timef 03/21/2025

Wayve co-founder and CEO Alex Kendall sees promise in bringing his autonomous vehicle startup’s tech to market. That is, if Wayve sticks to its strategy of ensuring its automated driving software is cheap to run, hardware agnostic, and can be applied to advanced driver assistance systems, robotaxis, and even robotics.  The strategy, which Kendall laid […]

Microsoft is launching a research project to estimate the influence of specific training examples on the text, images, and other types of media that generative AI models create. That’s per a job listing dating back to December that was recently recirculated on LinkedIn. According to the listing, which seeks a research intern, the project will […]

In recent years, Meta has introduced many AI features and capabilities to its apps, even going so far as experimenting with AI-generated characters complete with unique profiles and personalities, before scraping them after they were deemed creepy and unnecessary. In yet another move that may not be received well among users, Meta wants to use […]

Norwegian robotics startup 1X plans to start early tests of its humanoid robot, Neo Gamma, in “a few hundred to a few thousand” homes by the end of 2025, according to the company’s CEO, Bernt Børnich. “Neo Gamma is going into homes this year,” Børnich told TechCrunch in an interview at Nvidia GTC 2025. “We […]

Commercial services tech hasn’t historically been considered “sexy,” but the need for innovation in the space is enormous. That need has translated into a large fundraise for a company focused on streamlining commercial contracting processes. On Friday, BuildOps, which develops software for commercial services contractors, announced that it has raised $127 million in a Series […]

Two sources in the zero-day industry say Operation Zero's prices for exploits against the popular messaging app Telegram will depend on different factors.

Google has reported the results of an experiment it ran which removed news from search results for 1% of users for 2.5 months in eight* markets in Europe — claiming the results show that news is essentially worthless to Google’s ad business. The search giant conducted the test because European copyright law requires it to […]

Nvidia took San Jose by storm this year, with a record-breaking 25,000 attendees flocking to the San Jose Convention Center and surrounding downtown buildings. Many workshops, talks, and panels were so packed that people had to lean against walls or sit on the floor — and suffer the wrath of organizers shouting commands to get […] © 2025 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Apple has been sued in federal court over what plaintiffs allege is false advertising of several Apple Intelligence features. Filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in San Jose, the suit seeks class-action status and damages on behalf of those who purchased Apple Intelligence-capable iPhones and other devices. Plaintiffs claim that device owners haven’t received the […] © 2025 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The order accused DOGE of engaging in a "fishing expedition" at the federal agency. © 2025 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Apple is losing more than $1 billion per year on its streaming service, Apple TV+, according to a new report from The Information. Apple TV+ is the only service in Apple’s portfolio that isn’t profitable, the report reveals. The company has spent around $5 billion on content each year since the streaming service launched in […] © 2025 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

As conventional AI benchmarking techniques prove inadequate, AI builders are turning to more creative ways to assess the capabilities of generative AI models. For one group of developers, that’s Minecraft, the Microsoft-owned sandbox-building game. The website Minecraft Benchmark (or MC-Bench) was developed collaboratively to pit AI models against each other in head-to-head challenges to respond […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

North Korea is reportedly launching a new cybersecurity unit called Research Center 227 within its intelligence agency Reconnaissance General Bureau (RGB). © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Gwyneth Paltrow gave an update on her company Goop in a cover story for Vanity Fair.  Paltrow founded the lifestyle brand Goop in 2008 and it has raised more than $140 million from investors including Greycroft and G9 Ventures, according to Pitchbook. The brand is often regarded as one of the first examples of a […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

AI-powered search startup Perplexity is said to be in early talks to raise up to $1 billion in a new funding round valuing the startup at $18 billion. Bloomberg, citing a person familiar with the matter, reported on Thursday that Perplexity’s annual recurring revenue has now reached $100 million. Perplexity’s valuation has soared in recent […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

As Apple’s Siri comes under attack for failing at the most basic queries, the company is shaking up leadership in charge of Apple’s AI features for Siri. According to Bloomberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook is installing Mike Rockwell, the current VP of the Vision Products Group (the team behind the Vision Pro), to head up […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

As Apple’s Siri comes under attack for failing at the most basic queries, the company is shaking up leadership in charge of Apple’s AI features for Siri. According to Bloomberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook is installing Mike Rockwell, the current VP of the Vision Products Group (the team behind the Vision Pro), to head up […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Germany’s Munich Re has signed a definitive agreement to acquire digital insurance company Next Insurance for $2.6 billion, the firms announced on Thursday. Founded in 2016, Palo Alto-based Next Insurance is focused on providing insurance to small-to-medium-sized businesses. It was last valued at $2.5 billion in late 2023 when it raised $265 million. Next Insurance’s […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

EV owners of GM vehicles like the Chevrolet Silverado EV and Cadillac Lyriq will now officially have access to Tesla’s Superchargers. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

It’s well-established that AI models developed by Chinese AI labs like DeepSeek censor certain politically sensitive topics. A 2023 measure passed by China’s ruling party forbids models from generating content that “damages the unity of the country and social harmony.” According to one study, DeepSeek’s R1 refuses to answer 85% of questions about subjects deemed […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Honda and its luxury brand, Acura, are set to join the growing list of automakers providing EV owners access to Tesla’s Supercharger network in North America. Starting in June, owners of the Honda Prologue and Acura ZDX electric vehicles will be able to charge at Tesla’s stations. Those EVs are built with CCS charging ports […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Google is rolling out a new Gmail update that is designed to help you find the email you’re looking for more quickly. The company announced on Thursday that it will now use AI to consider factors like recency, most-clicked emails, and frequent contacts when surfacing emails based on your search query. Up until now, Gmail […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

CoreWeave said on Wednesday that it hopes to sell its initial public shares between $47 and $55 per share, putting the money it may raise between about $2.2 billion and $2.6 billion. Word on the street is that CoreWeave wanted to raise at least $3 billion and possibly over $4 billion. But price range announcements […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Anthropic’s AI-powered chatbot, Claude, can now search the web — a capability that had long eluded it. Web search is available now in preview for paid Claude users in the U.S., Anthropic said on its blog, with support for free users and additional countries coming soon. Users can toggle on web search in their profile […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

OpenAI is bringing new transcription and voice-generating AI models to its API that the company claims improve upon its previous releases. For OpenAI, the models fit into its broader “agentic” vision: building automated systems that can independently accomplish tasks on behalf of users. The definition of “agent” might be in dispute, but OpenAI Head of […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Meta’s social network Threads, an X competitor with more than 320 million monthly active users, is now rolling out new features related to topics, reply controls, and video playback in the app, among other things. It’s also making political content suggestions more personalized to the user, the company says. Combined, the features aim to make […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

As Generative AI moves increasingly into the physical world through robotics, vehicles and drones, the need to map cloud-based AIs to real-world environments can lead to a huge mismatch. Rerun, a Stockholm-based dev tools startup, which builds a data stack for this emergent kind of “Physical AI”, has secured $17 million in seed funding to […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Social network Bluesky, an open source X rival, has made a change that will allow publishers to better track the referral traffic originating from posts on its platform. According to a comment from Bluesky employee Emily Liu, the company is now sending referral traffic through Bluesky’s “go” subdomain to make it easier for publishers to […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Elon Musk-owned social media platform X is suing the Indian government, accusing the country’s IT ministry of unlawfully expanding its powers to remove online content, Reuters reported Thursday. X has long chaffed at government orders to remove or block content in the country, such as during the farmers’ protests last year. Though it ended up […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The Open Power AI Consortium says it will use domain-specific AI models to tackle problems in the power industry. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

An analyst who is one of the biggest boosters of Tesla on Wall Street says Elon Musk is facing a “moment of truth” at his EV company because of a “crisis” he’s created by spending so much in the Trump administration. The analyst, Wedbush’s Dan Ives, pleaded with Musk in a note published Thursday to […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Threat intelligence startup GreyNoise says it has observed a ‘notable resurgence’ in attack activity © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Open-source data movement company Airbyte is launching additional connectors to help enterprises better utilize their data in the age of AI without compromising data sovereignty. The San Francisco-based startup announced on Thursday that it’s releasing a host of new capabilities designed to enable customers to securely move corporate data without tapping SaaS applications. The new […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.