Samsung said on Wednesday that it’s adding Google’s Gemini AI to its home robot Ballie through a partnership with Google Cloud. Users will be able to ask the robot different queries to get answers from Gemini, said the companies. Samsung aims to tap into Gemini’s...
During its Cloud Next conference this week, Google unveiled the latest generation of its TPU AI accelerator chip. The new chip, called Ironwood, is Google’s seventh-generation TPU and is the first optimized for inference — that is, running AI models. Scheduled to launch sometime later...
Google is upgrading Workspace, its suite of cloud-based productivity tools, with new AI capabilities. The suite is gaining Workspace Flows, a tool designed to automate multi-step processes such as updating spreadsheets and digging through documents for information. Flows can tap Gems, Google’s brand of custom...
Gemini Code Assist, Google’s AI coding assistant, is gaining new “agentic” capabilities in preview. During its Cloud Next conference on Wednesday, Google said Code Assist can now deploy new AI “agents” that can take multiple steps to accomplish complex programming tasks. These agents can create...
Reddit Answers, the platform’s conversational AI search tool, gets an upgrade through an integration with Google Gemini. This comes over a year after Reddit expanded its partnership with Google Cloud to access its Vertex AI platform to build AI agents. Google and Reddit announced the update...
On Wednesday, Google rolled out updates to several of its first-party media-generating AI models available through its Vertex AI cloud platform. Lyria, Google’s text-to-music model, is now available in preview for select customers, and the company’s Veo 2 video creation model has been enhanced with...
If you ever call 911 from an area that’s hard to get to, you might hear the buzz of a drone well before a police cruiser pulls up. And there’s a good chance that it will be one made by Brinc Drones, a Seattle-based startup...
A new company, Deep Cogito, has emerged from stealth with a family of openly available AI models that can be switched between “reasoning” and non-reasoning modes. Reasoning models like OpenAI’s o1 have shown great promise in domains like math and physics, thanks to their ability...
On Monday, the “de-extinction” startup Colossal Biosciences announced its most ambitious results to date: the dire wolf. These are creatures that have been extinct for more than 12,000 years made famous by the HBO show Game of Thrones. These white, fluffy animals live on a...
Tech giants like Microsoft might be touting AI “agents” as profit-boosting tools for corporations, but a nonprofit is trying to prove that agents can be a force for good, too. Sage Future, a 501(c)(3) backed by Open Philanthropy, launched an experiment earlier this month tasking...
If you’re reading this, consider it your signal: the opportunity to influence the future of tech is here. TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 is now accepting speaker applications. Join us on stage this October 27–29 at Moscone West in San Francisco and share your ideas with 10,000+...
Zoox, Amazon’s autonomous vehicle unit, is deploying a small fleet of retrofitted test vehicles on the streets of Los Angeles starting Tuesday – a modest, yet meaningful step as the company inches toward offering public rides in Las Vegas and San Francisco later this year. ...
Founders, the battlefield is calling! Startup Battlefield 200 applications are now live — and the race has begun. If you’ve got a groundbreaking idea and the guts to pitch it to the world, TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 is your arena. You’ll face elite VC judges. You’ll...
Rain, a startup offering an employer-integrated earned wage access (EWA) app coupled with financial-wellness features like overdraft alerts and spending trends, has raised $75 million in an all-equity Series B round. The round was led by Prosus at a post-money valuation of $340 million. Rain...
An executive order will direct the federal government to list coal as a critical mineral and force some coal-fired power plants to keep generating electricity....
Join us for an unforgettable opportunity at TechCrunch Sessions: AI, happening at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall on June 5! We’re on the lookout for enthusiastic volunteers to be part of this exciting event. If you’ve ever wondered what goes into the making of tech gatherings,...
You voted. They rose to the top! Meet the two Audience Choice winners who’ll take the breakout stage at TechCrunch Sessions: AI on June 5 in Zellerbach Hall at UC Berkeley to share their insights with 1,200 AI leaders and enthusiasts. We sifted through hundreds...
Ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s new AI venture, Thinking Machines Lab, has gained two new prominent advisors: Bob McGrew, previously OpenAI’s chief research officer, and Alec Radford, a former OpenAI researcher behind many of the company’s more transformative innovations. Thinking Machines Lab’s website was quietly updated...
Snapchat is introducing Sponsored AI Lenses, a new ad format that lets brands engage with consumers in an immersive way. While Snapchat has offered brands the opportunity to pay for sponsored lenses on the platform for years, now they can leverage AI-generated experiences powered by...
On Tuesday, Amazon debuted a new generative AI model, Nova Sonic, capable of natively processing voice and generating natural-sounding speech. Amazon claims that Sonic’s performance is competitive with frontier voice models from OpenAI and Google on benchmarks measuring speed, speech recognition, and conversational quality. Nova...
A founder who has carved out a name for himself building products to help restaurants connect better with would-be diners has raised $50 million for his latest startup: a new take on the idea of customer loyalty. Blackbird Labs has built a payments-meets-loyalty-meets-blockchain platform for...
Dark kitchens– also referred to as ghost kitchens, cloud kitchens, or virtual kitchens– often receive criticism for their food quality. Sizl, a cook-to-order delivery service based in Chicago, seeks to change this perception by delivering meals made with fresh ingredients in around 30 minutes flat....
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...