Kerry Washington is expanding her angel investment portfolio, serving as lead investor in the pre-seed round of the wedding marketplace Cheersy. Cheersy, which was founded in 2024 by Amy Shack Egan, helps couples find day-of service wedding coordinators and has raised a total of $550,000,...
Is work religion, or is religion work? Both....
SoftBank is marching ahead on its ambitions to build out a major AI operation in its home market of Japan, on its own steam and in strategic partnership with others like OpenAI. On Friday, the tech company confirmed it would pay $676 million for factory...
AI company Sesame has released the base model that powers Maya, the impressively realistic voice assistant. The model, which is 1 billion parameters in size (“parameters” referring to individual components of the model), is under an Apache 2.0 license, meaning it can be used commercially with few restrictions....
Flock Safety and one of its long-time VCs, Bedrock Capital, announced Thursday that the startup raised a fresh $275 million at a $7.5 billion valuation. Flock makes computer vision-enabled video surveillance technology used by law enforcement as well as businesses, property management companies, and so...
Google, following on the heels of OpenAI, published a policy proposal in response to the Trump Administration’s call for a national “AI Action Plan.” The tech giant endorsed weak copyright restrictions on AI training, as well as “balanced” export controls that “protect national security while...
This week on Uncanny Valley, we look ahead into a future where driverless cars are mainstream....
Light, the maker of a minimalist phone designed to help consumers disconnect from smartphone distractions and social media, will launch its newest model, the Light Phone III, on March 27. This version of the device, like its older counterpart, offers a simple black-and-white display and...
One of Silicon Valley’s most storied startup accelerators, Y Combinator, held its Winter 2025 Demo Day on Wednesday, showcasing what its latest batch of 160 startups are cooking up. Some of Silicon Valley’s most successful startups – including Stripe, AirBnB, and Reddit – started out...
In a new policy proposal, OpenAI describes Chinese AI lab DeepSeek as “state-subsidized” and “state-controlled,” and recommends that the U.S. government consider banning models from the outfit and similar People’s Republic of China (PRC)-supported operations. The proposal, a submission for the Trump Administration’s “AI Action Plan”...
In the AI chatbot wars, Google thinks the key to retaining users is serving up content they can’t get elsewhere, like answers shaped by their internet habits. On Thursday, the company announced Gemini with personalization, a new “experimental capability” for its Gemini chatbot apps that...
When I was 16, I attended a writing workshop with a group of precocious young poets, where we all tried very hard to prove who among us was the most tortured upper-middle-class teenager. One boy refused to tell anyone where he was from, declaring, “I’m...
After identifying major flaws in popular AI models, researchers are pushing for a new system to identify and report bugs....
Ahead of the Game Developer’s Conference (GDC), Xbox revealed on Thursday that it’s experimenting with an AI-powered gaming sidekick. “Copilot for Gaming,” powered by Microsoft’s AI technology, is a voice-activated assistant designed to enhance the gaming experience and is designed to answer questions, complete tasks,...
Less than three months until TechCrunch’s biggest AI event yet! If you’re shaping the future of AI, investing in the next game-changing innovation, or simply eager to dive deep into what’s next, TechCrunch Sessions: AI is the place to be. On June 5, Zellerbach Hall...
In a proposal for the U.S. government’s “AI Action Plan,” the Trump Administration’s initiative to reshape American AI policy, OpenAI called for a U.S. copyright strategy that “[preserves] American AI models’ ability to learn from copyrighted material.” “America has so many AI startups, attracts so...
TechCrunch All Stage (formerly Early Stage) returns to Boston on July 15, and the agenda for our tentpole East Coast founder event is almost complete. We’re excited to share this sneak peek at some of the fantastic speakers and sessions we have on tap. For...
UiPath has acquired Peak.ai, a startup out of Manchester that builds “decision-making” pricing and inventory management AI solutions. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only....
Employees at many companies today are expected to make decisions through careful data analysis, but the tools they need to do it are clunky, slow or — in some cases — don’t exist. That’s according to Colin Zima, the CEO of Omni, a business intelligence...
A judge in Singapore granted bail to three men suspected of deceiving suppliers of server computers that may contain Nvidia chips affected by U.S. export rules that bar the sale of them to certain countries, as a route to halting them being sold to organizations...
AI-powered image generators, which are at the center of a number of copyright lawsuits against AI companies, are frequently trained on massive amounts of data from public websites. Most of these companies argue that fair use doctrine shields their data scraping and training practices. But many copyright...
Semiconductor giant Intel hired semiconductor veteran Lip-Bu Tan to be its new CEO. This news comes three months after Pat Gelsinger retired and stepped down from the company’s board, with Intel CFO David Zinsner and executive vice president of client relations Michelle Johnston Holthaus stepping...
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is worried about spies getting their hands on costly "algorithmic secrets" from the U.S.' top AI companies. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only....
Food delivery startup Wonder is acquiring media company Tastemade for around $90 million, according to The Wall Street Journal. Founded in 2021, Tastemade produces food, travel, and home videos and operates several free, ad-supported streaming television (FAST) channels. The acquisition gives Wonder access to a...
GTC, Nvidia’s biggest conference of the year, will return starting Monday in San Jose. If you can’t make it in person, don’t sweat it. TechCrunch will be on the ground covering the major developments. Many of the biggest presentations, talks, and panels will be livestreamed,...
GTC, Nvidia’s biggest conference of the year, begins Monday and runs till Friday in San Jose. TechCrunch will be on the ground covering the news as it happens — and we’re expecting a healthy dose of announcements. CEO Jensen Huang will give a keynote address...
Google DeepMind, Google’s AI research lab, on Wednesday announced new AI models called Gemini Robotics designed to enable real-world machines to interact with objects, navigate environments, and more. DeepMind published a series of demo videos showing robots equipped with Gemini Robotics folding paper, putting a...
Manus, the viral AI “agent” platform from Chinese startup Butterfly Effect, has had an unintended side effect: raising the profile of another AI tool called Browser Use. Browser Use, which aims to make websites more accessible for agentic applications that perform tasks on a user’s...
Since Donald Trump Jr. joined VC firm 1789 Capital after his father won the election, he’s been busy monetizing the Make America Great Again (MAGA) ecosystem. He’s been making bets in media, pharmaceutical, guns, and crypto while pushing against environmental, social, and governance (ESG) and...
Back in 2019, Microsoft open-sourced Dapr, a new runtime for making building distributed microservice-based applications easier. At the time, nobody was talking about AI agents yet, but as it turns out, Dapr had some of the fundamental building blocks for supporting AI agents built-in from...