timef 03/05/2025

The European Union is once again being urged to expand its investigation of Google under the bloc’s Digital Markets Act (DMA). The big aim of the EU’s flagship competition reform — which came into force last spring — was to level the digital playing field by forcing platform giants into fairer dealing with rivals and […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Two trailblazing computer scientists have won the 2024 Turing Award for their work in reinforcement learning, a discipline in which machines learn through a reward-based trial-and-error approach that lets them adapt within constrained or dynamic environments. Andrew G. Barto, a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst; and Richard S. Sutton, a professor at […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

YouTube on Wednesday announced a new premium subscription tier called Premium Lite, which would allow users to watch “most” videos ad-free for $7.99 per month. As an entry-level subscription, the new tier would not offer the other benefits of the full YouTube Premium ($13.99 per month) subscription like downloads, background play, or the ability to […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

On Wednesday, Google announced the launch of a new AI image feature for its Shopping tab, designed to help users find clothing items they envision by allowing them to search using their own words. The company is also expanding its AR beauty and virtual try-on tools. The new feature, “Vision Match,” is now available in […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Are you a leader in the AI space? Make your voice heard as a TechCrunch Sessions: AI speaker.  At TechCrunch Sessions: AI, you can help shape what’s next in the AI industry — and share your expertise with 1,200 AI founders, investors, and industry pioneers. Help drive the next wave of innovation on June 5 […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Security experts warn of ‘huge impact’ of actively exploited hypervisor flaws that allow sandbox escape © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Apple has launched a new Mac Studio, its desktop computer for professionals who need top-of-the-line performance. The company is trying something new with the Mac Studio as it lets you choose between the M4 Max or the M3 Ultra. The Mac Studio starts at $1,999. Pre-orders open today, and it will be available in Apple […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Apple has introduced a new MacBook Air on its website, offering improved performance while retaining the familiar design. The new laptop is equipped with Apple’s M4 chip, the most recent addition to the M-series chip lineup. The MacBook Air comes in two sizes. Customers can choose between a 13-inch and a 15-inch display. Pricing starts […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

A weekend hackathon project that lets AI agents talk on the phone with each other in a robotic language, one that’s incomprehensible to humans, has gone viral on social media over the past week. The project, called GibberLink, was created by two Meta software engineers during a hackathon competition in London, hosted by ElevenLabs and […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The confirmation of the pause on intelligence sharing follows a heated exchange between the U.S. and Ukrainian presidents © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Last month, Google announced the “AI co-scientist,” an AI the company said was designed to aid scientists in creating hypotheses and research plans. Google pitched it as a way to uncover new knowledge, but experts think it — and tools like it — fall well short of PR promises. “This preliminary tool, while interesting, doesn’t […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Britain’s competition authority, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), said Wednesday that Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI doesn’t qualify for investigation under the merger provisions of the U.K.’s Enterprise Act 2002, the country’s anticompetitive practices law. The full text of the decision will be published shortly, the CMA said. The CMA began investigating Microsoft’s partnership in […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Foreign exchange fluctuations can make or break a business that trades across borders, but trying to respond to that can be tricky if you’re anything smaller than the world’s largest enterprises. Today, a startup called Grain is emerging from stealth with a product it said will let finance teams from companies of any size better […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Here’s a blast from the past: Digg, one of the web’s early news aggregators, is now back under the ownership of original founder Kevin Rose. Notably, he’s joined as co-owner by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian (both pictured above). Digg and Reddit were once fierce rivals in the online social news aggregation space, launching within a […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The SoftBank-backed chipmaker has signed an agreement with the Malaysian government to bolster the country's chip design ecosystem. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Apple is challenging a U.K. Government data access order in the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), the Financial Times reports. The order targeted iCloud backups that are protected by end-to-end encryption. Last month, press leaks revealed the existence of the January order asking Apple to build a backdoor in iCloud’s encrypted backups. U.K. officials are exercising […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Darwinbox, an Indian startup building a SaaS platform for hiring, onboarding and employee administration, has raised $140 million to take on the likes of Rippling and Deel as it seeks to expand internationally, especially in the U.S. The funding is being co-led by KKR and Partners Group, and is a mix of primary and secondary […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

A U.K. startup, originating from founder Jacob Nathan’s high school science project on using enzymes to break down plastic waste, has secured an oversubscribed $18.3 million in Series A funding. Founded in 2019 in London, Epoch Biodesign now a 30+ strong multidisciplinary team of chemists, biologists and software engineers. It will be using the new […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Nvidia-backed data center company CoreWeave has acquired AI developer platform Weights & Biases for an undisclosed sum. According to The Information, CoreWeave spent $1.7 billion on the transaction. Weights & Biases was valued at $1.25 billion in 2023, and it recently filed for an IPO. Lukas Biewald, Chris Van Pelt, and Shawn Lewis founded Weights & Biases […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

EcoDataCenter, a Swedish company that builds eco-friendly data centers used by major compute providers to handle their AI traffic, has raised nearly half a billion dollars — $478 million (€450 million) to be exact — in anticipation of more demand.  The equity funding, which is coming from a group of unnamed institutional investors, will be […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Last October, Meta dipped its toe into the world of facial recognition — an area where it has had a tricky record — with an international test of two new tools: one to stop scams based on likenesses of famous people, and a second facial recognition feature to help people get back into compromised Facebook […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Defense tech startup Epirus has raised a $250m Series D to expand its counter-drone solutions. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

London startup Quantexa has made its name over the years with an enterprise platform that employs AI and data analytics to fight money laundering and fraud. Today, it is announcing new funding of $175 million to double down on that business while also moving deeper into another hot area: using its technology to help organizations […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Alec Radford, a researcher who helped develop many of OpenAI’s key AI technologies, has been subpoenaed in a copyright case against the AI startup, according to a court filing Tuesday. The filing, submitted by an attorney for the plaintiffs to the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California, indicated that Radford was served […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

A federal judge in Northern California denied Elon Musk’s motion for an injunction that would have halted OpenAI’s planned transition into a for-profit company, Bloomberg reported. Musk failed to provide enough evidence necessary for an injunction, U.S. District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled Tuesday. However, Rogers said the court is prepared to hold an […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The fintech startup has been under federal scrutiny for years for questionable financial and carbon accounting practices. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Amazon has formed a new group within AWS dedicated to creating AI agents, systems that help people automate parts of their lives, Reuters reported on Tuesday. In an email to staff seen by Reuters, AWS CEO Matt Garman said agentic AI has the potential to be “the next multi-billion business for AWS.” A longtime AWS […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

X is bringing more attention to Communities, a feature that allows X users to connect and engage in discussions around a given topic, similar to how it’s done on Reddit. Today, tabs to access popular Communities are pinned to the top of the app’s homepage alongside your For You feed and other Lists. Now, you’ll […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

One of Africa’s most active investors, known for early bets on unicorns like Flutterwave, Andela, and Wave, has secured fresh capital to invest in startups across the continent. This comes as funding deals and volumes in Africa saw only a slight dip last year, according to a report by VC firm Partech. LoftyInc Capital, which […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

“We’re a long way from pants,” Andy Dunn, founder of online fashion retailer Bonobos, told TechCrunch. Now, the former CEO is taking on a completely different challenge: he wants to help people make friends. Dunn’s newest venture, Pie, is a social app focused on bringing people together in real life. With an $11.5 million Series […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Foundation Capital has come a long way since it was forced to scale down its fund size from $750 million in 2008 to $282 million (its sixth main fund) in 2013. On Tuesday, the 30-year-old firm announced that it raised a $600 million eleventh flagship fund, which is 20% larger than the predecessor $500 million […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The founder and CEO of IPO-bound fintech Klarna took to X to once again explain why his company ditched Salesforce’s flagship CRM product about a year ago in favor of its own homegrown AI system.  But this time, Sebastian Siemiatkowski emphasized that he doesn’t think others will — or should — follow his lead. “I […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Amazon reportedly wants to get in on the AI “reasoning” model game. According to Business Insider, Amazon is developing an AI model that incorporates advanced “reasoning” capabilities, similar to models like OpenAI’s o3-mini and Chinese AI lab DeepSeek’s R1. The model may launch as soon as June under Amazon’s Nova brand, which the company introduced […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

While several of Google’s rivals, including OpenAI, have tweaked their AI chatbots to discuss politically sensitive subjects in recent months, Google appears to be embracing a more conservative approach. When asked to answer certain political questions, Google’s AI-powered chatbot, Gemini, often says it “can’t help with responses on elections and political figures right now,” TechCrunch’s […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Experts note that this is just the first step for the alleged North Korean hackers to profit from the historic heist. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

We still didn’t get a straight up definition of exactly what an AI agent is during Bret Taylor’s Mobile World Congress fireside chat in Barcelona on Tuesday. The Sierra founder and OpenAI board chair preferred to side-step CNN moderator Anna Stewart’s question asking how “agentic AI” is “any different to a GenAI chatbot” by suggesting […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

On June 5, TechCrunch Sessions: AI will kick off — and you can be part of the industry-changing conversations that will be taking place. We have an open invitation for members of the AI community to lead breakout sessions and discussions with over 1,200 startup founders, VC leaders, and AI aficionados attending our newest event, which […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Google announced new software updates for the Pixel phones as part of its so-called Pixel Drop program for March. Pixel Watches and all Android devices are also receiving some new features. The most notable parts of the update include using AI to detect scams in messages and calls, better categorization in the screenshot app, menstrual […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Calls for WordPress co-founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg to step down from his leadership role have increased in recent months amid his controversial fight and legal battle with hosting company WP Engine. Mullenweg not only intends to stay, he’s also thinking about how he plans to manage succession planning. He doesn’t want to pass […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Cohere for AI, AI startup Cohere’s nonprofit research lab, this week released a multimodal “open” AI model, Aya Vision, the lab claimed is best-in-class. Aya Vision can perform tasks like writing image captions, answering questions about photos, translating text, and generating summaries in 23 major languages. Cohere, which is also making Aya Vision available for […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The entire solar industry has been bracing for a rough road ahead. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Chinese ride-hail firm Didi is on the hunt for fresh funds for its autonomous vehicle technology unit that could value it at $5 billion, according to Bloomberg News. Investor interest in self-driving cars is high in China on the backs of IPOs from WeRide and Pony AI, which have a market capitalization of $4.7 billion […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.