Tenga, a sex toy company that originated in Japan, has gained an unusually loyal following. One of its most popular products is both futuristic and decidedly low-tech: disposable “eggs.”...
French President Emmanuel Macron announced a total of €109 billion in private investments in the AI ecosystem (around $112 billion at current exchange rates) on Sunday evening. This week, Paris is hosting the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit — the third international summit focused on AI...
In a new essay on his personal blog, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company is open to a “compute budget,” among other “strange-sounding” ideas, to “enable everyone on Earth to use a lot of AI” and ensure the benefits of the technology are widely...
The latest model from DeepSeek, the Chinese AI company that’s shaken up Silicon Valley and Wall Street, can be manipulated to produce harmful content such as plans for a bioweapon attack and a campaign to promote self-harm among teens, according to The Wall Street Journal....
Apple could launch a new iPhone SE and PowerBeats Pro headphones as early as February 11, according to reporting from Bloomberg. The announcement is likely to be on the smaller side, given that the company has not yet issued invites for either an in-person or...
Super Bowl weekend is here with the Philadelphia Eagles set to take on the Kansas City Chiefs in New Orleans on Sunday evening. While many folks tune in to the Super Bowl for the actual football, others do so for the halftime performance, and some...
Canadian investment firm Brookfield plans to invest €20 billion by 2030 in artificial intelligence projects in France (around $20.7 billion at current exchange rates), according to a report from La Tribune Dimanche confirmed by news agency AFP. The majority of the sum will be used...
Last month, Apple offered up more insight into its consumer robotics work via a research paper that argues that traits like expressive movements are key to optimizing human-robot interaction. “Like most animals,” starts the report, “humans are highly sensitive to motion and subtle changes in...
Fei-Fei Li, the Stanford computer scientist and startup founder sometimes known as “the Godmother of AI,” has outlined “three fundamental principles for the future of AI policymaking” ahead of next week’s AI Action Summit in Paris. First, Li said policy must be based on “science,...
To give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved — and overdue — time in the spotlight, TechCrunch has been publishing a series of interviews focusing on remarkable women who’ve contributed to the AI revolution. Raji Arasu, the CTO of Autodesk, said that she’s been using...
Arguments about what is and isn’t “open source” are often resolved by deferring to the Open Source Initiative (OSI): If a piece of software is available under a license rubber stamped as “open source” by the OSI’s formal “definition,” then that software is open source....
Fine art auction house, Christie’s, has sold AI-generated art before. But soon, it plans to hold its first show dedicated solely to works created with AI, an announcement that has been met with mixed reviews. The auction, which Christie’s is calling ‘Augmented Intelligence,’ will feature...
Time and boundaries dissolve in these spaces while people become charged with stress, anxiety, and excitement. Throw in a drink or two, and it’s no wonder people aren’t themselves....
Sellers and shoppers on the two sites say they saw items disappear and prices go up after President Donald Trump implemented tariffs on Chinese imports....
Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei claims DeepSeek generated sensitive bioweapons data in a safety test it ran. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only....
OpenAI is expanding its footprint to Germany. According to a press release issued Friday, the ChatGPT maker plans to open an office in Munich in the coming months. “Germany is renowned for its technical expertise, academic excellence, and industrial innovation,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in...
Just six months after defense tech Anduril raised a massive $1.5 billion round that valued the company at $14 billion, it’s in talks to raise another $2.5 billion, at a valuation of up to $28 billion, sources told CNBC. The deal would, not surprisingly, be...
Donald Trump’s pick for FBI director told senators he has no plans to divest his shares, which his financial disclosure form says were received in exchange for consulting services....
Andrew Ng, the founder and former leader of Google Brain, supports Google’s recent decision to drop its pledge not to build AI systems for weapons. “I’m very glad that Google has changed its stance,” Ng said during an onstage interview Thursday evening with TechCrunch at...
Elon Musk doesn’t want Tesla to be just an automaker. He wants Tesla to be an AI company, one that’s figured out how to make cars drive themselves. Crucial to that mission is Dojo, Tesla’s custom-built supercomputer designed to train its Full Self-Driving (FSD) neural...
An AI system developed by Google DeepMind, Google’s leading AI research lab, appears to have surpassed the average gold medalist in solving geometry problems in an international mathematics competition. The system, called AlphaGeometry2, is an improved version of a system, AlphaGeometry, that DeepMind released last...
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 first week of February was busy on the geopolitical front, as well as in the world...
A number of startups are racing to make vehicle inspections faster, easier, and cheaper. Self Inspection, a startup based in San Diego, thinks it has them all beat with its AI-powered service — and now it has convinced outside investors. Self Inspection, founded in 2021,...
France’s public investment bank announced that it plans to invest as much as €10 billion (around $10.3 billion at current exchange rates) in the artificial intelligence ecosystem in France. This announcement comes a few days before heads of state and global tech leaders gather for...
In this post, we explain the many Microsoft Copilots available and what they do, and highlight the key differences between each. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only....
Safe Superintelligence, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, is in talks to raise funding at a valuation of “at least” $20 billion, according to Reuters. It’s not clear how much Safe Superintelligence — which has yet to generate any revenue...
Humanoid robotics company Figure raised eyebrows this week when it announced it would be stepping away from a partnership with OpenAI in favor of building its own in-house AI models. Figure CEO Brett Adcock alluded to a “major breakthrough” in their own process and plans...
The GenAI boom of the last few years has unleashed a wave of startups promising to support the process of prompt engineering — i.e., coming up with instructions to precisely steer an AI chatbot to serve useful output. So think tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and...
The real competition in AI isn’t about foundation models. It’s about apps built on top of those models....
When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020 and schools transitioned to online learning, both Joe Titus and Paul Suhr were concerned about how to maintain their children’s activity levels in the absence of mandatory physical education classes and sports. The two friends’ solution was Hiveclass,...