonomous vehicles has raised $15 million for his next act: a startup that claims its AI can write enterprise software on its own.

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What’s the secret to success? It isn’t any of the trends that so many founders in Silicon Valley subscribe to.

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The PRESS Act would protect a journalist's sources, and gained unanimous bipartisan support when passed by the House in January.

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Anthropic today announced that it’s teaming up with Palantir, the data-mining company, and Amazon Web Services to provide U.S. intelligence and defense agencies access to Anthropic’s Claude 3 and 3.5 family of AI models. The news comes as a growing number of AI vendors, for strategic and revenue-related reasons, look to ink deals with U.S.

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The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced on Tuesday it will be taking action against the online cash app and neobank Dave, which it says used “misleading marketing to deceive consumers.” At issue is how Dave marketed $500 cash advances to consumers that it rarely offered.

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By now, there’s hardly a coder in the world who isn’t using an AI copilot in some way. But using GitHub Copilot or Cursor.AI to ask technical questions and get debugging help could be just the beginning.

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It seems Lyft is hoping to catch up to Uber’s string of autonomous vehicle partnerships. Lyft announced Wednesday three separate partnerships — with startup May Mobility, automated driving company Mobileye and smart dashcam firm Nexar — all aimed at establishing a foothold in the emerging autonomous vehicle market.

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“Move cautiously and red-team things” is sadly not as catchy as “move fast and break things.” But three AI safety advocates made it clear to startup founders that going too fast can lead to ethical issues in the long run.

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Most AI benchmarks don’t tell us much. They ask questions that can be solved with rote memorization, or cover topics that aren’t relevant to the majority of users. So some AI enthusiasts are turning to games as a way to test AIs’ problem-solving skills.

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Go to TechCrunch.com for more tech stories.

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Can the U.S. meaningfully regulate AI? It’s not at all clear yet. Policymakers have achieved progress in recent months, but they’ve also had setbacks, illustrating the challenging nature of laws imposing guardrails on the technology. In March, Tennessee became the first state to protect voice artists from unauthorized AI cloning.

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Google Maps is getting new features powered by Gemini, Google’s generative AI model. On Thursday the company announced incoming updates that will allow Google Maps users in the U.S. to tap into AI to help them find new places to visit and answer questions about different locations

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Two mobile operating systems currently comprise nearly 100% of the global smartphone market. Building one is hard, and for most phone makers, there are better uses of resources, especially when Android is right there for the taking

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Space executives took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt on Monday to talk about the challenges and opportunities of building out dual-use technology, or tech that has both a defense and a commercial use case. 

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The European Union has expanded its scrutiny of online marketplaces by opening a formal proceeding on Chinese low cost ecommerce platform, Temu, under the Digital Services Act (DSA), the Commission announced Thursday. Enforcers of the online governance framework will now dial up their oversight of Temu.

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A new startup setting out to combat the scourge of deepfakes and spoofed evidence in the age of AI is showing off its wares on the Startup Battlefield stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 this week.

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Meet Luna, a health and well-being app for teen girls that is designed to help them navigate teenhood. The app lets teens ask questions about their health and wellness and get responses from experts. It also lets them track their periods, moods, and skin.

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The focus of the new $100 million fund, Crosscut’s sixth, will include energy and power, space and underwater exploration, advanced manufacturing, advanced materials, and security and defense.

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Buzzy calendar apps tend to make a big splash and disappear after a while. Sometimes they get acquired, sometimes the company pivots to something else. That’s not the case with Fantastical, a popular calendar app for macOS, iOS, and other Apple platforms.

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McDonald’s ice cream machines have developed a lousy reputation for being broken when you visit the restaurant, largely due to strict copyright laws that only permit specially licensed technicians to legally repair them. The manufacturers have to license each technician, and they put locks on the McFlurry machines to prevent others from repairing them; A federal jury ruled Friday that Masimo smartwatches infringed Apple patents, but Apple isn’t getting a big payday. Bloomberg Law reports that the company was only seeking the statutory minimum of $250, and that’s all it was awarded; a few months after acquiring equity management company Easop, Remote, an HR platform for managing geographically distributed teams, is doubling down on its focus on managing equity compensation with a new product, Remote Equity. Remote already makes it easy for companies to work with talent all around the globe; Authorities have gained 'full access' to the servers used by the two notorious infostealers; The popularity of an Instagram video can affect its actual video quality: According to Adam Mosseri (the Meta executive who leads Instagram and Threads), videos that are more popular get shown in higher quality, while less popular videos get shown in lower quality.

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World models, also known as world simulators, are being touted by some as the next big thing in AI. AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs has raised $230 million to build “large world models,” and DeepMind hired one of the creators of OpenAI’s video generator, Sora, to work on “world simulators.”

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Scout Motors, the Volkswagen Group spinoff, unveiled Thursday two EVs it hopes will hook American customers with modern-meets-rugged styling that downplays digital and embraces the mechanical. The catch? The company will also offer variants to its all-electric Scout Traveler SUV and Scout Terra Truck that will come equipped with a built-in gas-powered generator.

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The war in Ukraine has shown that warfare changes by the day. It’s also clear that the tech used to make war today is costly: While larger countries can afford legions of tanks, helicopters, and precision-strike systems, smaller nations find themselves scrambling for cheaper ways to defend themselves.

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Brands often rely on scraping the web and monitoring social media to understand what customers are saying about them and get insights for product development. Cafeteria is a startup that wants to connect brands to their most opinionated customers: teens.

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The co-founders who sold their last startup to Spotify are working on a new project: an AI-powered educational startup called Oboe backed by a $4 million seed investment. The new company, hailing from Nir Zicherman and Michael Mignano, aims to democratize access to learning the way that their prior startup, Anchor.

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3D printing objects using metal is a well-established technique, but it tends to be too complex, expensive, or imprecise to match traditional methods at scale. Armed with $14 million from Nvidia and Boeing, Freeform aims to change that, building a new metal additive printing process that they say changes the game

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Anthropic has released an updated version of its Claude 3.5 Sonnet model with a new Computer Use feature that can interact with apps on a PC.

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As the creator economy is growing rapidly, brand partnerships remain one of the prime ways creators can earn money. Other services like link-in-bio apps with affiliate links or Pateron-like subscriptions become secondary ways to increase creators’ income. For platforms and startup, the biggest challenge remains to match brands and creators for collaboration

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This week’s cover of WSJ Magazine is extremely minimalistic. That’s not surprising given that the main story is an in-depth interview with Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple and the king of minimalistic design; Instagram and Threads accounts that track the private jets of celebrities – including Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Kim Kardashian, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Kylie Jenner – were suspended on Monday, according to the owner of many such accounts, Florida college student, Jack Sweeney. Links to Instagram/Threads accounts tracking the flights of the former President; Zoom is partnering with Suki, an AI medical note-taking app, to let doctors use an AI scribe that will take notes of their consultations with patients; Earlier this year, Medal, a startup known for its video game clipping features, launched a cross-platform AI assistant called Highlight. Now, the company is spinning off Highlight into a new entity, which has raised $10 million in a funding round. General Catalyst led the funding round with Valor, SV Angel, and Conviction Embed

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Meta is expanding tests of facial recognition as an anti-scam measure to combat celebrity scam ads and more broadly, the Facebook owner announced Monday. Monika Bickert, Meta’s VP of content policy, wrote in a blog post that some of the tests aim to bolster its existing anti-scam measures

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AI search engine Perplexity is in fundraising talks and hopes to raise around $500 million at an $8 billion valuation, according to the Wall Street Journal. If a deal happens with those terms, it would more than double Perplexity’s valuation from its $3 billion valuation when it raised from SoftBank over the summer; Uber and Lyft need to do more to support disabled passengers, especially those who are blind or visually impaired, according to protesters who gathered outside the companies’ headquarters on October 15; Drone-maker DJI filed a lawsuit Friday against the US Department of Defense over its inclusion on a DoD list of “Chinese military companies.” A DJI spokesperson said the company filed the suit after “attempting to engage with the DoD for more than sixteen months” and deciding “it had no alternative other than to seek relief; AI companies claim to have robust safety checks in place that ensure that models don’t say or do weird, illegal, or unsafe stuff. But what if the models were capable of evading those checks and, for some reason, trying to sabotage or mislead users? Turns out they can do this, according to Anthropic researchers.

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OpenAI quietly published a statement on its website pledging not to use its patents offensively. Asserting its commitment to the principles of “broad access” and “collaboration,” OpenAI said that it would only use its patents in a way that supports innovation

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Worldcoin, the Sam Altman co-founded “proof of personhood” crypto startup that scans people’s eyeballs, announced on Thursday that it dropped the “coin” from its name and is now just “World.” The startup also unveiled its next generation of iris-scanning “Orb” and other tools at a live event in San Francisco

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Instagram is introducing a series of new safety features to protect users from sextortion scammers, the company announced on Thursday. Most notably, the company is no longer going to allow people to screenshot or screen record ephemeral images or videos sent in private messages.

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Amy Wu, founder of the AI-based mental health app Manifest, has a bold prediction for the next wave of tech. “Separately from the AI trend, I think so many people are seeing this loneliness epidemic that’s happening with Gen Z,” she said.

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The United Kingdom’s NHS — the world’s largest public health service — is working on creaking IT infrastructure. In any sector, that’s a ticking time bomb. But when you consider that the NHS holds medical records for nearly 67 million people, a breach of that system could become a meltdown; Sophia Tung set up a livestream this past summer, showing self-driving Waymo cars honking from the San Francisco parking lot near her apartment at all hours of the night; Meta’s X rival Threads is rolling out a new “activity status” feature that will let you see when someone on the social network is online. Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced the feature on Tuesday in a Threads post, noting that it’s meant to act as “a way to help you find others to engage with; and if you like open-source, decentralized social networks that put the power in the hands of the people instead of billionaires, you can now support that cause…by buying toys. On Tuesday, Mastodon, a decentralized alternative to X, began selling its own merchandise in the form of cute, plushie mastodons – the proto-elephants with long tusks

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During Tesla’s much-hyped robotaxi reveal event last week, CEO Elon Musk said he expects Tesla to release an “unsupervised” version of FSD, the automaker’s advanced driver assistance system, in Texas and California in 2025 on certain Model 3 and Model Y vehicles. 

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During Tesla’s “We, Robot” event last week, which TechCrunch covered late into the night,, sources on the ground sent me a handful of videos of the automaker’s Optimus humanoid robots walking around the party, dancing, mixing drinks, and talking to guests.

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With the deal, Google joins Microsoft and Amazon in turning to nuclear power to satiate its thirst for electricity.

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The telecom industry is undergoing its greatest period of disruption since the telegraph, as companies work to open up space as the next frontier for communications. French startup Constellation hopes to take part by repurposing 5G tech to provide a Starlink-like satellite broadband that uses telecoms’ existing assets.

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A ransomware and extortion racket called Underground has claimed responsibility for the breach on its dark web leak site, which TechCrunch has seen.

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Interlagos, the venture capital firm started by former senior SpaceX leaders, is looking to raise $550 million for its first venture fund, according to regulatory filings and a confidential deck sent to prospective LPs and viewed by TechCrunch. 

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Social networking startup Bluesky is seizing the moment. Amid ongoing moderation issues affecting X rival Instagram Threads, the decentralized X competitor Bluesky has created an account on Meta’s newest platform.

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AI is spamming up job applications. 404 Media’s Jason Koebler writes about how he used a free tool, AI Hawk, to apply for 17 jobs in an hour while working a restaurant shift — only stopping when he’d reached 2,843; The Internet Archive, the nonprofit organization that digitizes and archives materials like web pages, came under attack Wednesday; The startup, which already monitors the climate impact of digital advertising, is expanding to include artificial intelligence; Opera browser has a new AI-powered feature that lets you take action on tabs through natural language queries. Things you can do include grouping, pinning, bookmarking and closing tabs with these commands.

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A multi-year competition challenge to Facebook (aka Meta), which saw Germany’s antitrust authority become a pioneering champion for privacy rights in 2019 after it sought to block the social media giant’s ‘superprofiling’ of users on the grounds that consentless cross-site tracking of users is an “exploitative abuse” of Facebook’s monopoly position, finally concluded Thursday.

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Even a category as hot as robotics is not immune from macroeconomic trends. According to figures from automation advocacy group, A3, the North American robotics market declined in the first half of 2024, both in terms of sales and revenue. The number of industrial robotics ordered in H1 declined 7.5% year-over-year to 15,705.

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It’s been the stuff of science fiction for decades: to provide gigawatts of cheap, clean power anywhere on Earth, day or night, using satellites that collect and transmit solar energy directly on orbit

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As the engine powering the world’s digital artists, Adobe has a big responsibility to mitigate the rise of AI-driven deepfakes, misinformation, and content theft. In the first quarter of 2025, Adobe is launching its Content Authenticity web app in beta, allowing creators to apply content credentials to their work, certifying it as their own.

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Actress Emma Watson has made a previously undisclosed investment into the women’s health company Hertility, bringing its total funding to more than $14 million, the company told TechCrunch in an interview on Monday. Watson is known for her interest in the environment and supporting women-led initiatives.

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Ultrasound is perhaps best known as the technology that enables non-invasive body scans, underwater communication, and to help us park our cars. A young startup called Sonair out of Norway wants to employ it for something else: 3D computer vision used in autonomous hardware applications.

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A woman in Ohio is being haunted by ghosts. Or, maybe she’s not. There’s a dead body buried underneath her house, rolled up inside a rug. Or, there’s actually no body at all, despite signals from cadaver dogs. This week’s biggest drama on TikTok tells the story of a woman from Ohio

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Rivian says it will build fewer vehicles this year than it did in 2023, the result of a supply chain problem that popped up in the third quarter that has “become more acute in recent weeks.” The company did not specify what specific component is impacted; Waymo has struck a deal with Hyundai to bring the IONIQ 5 EV to its robotaxi network, adding another autonomous vehicle option as it scales up its business. The autonomous vehicle company announced Friday that it expects to start on-road testing a Waymo-equipped IONIQ 5 by late 2025, with the AV becoming available to riders; YouTube on Thursday announced a series of updates for its short-form video product, YouTube Shorts. These include the ability for creators to upload videos up to three minutes in length.

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Are you confused about artificial general intelligence, or AGI? It’s that thing OpenAI is obsessed with ultimately creating in a way that “benefits all of humanity.” You may want to take them seriously since they just raised $6.6 billion to get closer to that goal

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The race is on for better chips and data center capacity to handle AI workloads, but all that activity comes with a catch. Heavy processing power means heat — a lot of it — and that has massive implications, both for how well servers operate and the environment

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ChatGPT maker OpenAI has closed the largest VC round of all time. The startup today announced that it raised $6.6 billion in a funding round that values OpenAI at $157 billion pre-money. Led by previous investor Thrive Capital, the new cash brings OpenAI’s total raised to $17.8 billion or so, per Crunchbase.

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Ameba takes the unstructured data in a retailer’s supply chain systems, sprinkles in some generative AI, and makes the whole thing more efficient. 

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The past few years have seen the topic of women’s health thrown into the sociopolitical spotlight.

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Evil Corp maintains a "privileged" relationship with the Kremlin, and was often tasked with launching cyberattacks on behalf of Russia. 

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Microsoft has given its Copilot assistant on Windows a makeover — and a voice. Copilot can now read your screen, speak aloud, and more.

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California Governor Gavin Newsom has vetoed SB 1047, a high-profile bill that would have was regulated the development of AI. The bill was authored by State Senator Scott Wiener and would have made companies that develop the largest AI models liable for implementing safety protocols to prevent “critical harms.”

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EV startup Canoo has been hit with two new lawsuits from suppliers linked to the drivetrains that power its electric vehicles, just weeks after the company kicked off a major reorganization that included the departure of its chief technology officer

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For years, Silicon Valley and Wall Street have questioned Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to invest tens of billions of dollars into Reality Labs. This week, Meta’s wearables division unveiled a prototype of its Orion smart glasses, a form factor the company believes one day could replace the iPhone.

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A new Dealroom report shows that VC investment in defense-related tech is outpacing any other type of investment across NATO member states and allies. 

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A new female-founded dating app called After is launching in Austin, Texas on Thursday with the mission of tackling ghosting and holding people accountable. 

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The promise of blockchain to change the world hasn’t materialized. For the most part, the technology has instead enabled people to speculate on a new asset class. A big hurdle to realizing blockchain’s full potential, web3 proponents argue, is that decentralized services are incredibly hard to build.

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The brouhaha in the WordPress community looks likely to escalate into a legal battle around trademarks.

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Rivian has revealed the first $10 million worth of grants from the Rivian Foundation, just three years after promising to make the “natural world” a “stakeholder in our success.” The company launched a website for the foundation on Monday that details 41 grantees who will collectively receive just north of $10 million in funding.

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Companies are eyeing nuclear power as a way to reconcile their breakneck data center growth with their commitments to hit net zero carbon emissions.

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A tough market seems to have put an end to Pure's ambitions.

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The IPO market has not roared back in 2024 as many investors hoped it would — not yet, at least. Elevated interest rates (this week’s 50 bps rate cut notwithstanding) and uncertainty related to the U.S. election have prompted many companies to stay private and wait for better market conditions.

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California’s newest law could land social media users who post, or repost, AI deepfakes that deceive voters about upcoming elections in legal trouble. Governor Gavin Newsom suggests that AB 2839, which went into effect immediately after he signed it on Tuesday, could be used to reel in Elon Musk’s retweets, among others who spread deceptive messages.

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The team points to glass’ optical properties and its “infinite recyclability” as reasons for turning to the material; Also, test subjects were required to move a 30-pound kettlebell up and down a flight of stairs; a New York Times article Thursday highlighted a lucrative side hustle that is emblematic of the times we live in: gaming algorithms to earn money. In this case, folks figured out they could maximize the payout from Lyft’s Citibike “bike angels” program by taking advantage of a company algorithm used to meet its supply-and-demand needs; Indian filmmaker Ram Gopal Varma is ditching human musicians for artificial intelligence, saying he’ll use only AI-generated tunes in future projects, a move that underscores AI’s growing reach in creative industries; Cruise is returning to the streets of Sunnyvale and Mountain View for the first time since it paused operations in the Bay Area after a robotaxi struck a pedestrian in October 2023. The company said Thursday that it will put “several” vehicles driven by humans in the two cities that will initially perform mapping.

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Like its rival, Google, Amazon has launched an AI-powered video generator — but it’s only for advertisers at the moment, and somewhat limited in what it can do. Today at its Accelerate conference, Amazon unveiled Video generator, which turns a single product image into a few-seconds-long video clip after a few minutes of processing.

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Upchieve, the free, 24/7 online tutoring and college counseling app for low-income students, announced Thursday it’s giving teachers in Title 1 middle schools and high schools a new tool to ensure their students get the academic support they need. The new offering, called “Upchieve for Teachers,” allows teachers to offer 1:1 support to their students.

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On Tuesday, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed some of America’s toughest laws yet regulating the artificial intelligence sector. Three of these laws crack down on AI deepfakes that could influence elections, while two others prohibit Hollywood studios from creating an AI clone of an actor’s body or voice without their consent.

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23andMe, the personal genomics company, went public in early 2021 via a merger with a blank check company that valued it at $3.5 billion. Then its fortunes began to sink. Fading interest in DNA kits – 23andMe’s main product – was one driver.; Investment powerhouse BlackRock is set to launch a massive AI-focused investment fund, exceeding $30 billion, in collaboration with Microsoft and the Abu Dhabi-backed investment outfit MGX, the FT reported today. According to the outlet, the fund — among Wall Street’s largest — will focus on creating data centers and funding energy infrastructure to support AI; Discord will now offer audio and video calls that even the company won't be able to listen in on; NASA wants to establish a permanent human presence on the Moon, but right now, astronauts have to be in direct line of sight with Earth to phone home. The space agency is looking to change that with its developing Near Space Network; Every month, 400,000 free members upgrade to paid memberships, the company says. According to Patreon, Autopilot improved the rate of free-to-paid membership upgrades by an average of 19% in testing.

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The head of Slack, Denise Dresser, tells TechCrunch she is shifting the business chat platform into a “work operating system,” specifically by making Slack a hub for AI applications from Salesforce, Adobe, and Anthropic

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Instagram is introducing Teen Accounts to automatically enroll young users into an app experience with built-in protections. The company announced that starting on Tuesday, it will start placing all current and future accounts held by a teenager into a Teen Account.

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IBM today launched the Qiskit Functions Catalog, a new set of services that aims to make programming quantum computers easier by abstracting away many of the complexities of working with these machines.

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This latest round of government sanctions land months after Intellexa's founder Tal Dilian was sanctioned for selling the Predator spyware.

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At the MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs) on Wednesday night, new technology allowed fans to shop their favorite artist’s styles as they appeared on the screen.

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Uber riders in Austin and Atlanta will be able to hail a Waymo robotaxi through the app in early 2025 as part of an expanded partnership between the two companies.  Waymo’s autonomous vehicles have been available on the Uber app in Phoenix since October 2023; Following the moves of other tech giants, Spotify announced on Friday it’s introducing in-app parental controls in the form of “managed accounts” for listeners under the age of 13. The new feature will initially be offered as a pilot program for parents or guardians on a Family plan in select markets, including Denmark, New Zealand and others; making the AI info label harder to find, it might be easier for users to be deceived by content that was edited with AI, especially as editing tools become more and more advanced; It was a matter of time, but Apple is going to allow third-party app stores on the iPad starting next week, on September 16. This change will occur with the next major release of iPadOS, the operating system specifically designed for the iPad.

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iFixit, everyone’s favorite gadget repair gadfly, is launching a portable soldering iron. The gadget is designed to make component repair more accessible for home users. The timing of the announcement isn’t lost on anyone, dropping the same week as Apple’s “It’s Glowtime” event.

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The FDA on Thursday announced that it has granted what it calls “the first over-the-counter (OTC) hearing aid software device, Hearing Aid Feature.”; DeepMind employed a new learning platform, ALOHA Unleashed, paired with its simulation program, DemoStart, to teach robots by watching humans; Google Wallet will test a feature that turns your US passport into a digital ID; The White House has announced that several major AI vendors, including OpenAI and Microsoft, have committed to taking steps to combat nonconsensual deepfakes and child sexual abuse material. Adobe, Cohere, Microsoft, OpenAI and data provider Common Crawl said that they’ll “responsibly” source and safeguard the datasets they create and use to train AI from image-based

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SpaceX has put on its most public and aggressive offensive against regulators to date, with a blog post published Tuesday urging more expeditious launch licensing — lest the country lose its place as the leader in the global space race.  Orbital launch is a tightly regulated industry governed chiefly by the Federal Aviation Administration, though

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A group of Democratic senators is urging the FTC and Justice Department to investigate whether AI tools that summarize and regurgitate online content like news and recipes may amount to anti-competitive practices

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Apple Intelligence, the iPhone maker’s new set of AI capabilities arriving in iOS 18, is laying the groundwork for a new way to use apps. Today, the dated App Store model is under constant regulatory attack. Meanwhile, users can accomplish a lot of tasks with fairly simple questions to an AI assistant like ChatGPT.

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Bumble is increasing its investments in AI and branching out with new features to stay relevant amid a generational shift in dating behavior among younger users. During Goldman Sachs’ annual technology conference on Monday, Bumble CEO Lidiane Jones unveiled more details about the app’s upcoming AI capabilities, including a photo selection tool as well as features to help with conversations and profile creation. 

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When Apple unveiled its AI plans at WWDC in June, analysts suggested the feature could put the iPhone 16 on track for another “supercycle.” Like the addition of 5G before it, industry watchers believed that Apple Intelligence’s arrival might convince holdouts to bite the bullet and upgrade their device. Also, Bluesky keeps growing: The company announced that as of Friday morning, it had added 3 million new users, bringing its total user count to more than 9 million. In other words, the social platform’s user base has grown by around 50 percent in the week or so since a Brazilian court banned X (formerly Twitter). And the car rental giant says personal information, credit card information, and driver's license numbers were stolen in the August cyberattack.

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After a rough couple years, YouTube creators The Try Guys said they’re on-track to reach profitability, with subscriptions to their three-month-old, ad-free service 2nd Try now accounting for 20% of the company’s revenue. Of course, those numbers also mean The Try Guys remain reliant on other revenue streams, including YouTube advertising. Also, Italy-based app company Bending Spoons, which owns Evernote and Meetup, is planning to lay off 75% of the staff of file transfer service WeTransfer, TechCrunch has learned. Bending Spoons acquired the Dutch company in July for an undisclosed amount.

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Mintlify offers a collection of documentation-authoring tools, including tools that can auto-generate docs from codebases.

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Salesforce has acquired Own Company, a provider of data management and protection solutions, for $1.9 billion in cash. In a press release, Salesforce GM Steve Fisher said in a statement that Own “underscores [Salesforce’s] commitment to providing secure, end-to-end solutions that protect our customers’ most valuable data.”

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Cowboy has closed funding of around $5.5 million. With this recent funding round, Cowboy is now valued at €40 million on a pre-money basis.

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Some major consolidation is afoot in the world of internet communications — and it will have implications for competition and consumer internet access in U.S. On Thursday, Verizon announced that it would gobble up Frontier Communications for $20 billion — more than double Frontier’s market cap at the close of trading the night before; A long-running lawsuit over the Internet Archive’s “emergency” ebook lending practices during the COVID-19 pandemic has ended in a loss for the website and a victory for publishers. The lawsuit concerned the Internet Archive’s National Emergency Library, a program it established at the beginning of the pandemic to allow wider access to some 1.3 million ebooks; These final maneuvers will bring to a close a troubled first crewed mission for the Boeing-made Starliner; The Cosmos Institute, a nonprofit whose founding fellows include Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark and former Defense Department technologist Brendan McCord, has announced a venture program and research initiatives to — in the organization’s words — “cultivate a new generation of technologists and entrepreneurs equipped with deep philosophical thinking to navigate the uncharted territory.

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The American sports betting market produced $10.9 billion in revenue in 2023 for casinos, sportsbooks and iGaming, according to the American Gambling Association. One of the reasons this industry is so lucrative is because the majority of people who bet on sports lose.

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Anthropic is launching a new subscription plan for its AI chatbot, Claude, catered towards enterprise customers that want more administrative controls and increased security. Claude Enterprise will compete with OpenAI’s business-specific solution, ChatGPT Enterprise, released roughly a year ago. Claude Enterprise allows businesses to upload proprietary company knowledge into Anthropic’s AI chatbot.

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Flexible green methanol, which is made without fossil fuels, could rid carbon pollution from a range of industries.

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Spotter, the startup that provides financial solutions to content creators, announced Tuesday the launch of its new AI-powered creative suite. Dubbed Spotter Studio, the solution aims to support YouTubers throughout the creative process, such as helping them brainstorm video concepts, generate thumbnail and title ideas, plan projects, organize tasks, and collaborate with their team.

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Home robots’ unfulfilled potential is neither because of lack of demand on the part of consumers nor lack of effort from manufacturers.

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The Mac mini will be the next Apple device to say goodbye to USB-A, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. Apple customers have probably gotten used to seeing the familiar, rectangular USB-A ports replaced with their thinner USB-C siblings. And while USB-C has its advantages, the transition can sometimes leave users confused and scrambling for adapters; TikTok is introducing a new “Manage Topics” feature that will give you more control over what you see on your For You feed, the company announced on Friday. The new feature is rolling out to users in the U.S. With the new tool, you can tailor your For You feed to show you more; a Brazilian court’s decision to ban X (formerly Twitter) seems to benefiting its rivals, especially Bluesky. The microblogging platform announced late Friday that it was seeing “all-time-highs for activity” with 500,000 new users joining in the previous two days. It’s also number one on the free iPhone app chart in Brazil today; In the latest twist in Bolt’s aggressive fundraising efforts, the fintech company’s CEO appears to have made a veiled threat of legal action against Silverbear Capital, the investment bank whose involvement in the deal remains in some dispute. “We believe there was some internal miscommunication at Silverbear Capital, one of our lead investors; No matter who powerful generative AI becomes, writer Ted Chiang says it will never create true art. Chiang is one of the most admired science fiction authors writing today, best known for the novella “Story Of Your Life” (which was adapted into the movie “Arrival”). But he’s also published terrific pieces for The New Yorker.

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Jam & Tea Studios is the latest gaming startup implementing generative AI to transform the way players interact with non-playable characters (NPCs) in video games.  Traditionally, video game NPCs are directed by predetermined scripts, which can feel repetitive, unrealistic, and boring

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Given everything you’ve already heard about AI, you may not be surprised to learn that Google is among other outfits beginning to use sound signals to predict early signs of disease.  How? According to Bloomberg, Google has trained its foundation AI model with 300 million pieces of audio that included coughs, sniffles, and labored breathing; Nvidia and Apple are reportedly in talks to contribute to OpenAI’s next fundraising round — a round that could value the ChatGPT maker at $100 billion. Per its sources, the New York Times says earlier OpenAI investor Thrive Capital would lead the deal should it happen; It seems that the Ministry of Truth has been busy at Tesla. Some sharp-eyed folks, including reporters at Electrek, noticed that Tesla has deleted all of its blog posts prior to 2019; Gmail users on Android devices can now chat directly with Google’s AI assistant, Gemini, about their emails in the Gmail app. Google rolled out the new feature, Gmail Q&A, on Thursday to users who pay for Gemini, according to a blog post, and announced the feature would be coming to iOS devices.

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Uber is making a strategic investment into Wayve as an extension of the U.K.-born startup’s previously announced $1.05 billion Series C round. The partnership will also see the two companies work with automakers to integrate Wayve’s AI into consumer vehicles that will one day operate on the ride-hail giant’s platform.

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OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, could be in talks to raise a massive tranche of cash. The Wall Street Journal reports that OpenAI may be close to closing a fundraising round led by Thrive Capital, a previous investor, that’d value the AI company at over $100 billion; One-click checkout tech company Bolt is still waiting to find out if shareholders will sign off on a proposed funding round with stipulations that founder Ryan Breslow would return as CEO; Apple released the new developer betas for iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS 15.1 Sequoia. With this update, the company is launching new Apple Intelligence features including the ability to remove objects from photos; New Enterprise Associates is getting back into the secondaries game.  The Silicon Valley-based VC raised more than $468 million for NEA Secondary Opportunity Fund, according to an SEC filing. The fundraise closed on July 3, according to a source familiar with the matter, but hasn’t received much attention

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CoinSwitch, a prominent Indian cryptocurrency exchange, is suing rival platform WazirX to recover trapped funds.

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Tinder removed the U.S. military ads, saying the campaign violated the company's policies; Elon Musk’s X has already declared it aims to compete with LinkedIn for job listings and PayPal for payments. Now, it wants to take on the likes of Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams with a video conferencing tool; Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander failed to reach the moon because of a problem with a single valve in the propulsion system, according to a report on the mission released Tuesday. Company leadership said in a press conference that engineers have redesigned the valve and introduced additional redundancy into the propulsion system of its next lander.

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Meta and Spotify are exploring deeper music integration in Meta’s Instagram app. New findings indicate the companies are testing a feature that would allow users to continuously share what music they’re listening to through Instagram’s Notes.

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Ride-hailing platform Uber has been fined €290 million — around $324 million at current exchanges rates — by the Netherlands’ privacy watchdog for breaching the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

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Apple will be unveiling new products on September 10, with the announced phones going on sale on September 20, according to a report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. That lineup will reportedly include the iPhone 16, with larger screens on the Pro models and a new button just for taking pictures.; RealPage, which makes property management software, was sued Friday by the U.S. Justice Department and eight attorneys general for allegedly helping apartment and building managers around the country collude to drive up unit prices; Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of messaging app Telegram, was arrested on Saturday evening at France’s Bourget airport, according to French television network TF1. Neither Telegram nor a spokesperson for France’s national anti-fraud office ONAF immediately responded to a request for comment; Disappearing posts on social networks are handy if you have a habit of deleting them through third-party tools or the context of those posts is short-lived. Earlier this month, Threads said it is testing ephemeral posts only as an internal prototype; Boeing’s Starliner mission is coming back to Earth — empty. After months of data analysis and internal deliberation, NASA leadership announced today that Starliner will be coming back to Earth in September, without a crew. Meanwhile, astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams will remain on-board the International Space Station until February;

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The pellets can be stored in piles or silos, moved around using conveyor belts, and transported via rail cars.

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