Category: Ai News

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. To get this in your inbox, sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! Senior reporter Sean O’Kane popped over to Palo Alto to check out Rivian’s Autonomy & AI Day, which some insiders told…

The robot swerved through the cafeteria of Rivian’s Palo Alto office, shelves adorned with chilled canned coffees — until it didn’t. Five minutes later, a man carefully pushed it out of everyone’s way, the words “I’m stuck” flashing yellow on the poor droid’s screen. It was an inauspicious start to Rivian’s “Autonomy & AI Day,”…

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm since its launch in November 2022. What started as a tool to supercharge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved into a behemoth with 300 million weekly active users. In 2025, OpenAI has battled the perception that it was…

The tech layoff wave is still kicking in 2025. Last year saw more than 150,000 job cuts across 549 companies, according to independent layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi. So far this year, more than 22,000 workers have been the victim of reductions across the tech industry, with a staggering 16,084 cuts taking place in February alone. We’re…

Google is rolling out a beta experience that lets you hear real-time translations in your headphones, the company announced on Friday. The tech giant is also bringing advanced Gemini capabilities to Google Translate and expanding its language learning tools in the Translate app. The new real-time headphone translations experience keeps each speaker’s tone, emphasis, and…

Generative AI’s experimental phase is concluding, making way for truly autonomous systems in 2026 that act rather than merely summarise. 2026 will lose the focus on model parameters and be about agency, energy efficiency, and the ability to navigate complex industrial environments. The next twelve months represent a departure from chatbots toward autonomous systems executing…

F. Scott Fitzgerald once observed that “in a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning.” Microsoft’s latest Copilot usage analysis suggests this nocturnal tendency toward existential contemplation persists in the AI age—with religion and philosophy conversations rising through the rankings during early morning hours. The Microsoft AI (MAI) research team…

World, the biometric ID verification project co-founded by Sam Altman, released the newest version of its app today, debuting several new features, including an encrypted chat integration and an expanded, Venmo-like capability for sending and requesting crypto.  World was created by the startup Tools for Humanity in 2019, and originally launched its app in 2023….

Theo Baker is truly an outlier. While journalism as a major has seen shrinking enrollment for years and is even being dropped by some schools entirely, Baker, a senior at Stanford University, has doubled down on old-school investigative reporting, and it is paying off spectacularly. Baker first made headlines as a college freshman when his…

Google released on Thursday a “reimagined” version of its research agent Gemini Deep Research based on its much-ballyhooed state-of-the-art foundation model, Gemini 3 Pro.   This new agent isn’t just designed to produce research reports – although it can still do that. It now allows developers to embed Google’s SATA-model research capabilities into their own apps….

1X found some big potential buyers for its humanoid robots designed for consumers — the portfolio companies of one of its investors. The robotics company announced a strategic partnership to make thousands of its humanoid robots available for EQT’s portfolio companies on Thursday. EQT is a large Swedish multi-asset investor, and its venture fund EQT…

The way venture capitalists think about fund-raising can be a black box. But investors must think about their go-to-market strategy for raising their own funds, just as much as they think about how their portfolio companies find their market fit.   All season on Build Mode, we’ve explored how founders should approach marketing, but this week we’re exploring how VCs sell themselves to founders as trustworthy partners, and…

Epic Games’ popular battle royale, Fortnite, has returned to the U.S. Google Play Store following a court order. The game maker had recently settled its five-year legal battle with the tech giant, which stemmed from a dispute around the percentage of in-app purchase sales that app developers had to share with the platforms. However, the…

Disney sent a cease-and-desist letter to Google on Wednesday, alleging that the tech giant has infringed on its copyrights, Variety reports. Disney is accusing the tech giant of copyright infringement on a “massive scale,” claiming it has used AI models and services to commercially distribute unauthorized images and videos, according to the letter seen by…

Google is updating its AI try-on feature to let you virtually try on clothes using just a selfie, the company announced on Thursday. In the past, users had to upload a full-body picture of themselves to virtually try on a piece of clothing. Now, they can use a selfie and Nano Banana, Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash…

OpenAI launched its latest frontier model, GPT-5.2, on Thursday amid increasing competition from Google, pitching it as its most advanced model yet and one designed for developers and everyday professional use.  OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 is coming to ChatGPT paid users and developers via the API in three flavors: Instant, a speed-optimized model for routine queries like…

Google on Thursday introduced a new AI experiment for the web browser: the Gemini-powered product, “Disco,” which helps to turn your open tabs into custom applications. With Disco, you can create what Google is calling “GenTabs,” a tool that proactively suggests interactive web apps that can help you complete tasks related to what you’re browsing,…

Rivian’s two-year effort to build its own AI assistant will launch in early 2026. And when it does, the AI assistant will roll out to every existing EV in its lineup, not just the next-generation versions of its R1T truck and R1S SUV.  Drivers and passengers will be able to use the AI assistant to operate climate…

Rivian detailed Thursday how it plans to make its electric vehicles increasingly autonomous — an ambitious effort that includes new hardware, including lidar and custom silicon, and eventually, a potential entry into the self-driving ride-hail market, according to CEO RJ Scaringe. The announcements at the company’s first “Autonomy & AI Day” event in Palo Alto,…

The race to release world models is on as AI image and video generation company Runway joins an increasing number of startups and big tech companies by launching its first one. Dubbed GWM-1, the model works through frame-by-frame prediction, creating a simulation with an understanding of physics and how the world actually behaves over time,…

Four years ago, Ford and South Korean battery maker SK On struck a deal to form a joint venture and spend $11.4 billion to build factories in Tennessee and Kentucky that would produce batteries for the next generation of electric F-Series trucks. The factories live on; the joint venture will not. SK On, a subsidiary…

The Walt Disney Company announced on Thursday that it has signed a three-year partnership with OpenAI that will bring its iconic characters to the company’s Sora AI video generator. Disney is also making a $1 billion equity investment in OpenAI. Launched in September, Sora allows users to create short videos using simple prompts. With this…

On Me, a digital gift card startup founded by former Google employees, is aiming to redefine the gift card industry with its mobile-first gifting platform that lets users purchase digital gift cards categorized by interests rather than being restricted to specific retailers. The company on Thursday said it had raised $6 million in a seed…

Each December, TIME Magazine names a person of the year — someone who has most influenced the news and world, for good or ill. Last year, TIME chose President Donald Trump for the second time. The year before that, it was Taylor Swift, who many claimed saved the economy from a recession with her Eras…

Microsoft believes it has a fix for AI prompts being given, the response missing the mark, and the cycle repeating. This inefficiency is a drain on resources. The “trial-and-error loop can feel unpredictable and discouraging,” turning what should be a productivity booster into a time sink. Knowledge workers often spend more time managing the interaction…

Messaging app Freedom Chat has fixed a pair of security flaws: one that allowed a security researcher to guess registered users’ phone numbers, and another that exposed user-set PINs to others on the app. Freedom Chat, released in June, bills itself as a secure messaging app, and claims on its website that users’ phone numbers…

Spoor launched in 2021 with the goal of using computer vision to help reduce the impact of wind turbines on local bird populations. Now, the startup has proven its technology works and is seeing demand from wind farms and beyond. Oslo, Norway-based Spoor has built software that uses computer vision to track and identify bird…

Up to 3 million abandoned oil and gas wells litter the U.S. alone, and while many still contain oil or natural gas, the owners decided it wasn’t worth it to keep pumping. “They’ve tried everything,” Prab Sekhon, CEO of Eclipse Energy, told TechCrunch. “There’s still a ton of oil left behind.” Eclipse doesn’t have a…

Following a couple of months’ testing, Norway-based browser company Opera has finally made its AI-powered browser, Neon, available to the public — though you’ll have to shell out $19.90 per month to use it. Opera first unveiled Neon earlier this year in May and launched it in early access to select users in October. Similar…

Spotify may be synonymous with music streaming, but it’s also got a wildly popular developer-tool side-hustle called “Backstage.”   Backstage is an open source project that helps companies build their own internal developer portals: a catalog of their developer tools along with quick visualizations of the work the tools have done, and other metrics. But like…