timef 03/15/2025

SpaceX successfully launched four people into space on Friday, beginning a mission that will give the International Space Station enough crew members to allow astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore to return to Earth after their nine-month stay. The mission, known as Crew-10, will see SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft dock with the International Space Station (ISS) […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

After 23 years of connecting people around the world, Skype, the popular video-calling service, is shutting down. Microsoft, the parent company, confirmed that the official sunset date for the service is May 5, 2025. Skype users can either migrate all their contacts and chat data to Microsoft Teams, or they can choose to download their […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

On Thursday, House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) sent letters to 16 American technology firms, including Google and OpenAI, asking for past communications with the Biden Administration that might suggest the former President “coerced or colluded” with companies to “censor lawful speech” in AI products. The Trump Administration’s top technology advisers previously signaled it would pick […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Bench customers say they're being required to pay for services they already paid for. Bench's new owners deny it. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

As businesses race to replace humans with AI agents, coding assistant Cursor just gave a peek at the attitude bots could bring to work, too.  © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Swedish fintech Klarna took the next step in its highly anticipated U.S. IPO on Friday when it made its F-1 public. Here are the top take-aways. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

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 […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

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, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

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 […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

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 […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Klein, a former AT&T technician turned whistleblower, exposed mass surveillance by the U.S. government in 2006. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

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 […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

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 […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm since its launch in November 2022. What started as a tool to supercharge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved into a behemoth with 300 million weekly active users. 2024 was a big year for OpenAI, from its partnership […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

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 […] © 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. 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 […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

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, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

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 […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

DeepSeek has gone viral. Chinese AI lab DeepSeek broke into the mainstream consciousness this week after its chatbot app rose to the top of the Apple App Store charts (and Google Play, as well). DeepSeek’s AI models, which were trained using compute-efficient techniques, have led Wall Street analysts — and technologists — to question whether the U.S. can maintain its […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

TikTok, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, has been at the center of controversy in the U.S. for four years now due to concerns about user data potentially being accessed by the Chinese government. Just this past month, the app experienced a temporary outage in the U.S. that left millions of users in suspense before […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.