XL Batteries is using petrochemical infrastructure to store solar and wind power
The startup has commissioned a demonstration unit of its organic flow battery....
The startup has commissioned a demonstration unit of its organic flow battery....
IBM is releasing the latest version of its mainframe hardware that includes new updates meant to accelerate AI adoption. The hardware and consulting company on Monday announced IBM z17, the latest version of its mainframe computer hardware. This fully encrypted mainframe is powered by an...
Retaining top AI talent is tough amid cutthroat competition between Google, OpenAI, and other heavyweights. Google’s AI division, DeepMind, has resorted to using “aggressive” noncompete agreements for some AI staff in the U.K. that bar them from working for competitors for up to a year,...
Amazon has upgraded its AI video model, Nova Reel, with the ability to generate videos up to two minutes in length. Nova Reel, announced in December 2024, was Amazon’s first foray into the generative video space. It competes with models from OpenAI, Google, and others...
At 11 a.m. in California last Thursday, the day after President Donald Trump declared sweeping new tariffs under what he dubbed “Liberation Day,” Ryan Petersen was live on camera, fielding questions from a virtual room packed with more than 2,300 anxious customers. The founder and...
A Meta exec on Monday denied a rumor that the company trained its new AI models to present well on specific benchmarks while concealing the models’ weaknesses. The executive, Ahmad Al-Dahle, VP of generative AI at Meta, said in a post on X that it’s...
Waymo is preparing to use data from its robotaxis, including video from interior cameras tied to rider identities, to train generative AI models, according to an unreleased version of its privacy policy found by researcher Jane Manchun Wong. The draft language reveals Waymo may also...
Google is bringing multimodal search to AI Mode, its Google Search experiment that lets users ask complex, multi-part questions and follow-ups to dig deeper on a topic. Users who have access to AI Mode can now tap the feature to ask questions about photos they’ve...
In a recent memo to employees, Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke made a bold policy change: teams must demonstrate why AI can’t perform a job before they’re permitted to ask for more headcount and resources. “Before asking for more headcount and resources, teams must demonstrate why...
Los Angeles-based startup Moonvalley, which is developing AI tools for video creation, has raised a fresh $43 million in venture capital, according to an SEC filing. The filing, which lists 11 unnamed investors, comes roughly a week after Moonvalley launched its first AI video-generating model, Marey....
Overwhelmed with trying to keep up with the different models you can now use to build your content using AI? A startup called Krea that’s looking to solve this problem specifically for designers and other visual creatives has now raised $83 million for a platform...
IBM on Monday said it has acquired Hakkoda, a data and AI consultancy based in New York. The acquisition would “further expand” IBM’s ability to bring consultants and AI to clients, particularly customers in industries like financial services, public sector, and healthcare and life sciences,...
OpenAI is said to have discussed acquiring the AI hardware startup that former Apple design lead Jony Ive is building with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. According to The Information, OpenAI could pay around $500 million for the fledgling company, called io Products. Ive, who left...
New research from Stanford suggests artificial intelligence isn’t ruled by just OpenAI and Google, as competition increases across the US, China, and France....
One of the new flagship AI models Meta released on Saturday, Maverick, ranks second on LM Arena, a test that has human raters compare the outputs of models and choose which they prefer. But it seems the version of Maverick that Meta deployed to LM...
Microsoft has released a browser-based, playable level of the classic video game Quake II. This functions as a tech demo for the gaming capabilities of Microsoft’s Copilot AI platform — though by the company’s own admission, the experience isn’t quite the same as playing a...
Meta has released a new collection of AI models, Llama 4, in its Llama family — on a Saturday, no less. There are four new models in total: Llama 4 Scout, Llama 4 Maverick, and Llama 4 Behemoth. All were trained on “large amounts of...
Elisabeth Diana, head of communications at human resources Deel, is no longer with the company, according to her LinkedIn profile. Bloomberg first reported the news that Diana had resigned from Deel, which was recently accused of planting a spy at rival company Rippling. TechCrunch reached...
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie wants to bring his city back to its glory days. And he’s convinced tech leaders — who often pitch utopian ideals of their own — can help him deliver. “I’m a mayor that is picking up the phone and calling...
While the White House carved out a narrow exemption for some semiconductor imports, President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs still apply to GPUs and chipmaking equipment....
ChatGPT has seen India as its largest market by monthly active users and the second largest by downloads, per the external data seen by TechCrunch....
A new study appears to lend credence to allegations that OpenAI trained at least some of its AI models on copyrighted content. OpenAI is embroiled in suits brought by authors, programmers, and other rights-holders who accuse the company of using their works — books, codebases,...
Mach CEO Ethan Thornton has been building weapons systems of varying shapes and sizes since high school, but his ambitions have turned into a company that recently landed a contract with the U.S. military and a plan to develop cross-functional factories. TechCrunch’s Charles Rollet interviewed...
GitHub Copilot, Microsoft-owned GitHub’s AI coding assistant, could soon become costlier for some users. On Friday, GitHub announced “premium requests” for GitHub Copilot, a new system that imposes rate limits when users switch to AI models other than the base model for tasks such as...
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 reminded us that different startups share a different approach to news: Some choose to remain...
On Friday, Google released API pricing for Gemini 2.5 Pro, an AI reasoning model with industry-leading performance on several benchmarks measuring coding, reasoning, and math. For prompts up to 200,000 tokens, Gemini 2.5 Pro costs $1.25 per million input tokens (roughly 750,000 words, longer than...
For its 50th birthday, Microsoft is teaching its AI-powered Copilot chatbot a few new tricks. Copilot can now take action on “most websites,” Microsoft says, enabling it to book tickets, reserve restaurants, and more. The bot has gained the ability to remember specific things about...
Rippling’s latest lawsuit reads less like a legal filing and more like the plot of a corporate espionage thriller, complete with secret crypto payments, an alleged mole, and a fake Slack channel trap. This week, the HR tech startup publicly named the employee at the...
Since IPOs slowed to trickle a few years ago, limited partners who invest in venture capital funds have had one giant problem: a dearth of liquidity. Lack of cash returns has been especially troublesome for wealthy individuals or their small family offices – who manage...
After effectively cancelling the consumer launch of its o3 reasoning model in February, OpenAI now says it plans to release both o3 and a next-gen successor, o4-mini, in “a couple of weeks.” In a post on X on Friday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the...