timef 02/22/2025

Apple has been steadily working to expand the world of the Apple TV+ series “Severance,” through online materials, e-books, podcasts, and other content – and so have its fans. Taking advantage of its platform power, the Cupertino tech giant has been able to easily distribute supplemental material that adds to the show’s storytelling abilities, offering […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Social media giants Meta and X (formerly Twitter) approved ads targeting users in Germany with violent anti-Muslim and anti-Jew hate speech in the run-up to the country’s federal elections, according to new research from Eko, a corporate responsibility non-profit campaign group. The group’s researchers tested whether the two platforms ad review systems would approve or […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

For years, Meta employees have internally discussed using copyrighted works obtained through legally questionable means to train the company’s AI models, according to court documents unsealed on Thursday. The documents were submitted by plaintiffs in the case Kadrey v. Meta, one of many AI copyright disputes slowly winding through the U.S. court system. The defendant, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Coinbase on Friday said the SEC has agreed to drop the lawsuit against the company with prejudice, meaning it cannot be filed again.  The move, which is still subject to the approval of the SEC’s Commissioners, is yet another signal that the Trump administration plans to be more friendly to crypto than the SEC was […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Apple on Friday released its first developer beta for iOS 18.4, which adds a new “Priority Notifications” feature, powered by Apple Intelligence. The addition aims to help users manage their notifications by prioritizing important alerts and minimizing distractions from less important ones.  These priority notifications are displayed in a separate section on the phone’s Lock […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said the market got it wrong when it comes to DeepSeek’s technological advancements and its potential to negatively impact the chipmaker’s business. Instead, Huang called DeepSeek’s R1 open source reasoning model “incredibly exciting” while speaking with Alex Bouzari, CEO of DataDirect Networks, in a pre-recorded interview that was released […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

OpenAI is forecasting a major shift in the next five years around who it gets most of its computing power from, The Information reported on Friday. By 2030, OpenAI expects to get three-quarters of its data center capacity from Stargate, the data center expansion project that’s expected to be heavily financed by SoftBank, one of […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Norwegian robotics firm 1X unveiled its latest home robot, Neo Gamma, on Friday. The humanoid system will succeed Neo Beta, which debuted in August. Like its predecessors, the Neo Gamma is a prototype designed for testing in the home environment. Images of the robot show it performing a number of household tasks like making coffee, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

This week, Sakana AI, a Nvidia-backed startup that’s raised hundreds of millions of dollars from VC firms, made a remarkable claim. The company said it had created an AI system, the AI CUDA Engineer, that could effectively speed up the training of certain AI models by a factor of up to 100x. The only problem […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Meta is expanding in India, despite recent layoffs of what the tech giant controversially deemed "low performers." © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The criminal trial against fintech startup founder Charlie Javice began on Friday, with lawyers laying out their opening arguments, Reuters reported.  Lawyers reiterated their original claims and defenses from the lawsuit filed by JPMorgan Chase against Javice in December of 2022. The financial services giant alleges that Javice had helped “fake millions of customers in […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Recipe app developers just got new competition. On Friday, Apple introduced a soon-to-launch feature for Apple News+ subscribers called Apple News+ Food, a new section that will allow users to search, discover, save, and easily cook recipes from dozens of existing News+ publishing partners. It’s set to roll out as part of iOS 18.4 and […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Apple Intelligence is heading to the Vision Pro, as part of an upcoming operating system update. Apple confirmed on Friday that its generative AI platform will arrive on the extended reality headset as part of VisionOS 2.4. A beta version of the software is currently available for developers. The public version is set for an […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

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. Startup life is a story of births and deaths. This week confirmed this, and it confirmed that unicorn rounds are not dead. Most interesting startup stories from […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Crypto exchange Bitby disclosed a breach that that amounts to a loss of $1.4 billion, the largest crypto theft of all time. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Occidental CEO Vicki Hollub compared using CO2 in enhanced oil recovery to fracking, the technology that sent U.S. oil and gas production skyrocketing. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Tiny Michigan biotech startup CircNova has raised a $3.3 million seed round for its technology that uses AI to target so-called “circular RNA.” The development holds promise as a new method to quickly develop therapies for conditions that currently have no drug treatments. The new funding is also a victory lap for co-founder and CEO […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Global investing in fintech startups is starting to see an uptick. Just this week, KPMG issued its Pulse of Fintech report for the second half of 2024. In the fourth quarter of 2024, investment climbed to $25.9 billion from $18 billion in the third quarter, according to KPMG. Granted, this is not the enthusiasm of […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

As they gain in popularity, AI coding assistants such as GitHub Copilot may appear to be boosting productivity. But in reality, they could be causing overall code quality to decline. That’s the top-line finding from a new report released by software engineering platform GitClear, which analyzed 211 million code lines from 2020 to 2024. According […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

AI Innovators, seize your moment! Have insights that could inspire 1,200 AI founders, investors, and enthusiasts eager to advance the future of AI? Take center stage, influence the AI conversation, and exchange ideas at TechCrunch Sessions: AI on June 5 at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall. We’re gathering top AI visionaries from the startup world to […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

In an unprecedented step, Apple caved to a reported U.K. government’s demand to prevent users from using end-to-end encryption in iCloud. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.