Numerous tech companies have pledged millions in donations to help LA recover from wildfires that caused widespread devastation and forced thousands to evacuate the region. Those offering aid include YouTube/Google, Meta, Snap, Amazon, Netflix, and Sony.  Here’s an overview of what each company is doing to aid relief efforts in the region: YouTube and Google: […]

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Loft Orbital has raised $170 million in Series C funding to grow its satellite and space missions as a service.

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The AI embedded in a popular e-reader was spouting Chinese propaganda.

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OpenAI is getting into the local news game. Newsletter-based media organization Axios announced a partnership with OpenAI on Wednesday. As part of this three-year deal, the AI giant will fund Axios’ expansion of its local newsletters into four new cities: Pittsburgh; Kansas City, Missouri; Boulder, Colorado; and Huntsville, Alabama. While OpenAI has inked content-sharing and […]

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Tesla, along with three other industry partners, quietly backed an Illinois Environmental Protection Agency application that won $100 million in funding to build electric truck charging stations across the state, TechCrunch has learned. The award was the biggest given out by the Biden Administration’s Federal Highway Administration last week in the second round of what’s […]

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Days after pushing for sweeping AI chip export restriction, the Biden administration has added an additional 14 Chinese companies to its restricted trade list. This brings the full list up to 25 names, according to reporting from The Associate Press. Sophgo is, perhaps, the highest profile addition. An entity of Bitmain, the firm sparked international […]

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Donald Trump will take the presidential oath of office on Monday in front of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., once again. The event takes place at noon ET and is expected to attract considerable attention from both supporters and opponents. How to stream Trump’s inauguration You can watch the inauguration live with cable or […]

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François Chollet, an influential AI researcher, is launching a new startup that aims to build frontier AI systems with novel designs. The startup, Ndea, will consist of an AI research and science lab. It’s looking to “develop and operationalize” AGI. AGI, which stands for “artificial general intelligence,” typically refers to AI that can perform any […]

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Sean Duffy, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to head the U.S. Department of Transportation, thinks owners of electric vehicles should pay to use roads.  “How to do that, I think, is a little more challenging,” Duffy said at his confirmation hearing Wednesday before the Senate Commerce Committee.  The former Republican lawmaker is correct that it would […]

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Hiya, folks, welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. If you want this in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. This week was something of a swan song for the Biden administration. On Monday, the White House announced sweeping new restrictions on exporting AI chips — restrictions that tech giants, including Nvidia, loudly criticized. (Nvidia’s business […]

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More good news for those looking to exit Meta’s social app ecosystem in favor of a more open alternative: An independent developer is building a photo-sharing app for Bluesky called Flashes. The soon-to-launch app is powered by the same technology that underpins Bluesky, the AT Protocol, and has been built using code from the developer’s […]

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In a bid to make its Gemini chatbot app more of one-stop shop, Google says it’s working with The Associated Press to build “a feed of real-time information” in Gemini. Jaffer Zaidi, Google’s VP of global news partnerships, said that the goal is to “further enhance the usefulness of results” in the Gemini experience. “As […]

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Google announced on Wednesday that all AI features in Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and Meet are now available to Workspace customers at no extra charge, though the plan will see a $2 per month increase per user.  This change simplifies access to Workplace AI tools, including email summaries, automated note-taking, chatting with the Gemini bot, and […]

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Colossal Biosciences wants to bring back the woolly mammoth and has raised $200 million at a $10.2 billion valuation to do it.

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According to some of the latest statistics, employers are swamped by job applications. In the U.K. alone, employers running graduate training schemes received an average of 140 applications for each job in 2024, 59% more than in 2023, according to the Institute of Student Employers. And despite some trepidations amongst a few recruiters, plenty of […]

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Global fashion brands are struggling with billions of dollars’ worth of unsold inventory. Mostly, these brands avoid reselling in core markets like the U.K. and the U.S. to prevent market cannibalization. Meanwhile, emerging markets like Africa heavily rely on secondhand clothing imports, but 30% to 40% of these items are deemed unusable upon arrival, leading to […]

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OpenAI has begun testing a feature that lets new ChatGPT users sign up with only a phone number — no email required. The addition was spotted by software engineer Tibor Blaho. The feature is currently in beta in the U.S. and India. There are, however, some restrictions. Users who create an account using their number […]

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A trove of information on current and former students and teachers was accessed during the December cyberattack, sources say

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For years, Vyas Sekar would call up Muckai Girish, an old friend from undergrad, to talk through potential startup ideas and get Girish’s opinion. The two usually talked through an idea and ended the conversation at that. When Sekar called Girish with an idea involving synthetic data in early 2022, the conversation didn’t just end […]

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Microsoft is launching a pay-as-you-go plan for corporate customers that bundles several, but not all, of the company’s existing AI-powered productivity features for Microsoft 365. The new plan, Copilot Chat — not to be confused with Microsoft’s Copilot Business Chat or GitHub Copilot Chat — is underpinned by OpenAI’s GPT-4o AI model and lets users […]

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