In Brief Posted: 2:08 PM PDT · August 17, 2025 Image Credits:OpenAI OpenAI announced late Friday that it’s updating its latest model to be “warmer and friendlier.” The company recently launched the much-anticipated GPT-5 in a process that CEO Sam Altman admitted was “a little more bumpy than we’d hoped for,” with some users complaining
GPT-5 is supposed to be nicer now Read More »
In Brief Posted: 9:34 AM PDT · August 17, 2025 Image Credits:Getty Images While Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn was loudly criticized this year after declaring that Duolingo would become an “AI-first company,” he suggested in a new interview the real issue was that he “did not give enough context.” “Internally, this was not controversial,”
Duolingo CEO says controversial AI memo was misunderstood Read More »
In Brief Posted: 12:39 PM PDT · August 16, 2025 Image Credits:Curio Do A.I. chatbots packaged inside cute-looking plushies offer a viable alternative to screen time for kids? That’s how the companies selling these A.I.-powered kiddie companions are marketing them, but The New York Times’ Amanda Hess has some reservations. She recounts a demonstration in
AI-powered stuffed animals are coming for your kids Read More »
Demand for AI “companion” applications outside of bigger names, like ChatGPT and Grok, is growing. Of the 337 active and revenue-generating AI companion apps available worldwide, 128 were released in 2025 so far, according to new data provided to TechCrunch by app intelligence firm Appfigures. This subsection of the AI market on mobile has now
AI companion apps on track to pull in $120M in 2025 Read More »
In early 2023, David Petrou, a distinguished engineer and founding member of both Google Goggles and Google Glass, made a surprising move. After more than 17 years at the company, he departed to launch his own startup. “I was seeing how fast technology was changing, and I felt there are certain ideas that are best
Google vet raises $8M for Continua to bring AI agents to group chats Read More »
In a moonshot move, AI search engine Perplexity has offered to buy Chrome from Google for $34.5 billion cash in an unsolicited offer, Reuters reported, and Perplexity has confirmed to TechCrunch. Perplexity tells TC the terms of the offer include a commitment to keep Chrome’s underlying engine, Chromium, open source and continue to invest in
Perplexity offers to buy Chrome for billions more than it’s raised Read More »
Anthropic is increasing the amount of information that enterprise customers can send to Claude in a single prompt, part of an effort to attract more developers to the company’s popular AI coding models. For Anthropic’s API customers, the company’s Claude Sonnet 4 AI model now has a 1 million token context window — meaning the
Anthropic’s Claude AI model can now handle longer prompts Read More »
Just a week after OpenAI announced it would offer ChatGPT Enterprise to the entire federal executive branch workforce at $1 per year per agency, Anthropic has raised the stakes. The AI giant said Tuesday it would also offer its Claude models to government agencies for just $1 — but not only to the executive branch.
Self-driving truck maker Waabi has hired autonomous vehicle industry veteran and Uber Freight CEO Lior Ron to step in as chief operating officer, as the startup looks to scale its commercial operations ahead of its planned launch of driverless trucks on public highways later this year. Rebecca Tinucci, who previously spent six years building Tesla’s
Uber Freight CEO Lior Ron leaves to join self-driving startup Waabi as COO Read More »
When Bill Dally joined Nvidia’s research lab in 2009, it employed only about a dozen people and was focused on ray tracing, a rendering technique used in computer graphics. That once-small research lab now employs more than 400 people, who have helped transform Nvidia from a video game GPU startup in the nineties to a
How a once-tiny research lab helped Nvidia become a $4 trillion-dollar company Read More »
