Pre-Series A founders, this is your moment! If you’re ready to showcase your game-changing innovations on a global stage, the battlefield awaits. Applications for TechCrunch Startup Battlefield 200 — the premier startup pitch competition — are officially OPEN. This is your shot to shine! Step onto the global stage and showcase your groundbreaking startup to […]

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Meta is phasing out its third-party fact-checking programs in the U.S. while it reintroduces a bonus program for creators, which pays them for viral content. The timing of these changes at Meta could intensify the prevalence of misinformation, according to ProPublica. In the past, content creators could not monetize posts that fact-checkers deemed false; but […]

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Freight forwarding and logistics company Flexport is rolling out a suite of new products and features, many of which use AI, in what the company says will be the first in a series of semi-annual announcements of this kind.  If that sounds similar to Airbnb’s approach to seasonal product announcements, that’s because it was the […]

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An unchanged credential allows anyone to virtually control door locks and elevators at dozens of apartment buildings across North America, a security researcher found.

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Cambium uses data on timber and lumber transactions in a bid to make salvage wood appealing to a range of companies.

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 with its work for U.S. military and intelligence, Karp has largely stayed out of the limelight. Last year, in a rare […]

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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, […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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