At long last, digital consumer bank Chime has moved forward with its IPO by filing its S-1 paperwork Tuesday. Chime had reportedly filed confidential S-1 paperwork back in December. S-1 filings typically reveal all kinds of information, covering financial, legal, and other risk factors. But...
Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, has missed a self-imposed deadline to publish a finalized AI safety framework, as noted by watchdog group The Midas Project. xAI isn’t exactly known for its strong commitments to AI safety as it’s commonly understood. A recent report found that the...
Popular legal AI tool Harvey will now be using leading foundation models from Anthropic and Google, moving beyond strictly using OpenAI’s, Harvey announced in a blog post on Tuesday. This is noteworthy because Harvey is one of the OpenAI Startup Fund’s most successful early-backed portfolio...
Fabled startup investor and accelerator Y Combinator has some choice words for Google in an amicus brief it just submitted in the U.S.’s monopoly case against the search giant. In the brief, YC charged that Google is a “monopolist” that has “stunted” the U.S. startup...
Amazon says it will work with Humain, the AI company recently launched by Saudi Arabia’s ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, to invest “$5 billion-plus” in a strategic partnership to build an “AI Zone” in Saudi Arabia. The AI Zone will include dedicated Amazon Web Services (AWS)...
CEO Brian Chesky is spending hundreds of millions to relaunch his travel company as an everything app. Fitness! Food! Microdermabrasion? A WIRED exclusive....
WizardLM, a Beijing-based Microsoft AI research group, appears to have joined Tencent, the Chinese company that owns WeChat and blockbuster games like PUBG Mobile. In a post on X on Tuesday, Can Xu, a senior AI researcher who led a number of projects within WizardLM,...
TikTok is launching its first image-to-video AI feature, the company announced on Tuesday. The new feature is called “TikTok AI Alive” and allows users to turn static photos into videos within TikTok Stories. The feature is only accessible via TikTok’s Story Camera and uses AI...
As serial entrepreneur Joel Milne founded, scaled, and then successfully sold mobile auto repair service startup RepairSmith to AutoNation, he was plagued by a persistent problem. The automotive retail industry has a communication problem. And it’s an expensive one. Thousands of dealerships and mechanic shops...
During the Android Show on Tuesday, leading up to Google I/O, Google announced that it’s bringing Gemini to Wear OS smartwatches and Google TV. The announcement is part of Google’s plans to replace Google Assistant with Gemini across all of its devices and platforms. Tuesday’s...
Google is bringing Gemini, its generative AI, to all cars that support Android Auto in the next few months, the company announced at its Android Show ahead of the company’s 2025 I/O developer conference. The company says adding Gemini functionality to Android Auto and, later...
After a week or so of rumors, the U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC) formally rescinded the Biden Administration’s Artificial Intelligence Diffusion Rule days before it was set to go into effect. The Artificial Intelligence Diffusion Rule, which was introduced by former president Joe Biden in...
Audible, Amazon’s audiobook service, announced on Tuesday that it’s partnering with select publishers to convert print and e-books into AI-narrated audiobooks. This initiative aims to quickly expand its catalog as it competes with Apple, Spotify, and others in the rapidly growing audiobook market. Audible is...
If you’re a founder looking to grow your startup, chances are you’re wrestling with more than just product or capital. Talent, scale, and smart execution are the real battlegrounds. That’s exactly what TechCrunch All Stage 2025 is built to address on July 15 at Boston’s...
General Motors has cracked the chemistry of lower-cost, energy-dense electric vehicle batteries. Budget-conscious gasoline holdouts may soon have no excuse....
In a bid to make its AI DJ feel more interactive, Spotify is updating the feature to allow users to request music or change the mood of a playlist using voice commands. The company is rolling out this feature, initially only supported in English, in...
Melbourne O’Banion co-founded insurtech Bestow with Jonathan Abelmann in 2017 after struggling to secure his own life insurance policy. His goal was to make it easier for people to obtain life insurance and make the process more tech-enabled. Initially, Bestow operated as a direct-to-consumer insurance...
An analysis by Epoch AI, a nonprofit AI research institute, suggests the AI industry may not be able to eke massive performance gains out of reasoning AI models for much longer. As soon as within a year, progress from reasoning models could slow down, according...
AllTrails, the hiking and biking companion that was named 2023’s iPhone App of the Year, is launching a new premium membership called “Peak” that includes an upgraded feature set. This $80-per-year subscription will introduce AI tools to build custom routes and provide real-time trail condition...
Microsoft is hosting its annual Build developer conference next week from May 19 to 22. The event is guaranteed to include announcements regarding new AI integrations, services, and apps, including for Windows. At last year’s Build, Microsoft announced an integration of Copilot into Microsoft Teams,...
The largest holders of Donald Trump’s memecoin have secured spots at a private event with the US president himself. WIRED tracked how they did it....
Google is gearing up to hold its largest developer conference of the year, Google I/O 2025, on May 20 and May 21. CEO Sundar Pichai, DeepMind CEO and co-founder Demis Hassabis, and executives in charge of Search, Cloud, and Android will announce major updates to...
Buzzwords that are stretched to the point of being meaningless are as old as the tech industry itself. The top current one is “AI agent” and its variants, like “agentic.” So, unsurprisingly, no one really knows what an AI agent is. Even people with software engineering backgrounds...
Rep. Gerald Connolly, ranking member of the U.S. House Oversight Committee, has initiated an investigation into whether expense management startup Ramp is receiving preferential treatment in its bid for a $25 million government contract. Connolly sent a letter to the General Services Administration (GSA) Acting...
The men appeared at the US Copyright Office days after after the Trump administration fired its leader, who had just published a report about the use of copyrighted materials for AI training....
On Monday, Google announced the launch of its AI Futures Fund, a new initiative that seeks to invest in startups that are building with the latest AI tools from Google DeepMind, the company’s AI R&D lab. The fund will back startups from seed to late...
Saudi Arabia’s ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, launched an AI company called Humain to bolster the country’s artificial intelligence sector. The company plans to build out the country’s AI infrastructure, including the construction of data centers. This news arrives as Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Mark...
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is using his olive oil inefficiently in an “offense to horticulture,” the Financial Times humorously reports. For its “Lunch with the FT” series, the paper joined Altman in his kitchen. He prepared a garlicky pasta and salad, taking a rare break...
OpenAI’s ambitious Stargate data center project is facing delays thanks to tariff-related economic uncertainty, reports Bloomberg. Growing market volatility and cheaper AI services have made banks, private equity investors, and asset managers wary of investing in Stargate, an OpenAI-led project that aims to raise up...
Google’s openly available Gemma collection of AI models has reached a milestone: over 150 million downloads. Omar Sanseviero, a developer relations engineer at Google DeepMind, announced the figure on X over the weekend, also revealing that developers have created more than 70,000 variants of Gemma...