TechCrunch Industry News

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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?'”

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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,

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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."

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.”

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.”

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Go to TechCrunch.com for more tech stories.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.”

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.”

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.”

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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;

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Soon, parents in range of Waymo robotaxis might not have to worry about picking up their kids from after-school activities — or anytime, really. The San Francisco Standard reports that Waymo, the Alphabet subsidiary, is considering a subscription program that would let teens hail one of its cars solo and send pickup and drop-off alerts; Tesla is hiring individuals standing between 5’7 and 5’11 to carry up to 30 pounds for seven hours a day to train its Optimus robot; Citing a crowded market and profit concerns, Mineral ceased operation and pivoted to technology licensing; At least 200 workers at DeepMind, Google’s AI R&D division, are displeased with Google’s reported defense contracts — and according to Time, they circulated a letter internally back in May to say as much. The letter, dated May 16, says the undersigned are concerned by “Google’s contracts with military organizations,” citing articles about the tech

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For some businesses, there is a clear path to growth that doesn’t involve acquiring other companies or expanding organically: franchising. The U.S. has more than 800,000 franchise businesses, according to Statista, and that number is predicted to keep growing year over year.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A firmware update is delivering multi-user audio sharing, allowing music to be streamed to multiple headphones at once; also Microsoft demonstrated its leadership in accessible gaming hardware again on Wednesday with the announcement of a new one-handed joystick controller for Xbox and PC. The Xbox Adaptive Joystick works with the company’s already robust accessibility hardware stack, and even includes support for custom 3D-printed parts; early this year, AI-powered fake audio of President Biden reached voters in New Hampshire. The FCC struck back swiftly, identifying the perpetrator as the Texas-based Life Corporation, which has been behind similar scams over the years, and whacked them and an associated individual with a $6 million fine; At around $2,000, the Fit Bike places the system between Peloton’s entry-level Bike ($1,500) and Bike+ ($2,500).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The first vehicle that will be built on the low-cost EV platform Ford’s been developing in secret will be a mid-size pickup due out in 2027, the automaker announced Wednesday morning. The news comes as part of a much larger rewriting of Ford’s electrification plans.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

X looks like a pretty bad investment right about now. As readers might recall, billionaire Elon Musk borrowed $13 billion from Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and five other major banks to help finance the $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, as it was then called; OpenAI signs deal to train on Condé Nast content, surface stories in ChatGPT; WeTransfer’s expiry dates haven’t gone away, but you can at least extend them; Is your company AI-washing? Rippling founder Parker Conrad thinks it might be.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As TikTok Shop gains traction, YouTube is expanding its partnership with Shopify to onboard more brands for its YouTube Shopping affiliate program, the company announced on Tuesday.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The United States Department of Justice filed a major lawsuit against Live Nation-Ticketmaster in May, arguing that the entertainment giant is acting as a monopoly. An additional 10 state attorneys general joined the suit this week, bringing the total to 39 states and the District of Columbia; also, Zoom on Monday announced a new single-user webinar feature that caps out at 1 million attendees. The addition comes less than a month after the #WinWithBlackWomen fundraiser for Vice President Kamala Harris peaked at 44,000 users before crashing; and Waymo disclosed Tuesday it’s now giving more than 100,000 paid robotaxi rides every week across its three main commercial markets in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Phoenix. Those figures were shared by Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana in a social media post on X.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Root helps food and beverage companies collect primary data on their agricultural supply chains. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

General Motors is cutting around 1,000 software workers around the world in a bid to focus on more “high-priority” initiatives like improving its Super Cruise driver assistance system, the quality of its infotainment platform and exploring the use of AI. The job cuts are not about cost cutting or individual performance.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Rivian camp kitchen attracted buzz from almost the moment it appeared as a prototype in 2019 at Overland Expo West. Despite interest in the accessory, Rivian never actually sold the camp kitchen, which was kind of massive and designed to slide into the R1T pickup truck’s trademark gear tunnel.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

OpenAI has banned a cluster of ChatGPT accounts linked to an Iranian influence operation that was generating content about the U.S. presidential election, according to a blog post on Friday. The company says the operation created AI-generated articles and social media posts, though it doesn’t seem that it reached much of an audience.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Journalists, researchers, and politicians are mourning Meta’s shutdown of CrowdTangle, which they used to track the spread of disinformation on Facebook and Instagram. In CrowdTangle’s place, Meta is offering its Content Library – but is limiting usage to people from “qualified academic or nonprofit institutions who are pursuing scientific or public interest research.”

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Prytek had already been a big investor in TipRanks since 2017, most recently leading a $77 million round in the company in 2021.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For many companies, this also means that now is the time to start implementing these algorithms.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Search engine optimization (SEO) has been top of mind for brands for more than a decade to ensure their websites and products capture as many eyeballs as possible by ranking high up on search results pages. But search is changing, and as consumers increasingly turn to AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Claude

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Music streaming service SoundCloud has launched a merch marketplace called SoundCloud Store. The store will sell SoundCloud-themed items, but will also act as a service for artists to put out their own designs. The first edition of the store features designs from Wiz Khalifa, Denzel Curry, wolfacejoeyy, Bk The Rula, and Armani White.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The irony was not lost on her. Growing up the daughter of a racing car enthusiast father, Danielle Walsh had become — in her late 20s — the head of HSBC’s ‘Future Cities’ project, the global banking giant’s effort to serve clients’ climate change mandates.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

While Amazon has continued releasing Echo devices, including an upgraded Spot announced last month, the company has taken its foot off the gas.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Avi Schiffmann, the founder and CEO of Friend, told TechCrunch over email that the purchase has already paid for itself.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Rocket Lab surpassed $100 million in quarterly revenue for the first time, a 71% increase from the same quarter of last year. This is just one of several shiny accomplishments executives showed off to investors on Thursday — and a good omen for the space company’s medium-term ambitious plans.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Count Spotify and Epic Games among the Apple critics who are not happy with the iPhone maker’s newly revised compliance plan for the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA). Shortly after Apple announced the updated version on Tuesday, including loosened restrictions along with the addition of two more fees, Spotify shared a statement with TechCrunch

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The U.K.’s antitrust regulator has confirmed that it’s carrying out a formal antitrust investigation into Amazon’s ties with Anthropic, after Amazon recently completed a $4 billion investment into the AI startup.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky suggested on Tuesday’s Q2 earnings call with investors that the company will soon expand into new products and services, including co-hosting, a relaunch of Airbnb’s “experiences,” guest services, and more.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ride-hail giant Lyft will pilot a new feature called Price Lock that will let a rider purchase a monthly subscription “that caps the price for a specific route at a specific time,” according to CEO David Risher.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Figure 02 is outfitted with speakers and microphones to speak and listen to people at work.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Uber reported strong second-quarter results, with gross bookings and net profit both up decently. But the company has chosen to highlight the success of its autonomous vehicle effort, likely to assuage investors concerned about incoming competition from Tesla, which aims to reveal its first robotaxi in October.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When a company is the size of Amazon, a lot of bad actors will come after it and its customers, which makes defending the network a monster job.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A scathing rebuke by the U.K. data protection watchdog reveals what led to the compromise of tens of millions of U.K. voters' information.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In spite of a drop for the quarter, iPhone remained Apple’s most important category by a wide margin.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Following the recent lawsuit filed by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) against music generation startups Udio and Suno, Suno admitted in a court filing on Thursday that it did, in fact, train its AI model using copyrighted songs. But it claimed that doing so was legal under the fair-use doctrine.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Google Cloud is giving Y Combinator startups access to a dedicated, subsidized cluster of Nvidia graphics processing units and Google tensor processing units to build AI models. It’s part of Google Cloud’s effort to cozy up with promising early-stage AI startups, in hopes some of them will evolve into massive, compute-hungry business

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Commercial space station company Vast is building a private microgravity research lab as part of its wider Haven-1 station plans. The module is set to launch no earlier than the second half of 2025, the company said Thursday.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Badoo, Bumble, Grindr, happn, Hinge and Hily all had the same vulnerability that could have helped a malicious user to identify the near-exact location of another user, according to the researchers.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) has passed in the Senate after Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) pushed the internet bill to a vote. Proposed in 2022, KOSA requires that online platforms take reasonable steps to protect users from harm, and could become the most significant children’s online safety legislation to take effect since COPPA

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Zoe sends customers at-home testing materials to collect blood or feces to test blood fat, blood sugar, and gut microbiome health. Following those results, the company scores every food (on a scale from 0 to 100), so people can make better choices of what to eat.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We say something “goes viral” because we tend to think of rumors and disinformation spreading the way that an infection spreads. But these days it may be more accurate to say something “goes nuclear,” according to a new paper that models disinfo as a form of fission reaction

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Samsung is still foldables’ 500-pound gorilla, but the company successes have made the category significantly less lonely in recent years.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Zapp is launching its urban electric two-wheeler in India in 2025 as it plans to expand globally.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Exclusive: The Minnesota-based spyware maker Spytech snooped on thousands of devices before it was hacked earlier this year.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Satellites are among our most critical infrastructure, providing everything from GPS to disaster coordination, yet their inherent inaccessibility leaves them vulnerable to relatively simple technical issues or attacks. London-based Lodestar is looking to change that with a “first responder” service in space using advanced robotic sentries.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The startup has developed a way to create copper and aluminum foils that are laced with tiny holes and riddled with undulating peaks and valleys.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek says the streaming service is still in the “early days” of its plans to bring hi-fi support to the platform. During the company’s earnings call on Tuesday, the executive offered details about an upcoming deluxe tier.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There is no fool proof way to prevent a buggy update like CrowdStrike's, but there are best practices that could mitigate the fallout.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Mesa, Arizona-based Rosotics has kept a low profile. From the startup’s website, one would think they are solely focused on selling large metal 3D printers to aerospace and defense customers.   For the past three years, the company’s been quietly architecting plans that involve launching multiple massive spacecraft, each containing dozens of smaller spacecraft

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In spite of maintaining stealth until now, Mytra has already drummed up interest with big names. The startup has a pilot with grocery giant Albertsons, among others.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Identity management is one of the most common fulcrums around which security breaches have pivoted in the last several years, and one of the main reasons it’s the gift that keeps on giving to malicious hackers is that it’s a nightmare for organizations to track.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Founders of Pesa, a remittance fintech, know too well how costly, inaccessible and unreliable remittance services drive people to opt for risky informal channels — like WhatsApp groups — to transfer money. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Waymo would need a ground transportation permit to operate at SFO, which has yet to be approved.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Apple on Thursday announced its upcoming lineup of immersive video content for the Vision Pro. The list includes behind-the-scenes footage of the 2024 NBA All-Star Weekend, an immersive performance by The Weeknd, new series, films, concerts and more. The headset launched in February with more than 150 3D movies and immersive titles

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The now-scrapped moon mission would have been the U.S. space agency's first resource-mapping mission off planet Earth.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ford is still pushing forward on electrification, notably by increasing hybrid options.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Whether it’s an online marketplace, store, or social media platform, virtually every site today uses some kind of recommendation service to personalize its offerings. Shaped, which is announcing an $8 million seed funding round today, wants to make it easier for businesses of all sizes to combine the data they already have with large language models.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A new app called The Way is aiming to help people explore the deeper side of meditation through a single, structured path guided by an authorized Zen Master. Founded by uncle-and-nephew duo Henry Shukman and Jack Shukman, The Way wants to help people move beyond modern mindfulness practices offered by popular meditation apps like Headspace

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The smart ring has long played second fiddle to the smart watch. While tech giants like Apple and Google duked it out over wrists for years, the ring has been significantly quieter, a space where plucky startups have a chance to make their mark. Things are quickly changing, however.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Russia-based security software maker said its U.S. business is "no longer viable" following a U.S. Commerce Department sales ban.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Google’s parent company Alphabet might be on the verge of making its biggest acquisition ever. The Wall Street Journal reports that Alphabet is in advanced talks to acquire Wiz for around $23 billion. While the deal isn’t finalized, the WSJ says it could come together soon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Whistleblowers have accused OpenAI of placing illegal restrictions on how employees can communicate with government regulators, according to a letter obtained by The Washington Post. Lawyers representing anonymous whistleblowers sent the letter to Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Amazon’s AI-powered shopping assistant, named “Rufus,” is now live for all U.S. customers in the Amazon mobile app, the retailer announced on Friday. The assistant, which lives on the bottom right of the app’s main navigation bar, is designed to offer customers help with finding products, performing product comparisons, and getting recommendations.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Archer Aviation and Southwest Airlines are teaming up to figure out what it will take to build out a network of electric air taxis at California airports.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dark patterns refer to a range of design techniques that can subtly encourage users to take some sort of action or put their privacy at risk.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As venture capitalists continue to pour money into defense tech startups, they’re turning to a new hiring pool: ex-military officials.  

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices