California police aren’t loving their Tesla cop cars

Elon Musk on Thursday night rolled out the latest tech from Tesla, saying of its sleek Cybercab robotaxis and a prototype of its new electric van that “the future should look like the future.” Back in the present day, however, California police departments are beginning to regret their decis…Read More

Anthropic CEO goes full techno-optimist in 15,000-word paean to AI

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wants you to know he’s not an AI “doomer.” At least, that’s my read of the “mic drop” of a ~15,000 word essay Amodei published to his blog late Friday. (I tried asking Anthropic’s Claude chatbot whether it concurred, but alas, the post exceeded the free…Read More

Researchers question AI’s ‘reasoning’ ability as models stumble on math problems with trivial changes

How do machine learning models do what they do? And are they really “thinking” or “reasoning” the way we understand those things? This is a philosophical question as much as a practical one, but a new paper making the rounds Friday suggests that…Read More

Hit by hurricanes? FCC says you qualify for internet and mobile service subsidies

As hurricanes batter the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the United States, many people’s livelihoods are on hold and they’re struggling to make ends meet. The FCC just decided that anyone affected by a natural disaster can get a break on broadband and mobile service;…Read More

Instagram blames moderation issues on human reviewers, not AI

Instagram head Adam Mosseri on Friday addressed the moderation issues that saw Instagram and Threads users losing access to their accounts, having posts disappear, and more, saying that the company “found mistakes” that it’s attributing to human moderators, not AI systems, as many…Read More

ByteDance lays off hundreds of TikTok employees in shift to AI content moderation

ByteDance’s TikTok is laying off hundreds of employees, mainly in Malaysia, according to Reuters. The cuts come as the social network is increasingly turning to AI for content moderation. Although TikTok did not provide the exact number, it said that less than 500…Read More

UK neobank Monzo hits $5.9B valuation with secondary market sale

Monzo is now valued at $5.9 billion after the U.K.-based challenger bank confirmed a secondary market share sale to provide liquidity for its employees. The transaction, first rumored yesterday, saw existing investors such as Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund (GIC) and StepStone…Read More

Elon Musk unveils the Robovan: the biggest surprise from Tesla’s We, Robot event

Elon Musk unveiled a prototype of Tesla’s Robovan on Thursday night during the company’s We, Robot event in Los Angeles. The Robovan will be an electric, autonomous vehicle roughly the size of a bus, designed for transporting people around high density areas. It w…Read More

Elon Musk unveils the Robovan: the biggest surprise from Tesla’s We, Robot event

Elon Musk unveiled a prototype of Tesla’s Robovan on Thursday night during the company’s We, Robot event in Los Angeles. The Robovan will be an electric, autonomous vehicle roughly the size of a bus, designed for transporting people around high density areas. It w…Read More

Tesla Robotaxi event: How to watch the reveal live

Tesla loves to put on a show, and Thursday’s Robotaxi reveal might just be the flashiest of them all.  The electric vehicle maker is slated to unveil its much-hyped Robotaxi vehicle at Warner Bros. Discovery’s movie studio in Burbank, California. For those attending, doors will open at 5 p.m. PT,…Read More

Amazon team in charge of Just Walk Out loses three execs, gains one

Three Amazon executives in charge of developing new technologies for checking out of physical stores – including Just Walk Out, Dash Carts, and Amazon One – are leaving or have left the division, TechCrunch has learned. In addition, a former high-ranking advertising executive at…Read More

SpaceX alums are working to raise a hefty $550M first deep tech fund

Interlagos, the venture capital firm started by former senior SpaceX leaders, is looking to raise $550 million for its first venture fund, according to regulatory filings and a confidential deck sent to prospective LPs and viewed by TechCrunch.  The existence of the firm was…Read More

LinkedIn says 10M people have signed up as freelancers on its Services Marketplace

More than 100,000 people have been laid off in the technology industry alone this year, and — either by circumstance or choice — at least some of them are not heading back into exclusively full-time work. LinkedIn launched a freelancer marketplace in 2021 to cap…Read More

Opera’s new feature lets you group, pin and close tabs through natural language commands

Opera browser has a new AI-powered feature that lets you take action on tabs through natural language queries. Things you can do include grouping, pinning, bookmarking and closing tabs with these commands. The company said people can trigger the Aria c…Read More

MiLaboratories gets $10M for a platform play to accelerate genomic research

Advances in DNA sequencing and the vast amounts of genomic data being produced by next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology have created a startup opportunity to build software for biologists so they can more easily analyze this big data and take the next leap. It could…Read More