Manus, an “agentic” AI platform that launched in preview last week, is generating more hype than a Taylor Swift concert. The head of product at Hugging Face called Manus “the most impressive AI tool I’ve ever tried.” AI policy researcher Dean Ball described Manus as the “most sophisticated computer using AI.” The official Discord server […]
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Faced with an aging population and labor shortages, Japanese businesses are increasingly relying on service robots to supplement their workforce, according to Bloomberg. Research firm Fuji Keizai projects the country’s service robot market to nearly triple by 2030, to ¥400 billion ($2.7 billion). Potentially driving that growth: The Recruit Works Institute projects that the country […]
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The CEO of Colossal, a startup that aims to use genetic editing techniques to bring back extinct species, including the wooly mammoth, assured audiences at SXSW that the company has no plans to create a real-life Jurassic Park — lest there was any doubt. “Modern conservation isn’t working […] and we’re gonna need a ‘de-extinction’ […]
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Creatopy, a startup that uses AI to automate the creation of digital ads, has brought on a new CEO: Tammy Nam. Nam was previously COO and CMO at photo-editing startup PicsArt, and before that the CEO of video streamer Viki. She told TechCrunch via email that Creatopy was looking for a US-based executive who knows […]
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Apple announced this week that the “more personalized” version of Siri that it promised last year has been delayed — and according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, that’s also postponed the launch of the company’s planned smart home hub. In a statement, Apple said the upgraded Siri features, which are part of its broader Apple Intelligence […]
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Elon Musk lost the latest battle in his lawsuit against OpenAI this week, but a federal judge appears to have given Musk — and others who oppose OpenAI’s for-profit conversion — reasons to be hopeful. Musk’s suit against OpenAI, which also names Microsoft and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as defendants, accuses OpenAI of abandoning its […]
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The world is bad sometimes, but it feels even worse if you can’t stop staring into the all-consuming abyss that is the 6-inch screen of a smartphone, following you through space and time. It taunts you with its compact, light build that’s small enough to slip into your pocket and take anywhere, and its siren […]
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The US Department of Justice is still calling for Google to sell its web browser Chrome, according to a Friday court filing. The DOJ first proposed that Google should sell Chrome last year, under then-President Joe Biden, and it seems to be sticking with that plan under the second Trump administration. The department is, however, […]
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Google has quietly updated the webpage for its Responsible AI and Human Centered Technology (RAI-HCT) team, the team charged with conducting research into AI safety, fairness, and explainability, to scrub mentions of “diversity” and “equity.” A previous version of the page used language such as “marginalized communities,” “diverse,” “underrepresented groups,” and “equity” to describe the […]
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A federal judge is allowing an AI-related copyright lawsuit against Meta to move forward, although he dismissed part of the suit. In Kadrey vs. Meta, authors including Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Ta-Nehisi Coates have alleged that Meta has violated their intellectual property rights by using their books to train its Llama AI models, and […]
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Welcome back to Week in Review. This week we’re looking at OpenAI potentially charging $20,000 a month for a specialized AI agent, the unexpected return of early-internet darling Digg, a company genetically engineering mice to have mammoth-like fur, and more! Let’s do this. OpenAI could charge up to $20,000 per month for specialized AI “agents.” […]
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Last year was a monumental year for the AI industry in the U.S. and beyond. There were 49 startups that raised funding rounds worth $100 million or more in 2024, per our count at TechCrunch. Three companies raised more than one “mega-round” last year, and seven companies raised rounds at $1 billion or larger. How […]
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Something special went down in the desert outside of Las Vegas this weekend: two EVs took on the Mint 400 for the first time. Since the Mint 400 launched back in 1969, vehicles in this iconic desert endurance race have been powered by dead dinosaurs. Spectators and race participants alike are used to the smell […]
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The downsides of doomscrolling and screen addiction are well documented, but while many of us would like to spend less time glued to a smartphone, it’s easier said than done. Much has been written about the so-called dumbphone revival, where individuals regain some respite from pings and push notifications by downgrading to a basic feature […]
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Europe is waking up to the need to invest in defense, and so are European VCs. But with a painful history of Soviet occupations, Lithuania didn’t wait for the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to reach its third anniversary to commit 5% to 6% of its GDP to military spending — and fund […]
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Investor interest in AI coding assistants is exploding. Anysphere, the developer of AI-powered coding assistant Cursor, is in talks with venture capitalists to raise capital at a valuation of nearly $10 billion, Bloomberg reported. The round, if it transpires, would come about three months after Anysphere completed its previous fundraise of $100 million at a […]
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Microsoft is accelerating its push to compete with OpenAI, its longtime collaborator, by developing its own powerful AI models and exploring alternatives to power products like Microsoft’s Copilot bot. Microsoft has developed its own AI “reasoning” models comparable to models like OpenAI’s o1 and o3-mini, the The Information reports. OpenAI is said to have refused […]
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TechCrunch will be on the ground at SXSW 2025 — the annual tech, music, comedy, and film conference that kicked off Friday in Austin — in search of the zeitgeist of this AI-centric era. Yup, we’re one sentence in and AI has already made its entrance. And why not? A quick scan of the massive […]
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Signal President Meredith Whittaker warned Friday that agentic AI could come with a risk to user privacy. Speaking onstage at the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, the advocate for secure communications referred to the use of AI agents as “putting your brain in a jar,” and cautioned that this new paradigm of computing — where […]
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Intuitive Machines’ Athena lunar lander is dead, just one day after it touched down at the moon’s south pole and tipped over. Luckily, the company says it was able to “accelerate several program and payload milestones” and deploy a few of the experiments that were riding shotgun before Athena’s lander ran out of juice. The […]
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