An unchanged credential allows anyone to virtually control door locks and elevators at dozens of apartment buildings across North America, a security researcher found. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Cambium uses data on timber and lumber transactions in a bid to make salvage wood appealing to a range of companies. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
For decades, patents have been a bone of contention in the technology world, seen by some as a way to protect intellectual property, but by critics as a blunt weapon against innovation. In the age of AI, they are once again getting revisited. New York startup Patlytics has developed an AI-enabled patent analytics platform to … Read more
Meta has formally expanded Meta AI to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), opening the AI-enabled chatbot to millions more people. Back in October, Meta announced it was launching Meta AI in six additional markets, including Brazil and the U.K. At the same time, the company teased gradual rollout plans for additional markets around … Read more
The U.S. government is leaning hard on tech companies to make more commitments to building their businesses in the country, and Big Tech is falling in line. On Monday, Apple laid out its own plans in that area: it will spend $500 billion over the next four years in areas like high-end manufacturing, engineering, and … Read more
Photo and video apps targeting young adults with social hooks are a dime a dozen these days, so those that show traction with 18-twentysomethings tend to catch the attention of investors looking for the next Instagram or TikTok. In the latest example, photo-sharing app Yope, which lets you share still images to private groups, says … Read more
It’s often said that the UK and Europe lack the huge level of growth funding for later-stage startups that the US has for its own, and this is correct. According to the European Investment Fund, there are at least seven times more large-size VC funds in the US than in Europe. So the appearance of a … Read more
Larry Ellison’s leap into farming with his company, Sensei Farms, serves up a classic reminder: being a genius in one arena doesn’t mean success in another. As the WSJ reports, the Oracle co-founder set out to reinvent agriculture on Hawaii’s Lāna‘i Island, which he scooped up for $300 million back in 2012. Eight years and … Read more
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 … Read more
Palantir co-founder and CEO Alexander Karp opens his new book with a provocative declaration: “Silicon Valley has lost its way.” Over the past decade or so, as the data analytics company rose to prominence for its work with U.S. military and intelligence, Karp has largely stayed out of the limelight. Last year, in a rare … Read more
As school districts struggle to support the mental health of their students, a startup called Sonar Mental Health has built a “wellbeing companion” called Sonny to help. As described in the Wall Street Journal, Sonny is a chatbot that relies on a combination of human staff and AI. When students text their questions to Sonny, … Read more
When billionaire Elon Musk introduced Grok 3, his AI company xAI’s latest flagship model, in a live stream last Monday, he described it as a “maximally truth-seeking AI.” Yet it appears that Grok 3 was briefly censoring unflattering facts about President Donald Trump — and Musk himself. Over the weekend, users on social media reported … Read more
Debates over AI benchmarks — and how they’re reported by AI labs — are spilling out into public view. This week, an OpenAI employee accused Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, of publishing misleading benchmark results for its latest AI model, Grok 3. One of the co-founders of xAI, Igor Babushkin, insisted that the company was … Read more
The National Institute of Standards and Technology could fire as many as 500 staffers, according to multiple reports — cuts that further threaten a fledgling AI safety organization. Axios reported this week that the US AI Safety Institute (AISI) and Chips for America, both part of NIST, would be “gutted” by layoffs targeting probationary employees … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
The General Services Administration, the agency that manages buildings owned by the federal government, is planning to shut down its entire network of electric vehicle chargers, according to a report in The Verge. The GSA reportedly operates a network of hundreds of EV chargers with a total of 8,000 plugs that can be used to … Read more
Apple has been steadily working to expand the world of the Apple TV+ series “Severance,” through online materials, e-books, podcasts, and other content – and so have its fans. Taking advantage of its platform power, the Cupertino tech giant has been able to easily distribute supplemental material that adds to the show’s storytelling abilities, offering … Read more
Social media giants Meta and X approved ads targeting users in Germany with violent anti-Muslim and anti-Jew hate speech in the run-up to the country’s federal elections, according to new research from Eko, a corporate responsibility nonprofit campaign group. The group’s researchers tested whether the two platforms’ ad review systems would approve or reject submissions … Read more
For years, Meta employees have internally discussed using copyrighted works obtained through legally questionable means to train the company’s AI models, according to court documents unsealed on Thursday. The documents were submitted by plaintiffs in the case Kadrey v. Meta, one of many AI copyright disputes slowly winding through the U.S. court system. The defendant, … Read more
Coinbase on Friday said the SEC has agreed to drop the lawsuit against the company with prejudice, meaning it cannot be filed again. The move, which is still subject to the approval of the SEC’s Commissioners, is yet another signal that the Trump administration plans to be more friendly to crypto than the SEC was … Read more
Apple on Friday released its first developer beta for iOS 18.4, which adds a new “Priority Notifications” feature, powered by Apple Intelligence. The addition aims to help users manage their notifications by prioritizing important alerts and minimizing distractions from less important ones. These priority notifications are displayed in a separate section on the phone’s Lock … Read more
Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said the market got it wrong when it comes to DeepSeek’s technological advancements and its potential to negatively impact the chipmaker’s business. Instead, Huang called DeepSeek’s R1 open source reasoning model “incredibly exciting” while speaking with Alex Bouzari, CEO of DataDirect Networks, in a pre-recorded interview that was released … Read more
OpenAI is forecasting a major shift in the next five years around who it gets most of its computing power from, The Information reported on Friday. By 2030, OpenAI expects to get three-quarters of its data center capacity from Stargate, a project that’s expected to be heavily financed by SoftBank, one of OpenAI’s newest financial … Read more
Norwegian robotics firm 1X unveiled its latest home robot, Neo Gamma, on Friday. The humanoid system will succeed Neo Beta, which debuted in August. Like its predecessors, the Neo Gamma is a prototype designed for testing in the home environment. Images of the robot show it performing a number of household tasks like making coffee, … Read more
This week, Sakana AI, an Nvidia-backed startup that’s raised hundreds of millions of dollars from VC firms, made a remarkable claim. The company said it had created an AI system, the AI CUDA Engineer, that could effectively speed up the training of certain AI models by a factor of up to 100x. The only problem … Read more
Meta is expanding in India, despite recent layoffs of what the tech giant controversially deemed “low performers.” © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The criminal trial against fintech startup founder Charlie Javice began on Friday, with lawyers laying out their opening arguments, Reuters reported. Lawyers reiterated their original claims and defenses from the lawsuit filed by JPMorgan Chase against Javice in December of 2022. The financial services giant alleges that Javice had helped “fake millions of customers in … Read more
Recipe app developers just got new competition. On Friday, Apple introduced a soon-to-launch feature for Apple News+ subscribers called Apple News+ Food, a new section that will allow users to search, discover, save, and easily cook recipes from dozens of existing News+ publishing partners. It’s set to roll out as part of iOS 18.4 and … Read more