Google will replace Google Assistant on Android phones with Gemini later this year, the company announced on Friday. Google said in a blog post that it’ll upgrade more users from Google Assistant to Gemini “over the coming months.” Later this year, Assistant will no longer be accessible on most mobile devices or available from app […]
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This week, Google released a family of open AI models, Gemma 3, that quickly garnered praise for their impressive efficiency. But as a number of developers lamented on X, Gemma 3’s license makes commercial use of the models a risky proposition. It’s not a problem unique to Gemma 3. Companies like Meta also apply custom, […]
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Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! For regular readers of TechCrunch Mobility, you may be wondering, “Why did this newsletter land in my inbox on Friday?” Folks, we’re moving days in an effort […]
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Klein, a former AT&T technician turned whistleblower, exposed mass surveillance by the U.S. government in 2006.
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We’ve all experienced that moment of frustration when the GPS glitches and you miss an exit on the highway. The team at Tern AI, which is building a low-cost GPS alternative, says that’s because the current technology is limited by its reliance on satellite positioning. Tern AI says it has figured out how to locate […]
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The new Netflix movie “The Electric State” depicts a world full of robots — but not robots as we know them. Directed by brothers Anthony and Joe Russo (who previously helmed two Avengers blockbusters, “Infinity War” and “Endgame”) for a reported budget of $320 million, “The Electric State” takes place in an alternate version of […]
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China appears to think homegrown AI startup DeepSeek could become a notable tech success story for the country. After DeepSeek’s sudden rise to fame in January with the release of its open “reasoning” model, R1, the company is now operating under new, tighter government-influenced restrictions, according to The Information. Some of the company’s employees have […]
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Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. This week showed more optimism among startups than in other corners of the world, with entrepreneurs feeling confident enough to acquire other companies, raise fresh funding, and […]
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Arizona lawmakers are debating a bill that would protect utilities from wildfire-related lawsuits, a move that would likely send shockwaves through the insurance industry. The bill would make it harder to prove that utilities are to blame for wildfires started by faulty or poorly maintained equipment while also limiting damages. In exchange for reduced liability, […]
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Silicon Valley is bullish on AI agents. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said agents will “join the workforce” this year. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella predicted that agents will replace certain knowledge work. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said that Salesforce’s goal is to be “the number one provider of digital labor in the world” via the company’s […]
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Text messages sent between iPhones and Android devices will soon benefit from end-to-end encryption (E2EE), after the GSM Association (GSMA) yesterday published new specifications for the Rich Communication Services (RCS) protocol that include support for cross-platform E2EE. RCS is a long-standing effort to enable SMS-style cross-platform communications with richer features, such as group messaging, typing […]
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The U.S. Department of Justice announced that Rostislav Panev, who developed code and maintained infrastructure for LockBit, is now in U.S. custody.
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U.S. bipartisan lawmakers say the U.K. order gagging Apple from disclosing the demand is unconstitutional.
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Kerry Washington is expanding her angel investment portfolio, serving as lead investor in the pre-seed round of the wedding marketplace Cheersy. Cheersy, which was founded in 2024 by Amy Shack Egan, helps couples find day-of-service wedding coordinators and has raised a total of $550,000 from other investors, including Elizabeth Cutler, co-founder of Soul Cycle, and […]
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The U.K. government’s secret order to Apple demanding it backdoor the end-to-end encrypted version of its iCloud storage service has now been challenged by two civil rights groups, Liberty and Privacy International, which filed complaints Thursday. They called the order “unacceptable and disproportionate” and warned of “global consequences” as the access order is thought to […]
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President Trump’s family has been weighing an investment in Binance.US, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal. The investment would come just a couple of years after Binance’s U.S. arm pleaded guilty to violating anti-money laundering regulation. As part of that guilty plea, Binance’s founder, Changpeng Zhao, better known as CZ, paid a […]
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SoftBank is marching ahead on its ambitions to build out a major AI operation in its home market of Japan, on its own steam and in strategic partnership with others like OpenAI. On Friday, the tech company confirmed it would pay $676 million for a factory previously used by Sharp to build LCD panels and […]
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Waymo now has more than 300 driverless vehicles zipping passengers around San Francisco, but while they follow traffic laws, parking is another matter entirely. According to city records cited by The Washington Post, these rolling robots racked up 589 citations totaling $65,065 in fines last year for parking violations that ranged from blocking traffic to […]
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In the same way that genome sequencing determines the genetic makeup of an organism, Bryan Johnson — the investor and founder behind the Don’t Die movement — wants to start “foodome” sequencing. “We’re going to sequence the U.S. ‘foodome,’ which means test 20% of foods that constitute 80% of the American diet based on stuff […]
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AI company Sesame has released the base model that powers Maya, the impressively realistic voice assistant. The model, which is 1 billion parameters in size (“parameters” referring to individual components of the model), is under an Apache 2.0 license, meaning it can be used commercially with few restrictions. Called CSM-1B, the model generates “RVQ audio codes” from text […]
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