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DeepSeek has gone viral. Chinese AI lab DeepSeek broke into the mainstream consciousness this week after its chatbot app rose to the top of the Apple App Store charts (and Google Play, as well). DeepSeek’s AI models, which were trained using compute-efficient techniques, have led Wall Street analysts — and technologists — to question whether the U.S. can maintain its […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Instagram alternative Flashes publicly launched its Bluesky-based photo-sharing app on the App Store this week, gaining nearly 30,000 downloads in its first 24 hours. The app offers a classic Instagram-like experience, allowing users to upload up to four photos and videos of up to a minute in length. Built by Berlin-based developer Sebastian Vogelsang, Flashes […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Meta has unveiled the next generation of its Project Aria augmented reality glasses for research: Aria Gen 2. Aria Gen 2, which arrives roughly five years after the first-generation Aria device, adds new capabilities to the platform, including an upgraded sensor suite and Meta’s custom silicon. Aria Gen 2 has a PPG sensor for measuring […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Inception, a new Palo Alto-based company started by Stanford computer science professor Stefano Ermon, claims to have developed a novel AI model based on “diffusion” technology. Inception calls it a diffusion-based large language model, or a “DLM” for short. The generative AI models receiving the most attention now can be broadly divided into two types: […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

ElevenLabs, an AI startup that just raised a $180 million mega funding round, has been primarily known for its audio generation prowess. The company took a step in another technological direction by launching its first standalone speech-to-text model called Scribe. The startup, valued at $3.3 billion, has aided many other companies in providing speech-to-text services […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Apple shareholders rejected an anti-DEI proposal at its investor meeting Tuesday. The proposal was brought by a conservative group called the National Center for Public Policy Research. It asked Apple to end its DEI activities. Boards typically ask shareholders to reject shareholder proposals, and this was one of four such shareholder proposals. This proposal gained […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Automattic-owned blogging site and social platform Tumblr has financially backed Tapestry, the newly launched app designed to organize feeds from across the open web, including RSS, Mastodon, Bluesky, and others. Launched as a Kickstarter project in January 2024, Tapestry went on to raise over $177,000 via crowdfunding for its app, which opened up to the […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Poe, Quora’s platform that brings together a number of AI models under one roof, has launched a new capability that lets users build visual interfaces — apps, essentially — on top of any combination of models. Called Poe Apps, the feature allows Poe users to describe the app they want to create in the new […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Anthropic is releasing a new frontier AI model called Claude 3.7 Sonnet, which the company designed to “think” about questions for as long as users want it to. Anthropic calls Claude 3.7 Sonnet the industry’s first “hybrid AI reasoning model,” because it’s a single model that can give both real-time answers and more considered, “thought-out” […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Google has quietly revealed the pricing of Veo 2, the video-generating AI model that it unveiled in December. According to the company’s pricing page, using Veo 2 will cost 50 cents per second of video, which adds up to $30 per minute or $1,800 per hour. Google DeepMind researcher Jon Barron contrasted this pricing with […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

On a cool morning last November, 800 people gathered before sunrise in a South Burlington hangar to witness the maiden flight of Beta Technologies’ first electric aircraft to be built on its new scaled production line. Kyle Clark, Beta’s enigmatic founder and CEO, piloted the Alia CX300 — one of the startup’s two aircraft models […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The beauty of podcasting is that anyone can do it. It’s a rare medium that’s nearly as easy to make as it is to consume. And as such, no two people do it exactly the same way. There are a wealth of hardware and software solutions open to potential podcasters, so setups run the gamut […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

We’ve all been there. A favorite item is suddenly unavailable for purchase. Couldn’t the manufacturer have given you advance warning? Whether owing to low sales, changing habits, production costs, or even because something is a little wrong with your favorite product (shh), discontinued items are part of life. In a weekend piece, the New York […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Welcome back to Week in Review. This week we’re looking at the internal chaos surrounding HP’s $116 million acquisition of AI Pin maker Humane; Mira Murati’s new AI venture coming out of stealth; Duolingo killing its iconic owl mascot with a Cybertruck; and more! Let’s get into it. Humane’s AI pin is dead. The hardware […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Occidental CEO Vicki Hollub compared using CO2 in enhanced oil recovery to fracking, the technology that sent U.S. oil and gas production skyrocketing. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Afore Capital, a firm that claims to be the largest dedicated pre-seed investor, was founded on the idea that the first check into a new startup should be larger than what most accelerators and early-stage investors were offering. When Afore raised its third $150 million fund in 2022, the firm wrote checks ranging from $1 […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Google is pulling its AI assistant Gemini from the main Google app for iOS devices. The move is meant to encourage users to download the standalone Gemini app instead, which would allow Google to more directly compete with other consumer-facing AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity. However, the change could also risk reducing Gemini’s […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The VC firm has $90 billion in assets under management and invested in several unicorn cybersecurity startups © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Hours after Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI released the latest version of its AI model, Grok 3, X has significantly hiked the price for its top Premium+ subscription plan, which gives users access to the latest model, to almost $50 per month. On the support page that lists X’s premium plans, the monthly subscription price […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, released its latest flagship AI model, Grok 3, late Monday night, along with new capabilities in the Grok apps for iOS and the web. Grok, xAI’s answer to models like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Google’s Gemini, can analyze images and respond to questions, and powers a number of features on Musk’s social network, X. […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

More than 10,000 protesters gathered in New York City on Presidents’ Day to speak out against the current Trump administration and the actions in particular of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).  It was one of several protests that took place Monday in major cities across the country and came during the same long […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Social media is often about scale, but Nextdoor bet long ago on something different: that it could grow a big business off smaller, local communities. For years, the plan worked. The 15-year-old company has long been a dominant platform for neighborhood-based conversations, connecting users for everything from lost pet alerts to local business recommendations. Then […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Motorsports have long been a pay-to-play arena, with young drivers spending thousands of dollars just to get started in karting. Four-time Formula One champion Max Verstappen knows this all too well, but he also sees a way to change it through sim racing, a virtual form of car racing that closely replicates real-world racing. It’s […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Every Sunday, NPR host Will Shortz, The New York Times’ crossword puzzle guru, gets to quiz thousands of listeners in a long-running segment called the Sunday Puzzle. While written to be solvable without too much foreknowledge, the brainteasers are usually challenging even for skilled contestants. That’s why some experts think they’re a promising way to […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Broadcom and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) are separately exploring deals to take over parts of Intel, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. Broadcom is reportedly considering an acquisition of Intel’s chip-design and marketing business, and would want a partner for the company’s manufacturing business, while TSMC is reportedly looking at controlling […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Apple is planning to add Apple Intelligence to its Vision Pro headset in an update that could come as early as April, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. Just a couple weeks after Apple Intelligence was first announced in June 2024, Gurman reported that Apple was looking to bring its suite of AI tools to the […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Welcome back to Week in Review. This week we’re looking at OpenAI canceling the release of o3; TikTok returning to U.S. app stores nearly a month after it was removed; more complications in Elon Musk’s bid to buy OpenAI for $97.4 billion; and more! Let’s do it. OpenAI effectively canceled the release of o3, which […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng is reportedly set to meet with China’s top politicians, including Chinese leader Xi Jinping, during a summit that Alibaba founder Jack Ma is also expected to attend. The summit, which could happen as soon as next week, may be intended as a signal by China’s Communist Party that […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Meta is forming a new team within its Reality Labs hardware division to build robots that can assist with physical tasks, Bloomberg reported. The team will be responsible for developing humanoid robotics hardware, potentially including hardware that can perform household chores. Meta’s new robotics group, which will be led by Marc Whitten, driverless car startup […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Apple CEO Tim Cook took to X Thursday to tease “the newest member of the family,” set to arrive February 19. The safe money is on a fourth-generation iPhone SE. The budget-minded handset had previously been tipped for a potential release a week prior, but we got new Beats headphones instead. It’s been three years […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

A complete list of all the known layoffs in tech, from Big Tech to startups, broken down by month throughout 2024. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

With over 1,000 insurance companies in the U.S., figuring out how to get paid by each company is a complex challenge for doctors and hospitals. Each insurance may require slightly different information on medical claims, even for the same procedure. Incorrectly filed claims can lead to denied coverage, requiring manual resubmission and delayed payments. According […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

On Monday, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, offered to buy the nonprofit that effectively governs OpenAI for $97.4 billion. The unsolicited buyout would be financed by Musk’s AI company, xAI, and a consortium of outside investors, per a letter sent to California and Delaware’s attorneys general. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman quickly dismissed Musk’s bid, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Bird, formerly MessageBird, has cut 120 jobs — roughly one-third of its workforce — as the startup plans to realign its global operations. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Unknown attackers may have exploited a zero-day bug to access data on locked phones, according to Apple. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Late Sunday local time the French president, Emmanuel Macron, announced a total of €109 billion in private investments in the AI ecosystem — or around $112 billion at current exchange rates. Paris is hosting the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit this week — the third international summit focused on AI after earlier events in Bletchley Park […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Construction procurement is highly fragmented, manual, and opaque, forcing contractors to juggle multiple suppliers, endure lengthy negotiations, and deal with delayed payments. In Saudi Arabia, where trillion-dollar infrastructure and real estate projects are underway, these inefficiencies are even more pronounced. To address this, BRKZ, a Riyadh-based construction tech startup, offers a tech-enabled managed marketplace that […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The latest model from DeepSeek, the Chinese AI company that’s shaken up Silicon Valley and Wall Street, can be manipulated to produce harmful content such as plans for a bioweapon attack and a campaign to promote self-harm among teens, according to The Wall Street Journal. Sam Rubin, senior vice president at Palo Alto Networks’ threat […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Last month, Apple offered up more insight into its consumer robotics work via a research paper that argues that traits like expressive movements are key to optimizing human-robot interaction. “Like most animals,” starts the report, “humans are highly sensitive to motion and subtle changes in movement.” To illustrate its point, Apple pays homage to Pixar, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Fei-Fei Li, the Stanford computer scientist and startup founder sometimes known as “the Godmother of AI,” has outlined “three fundamental principles for the future of AI policymaking” ahead of next week’s AI Action Summit in Paris. First, Li said policy must be based on “science, not science fiction.” In other words, policymakers should focus on […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Social network Bluesky will soon give its users more control over who can reply to their posts. Confirmed by Bluesky developer Paul Frazee, Bluesky will add a new “followers only” setting that users can configure to limit replies. In addition, he says, Bluesky will create a way for users to set their default reply settings. […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Dojo is Tesla’s custom-built supercomputer that’s designed to train its “Full Self-Driving” neural networks. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Ford CEO Jim Farley has a question about President Donald Trump’s threatened tariffs on imports from Mexico, Canada, and China: Why stop there? Farley said in a conference call Wednesday that Trump’s selective approach “doesn’t make sense.” “Why are we having this conversation while Hyundai-Kia is importing 600,000 units in the U.S. with no incremental […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

WhatsApp said users in several European countries were targeted with Paragon spyware, according to the Italian government. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

During a recent press appearance, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that he’s observed the “IQ” of AI rapidly improve over the past several years. “Very roughly, it feels to me like — this is not scientifically accurate, this is just a vibe or spiritual answer — every year we move one standard deviation of IQ,” […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Stripe has closed on its $1.1 billion purchase of stablecoin platform Bridge – marking the payment giant’s largest acquisition to date and tangible push into crypto. Co-founded in 2022 by Coinbase and Square alumni Zach Abrams and Sean Yu, San Antonio, Texas-based Bridge built an API that helps companies accept stablecoins. The pair raised $58 […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Meta’s Threads is doubling down on support for custom feeds as it faces challenges from the growing social network Bluesky, now with over 30 million users, which also offers custom feeds as one of its key features. On Tuesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that users can now set their custom feeds to be public […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has pledged to make artificial general intelligence (AGI) — which is roughly defined as AI that can accomplish any task a human can — openly available one day. But in a new policy document, Meta suggests that there are certain scenarios in which it may not release a highly capable AI […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Monday to create a U.S. sovereign wealth fund and suggested that it could be used to purchase TikTok. The fund is expected to be created in the next 12 months by the U.S. Treasury and Commerce Departments, though it’s not immediately clear how. Trump has said previously […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

An app that helps people and teams in the working world simplify their to-do lists — ideally by organising and doing some of the work for them — has remained one of the unsolved goals in business technology. Leaning into AI, on top of battle scars from once building Google Wave, a startup called Tana […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

DeepSeek founder Lian Wenfeng is being hailed as a hero in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, where he grew up and reportedly returned for the Lunar New Year, joined by bodyguards. Wenfeng—who, at 40, is already a billionaire due to his hedge fund, High-Flyer—is apparently even more beloved by locals following DeepSeek’s breakthrough research, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

India has expanded its Aadhaar authentication service to let businesses such as those in e-commerce, hospitality, and healthcare use the biometrics of individuals to authenticate their identity. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

OpenAI is announcing a new AI “agent” designed to help people conduct in-depth, complex research using ChatGPT, the company’s AI-powered chatbot platform. Appropriately enough, it’s called deep research. OpenAI said in a blog post published Sunday that these this new capability was designed for “people who do intensive knowledge work in areas like finance, science, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Chinese fast-fashion retailer Shein has relaunched in India through a partnership with Reliance Retail, nearly five years after it was banned amid diplomatic tensions between New Delhi and Beijing. The new Shein India Fast Fashion app, developed and launched by billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Retail, marks the firm’s significant return to one of Asia’s largest […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

U.S. senator says Musk's access to Treasury systems represents a "national security risk." © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

X is now suing more advertisers in an antitrust lawsuit focusing on what the company’s CEO Linda Yaccarino has claimed is a “systematic illegal boycott.” The company formerly known as Twitter first filed the lawsuit against the World Federation of Advertisers and its brand safety initiative the Global Alliance of Responsible Media in August 2024. […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Adobe’s chief strategy officer Scott Belsky announced this week that he will be joining A24, the independent movie studio behind “Civil War,” “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” and many more titles. Belsky first joined Adobe in 2012 through the acquisition of Behance, leaving briefly in 2016 to become a VC at Benchmark but eventually returning […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.