A large portion of Egypt’s population lacks access to traditional banking, forcing many to rely on cash transactions and informal lending. Khazna, a fintech startup founded in 2019, is tackling this issue by offering financial services tailored toward low- and middle-income workers. The company provides solutions like salary advances, digital payments, and microloans to help […]

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U.S. food delivery giant Grubhub says hackers accessed the personal details of customers and drivers after breaching its internal systems.  Grubhub is a popular food-ordering and delivery platform with over 375,000 merchants and 200,000 delivery providers using its platform in more than 4,000 U.S. cities. New York-based Wonder Group acquired the company last fall in […]

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On the heels of Chinese AI firm DeepSeek making a huge splash in OpenAI’s American backyard, OpenAI is expanding in Asia, with major commercial deals that will also help it train its AI on more Asian-language content and user behavior — a gateway to doing more business in these markets in the future on its […]

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Self-driving truck startup Waabi is partnering with Volvo Autonomous Solutions to jointly develop and deploy autonomous trucks, an important milestone as it gets closer to a commercial launch.  The tie up also marks Volvo’s second partnership to co-develop self-driving big rigs with a startup partner. In May 2024, Volvo teamed up with Aurora Innovation to […]

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Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal is investing $230 million into an AI startup he founded as the country pushes to establish itself in a field dominated by U.S. and Chinese firms. Aggarwal is financing the investment in Krutrim — which has been building LLMs for Indian languages — largely through his family office, a source familiar […]

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Norway-based browser maker Opera on Tuesday launched a new browser called “Opera Air,” which focuses on mental well-being and mindfulness with features like break reminders, breathing exercises, soundscapes, and binaural beats for better focus. The company said that people use browsers for a lot of their work online, and it wanted to ship a browser […]

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AI is changing how we shop online, making our experiences more personalized. Smart assistants recommend products, negotiate deals, and even handle customer service. Big retailers and smaller businesses are using AI to improve search, supply chains, and checkout.  If AI companies (and their investors) have their way, shopping will soon be focused on chatting with […]

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Tabular data is a broad term that encompasses structured data that generally fits into a specific row and column. It can be a SQL database, a spreadsheet, a .CSV file, etc. While there has been tremendous progress on artificial intelligence applied to unstructured and sequential data, these large language models are fuzzy by design. They […]

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China said Tuesday it has launched an antitrust investigation into Google, part of a swift retaliation after the U.S. President Donald Trump imposed a 10% tariff on Chinese goods. The probe by China’s State Administration for Market Regulation will examine alleged monopolistic practices by the U.S. tech giant, which has had its search and internet […]

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Presentations.ai has raised $3 million in a seed round led by Accel to scale its AI-powered software for generating presentations.

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Adam Candeub, a known critic of Big Tech, looks poised to join the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Candeub will be general counsel of the FCC, reports Semafor, which cites direct confirmation from FCC chairman Brendan Carr. TechCrunch has reached out to the FCC for more information. Candeub has long been a vocal critic of Section […]

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Asya Bradley, a former fintech founder and investor, has joined payments giant Stripe as its new head of Startup & Venture Capital Partnerships. Bradley announced the news on February 2 in a post on LinkedIn, though her bio shows that she joined Stripe back in November. Neither Stripe nor Bradley were immediately available for comment.  […]

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It’s never been easier to create and publish art than it is now, and if you believe the companies building tech around AI, the production process is going to get even more efficient. That’s especially the case with video production, with companies of all sizes using large language models to build tools that let you […]

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DeepSeek's model is censored at both the application and training layers, a Wired investigation shows.

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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 […]

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DeepSeek, the Chinese AI company, is raising the ire of regulators around the world. DeepSeek’s viral AI models and chatbot apps have been banned by a growing number of countries and government bodies, which have expressed concerns over DeepSeek’s ethics, privacy, and security practices. Corporations have banned DeepSeek, too — by the hundreds. The biggest […]

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An Italian investigative journalist said he was the target of a spyware attack disclosed by WhatsApp.

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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 […]

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On Monday, Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario, one of Canada’s most populous provinces, announced on X that the province’s government would be “ripping up” its $68 million ($100 million CAD) contract with Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet service. The news came soon after President Donald Trump announced a 25% tariff on nearly all Canadian […]

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A native pornography app for iOS is coming to the EU via the approved alternative app store AltStore PAL, made possible by Europe’s Digital Markets Act (DMA). On Monday, the AltStore announced the launch of Hot Tub, an aggregator that offers iOS users a way to search and play videos from a variety of adult […]

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