Category: Apps

Andrew Ng, the founder and former leader of Google Brain, supports Google’s recent decision to drop its pledge not to build AI systems for weapons. “I’m very glad that Google has changed its stance,” Ng said during an onstage interview Thursday evening with TechCrunch at the Military Veteran Startup Conference in San Francisco. Earlier this…

Elon Musk has reportedly picked fresh-faced six engineers to run DOGE. I spoke to one of them in 2023, when his life looked very, very different. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. ​ Elon Musk has reportedly picked fresh-faced six engineers to run DOGE. I spoke to one of them in 2023, when…

An AI system developed by Google DeepMind, Google’s leading AI research lab, appears to have surpassed the average gold medalist in solving geometry problems in an international mathematics competition. The system, called AlphaGeometry2, is an improved version of a system, AlphaGeometry, that DeepMind released last January. In a newly published study, the DeepMind researchers behind…

A coalition of organizations and individuals have signed an open letter expressing concern at the U.K. government’s decision to appoint a former Amazon executive as chair of the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). The group, which includes U.S. tech outfits such as Yelp, DuckDuckGo, and Mozilla, says that the CMA must be “free from political…

Elon Musk doesn’t want Tesla to be just an automaker. He wants Tesla to be an AI company, one that’s figured out how to make cars drive themselves.  Crucial to that mission is Dojo, Tesla’s custom-built supercomputer designed to train its Full Self-Driving (FSD) neural networks. FSD isn’t actually fully self-driving; it can perform some…

A number of startups are racing to make vehicle inspections faster, easier, and cheaper. Self Inspection, a startup based in San Diego, thinks it has them all beat with its AI-powered service — and now it has convinced outside investors. Self Inspection, founded in 2021, is set to announce Thursday it’s raised $3 million in…

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. This first week of February was busy on the geopolitical front, as well as in the world of startups and VC news, with many announcements and significant…

A former iOS engineer, who was sued by Apple for leaking confidential information to journalists, has issued an apology after the lawsuit against him was dismissed. The lawsuit, which was filed last year, alleged that Andrew Aude sent thousands of messages to journalists at The Wall Street Journal and The Information about more than a…

Social network Bluesky will soon give its users more control over who can reply to their posts. Confirmed by Bluesky developer Paul Frazee, Bluesky will add a new “followers only” setting that users can configure to limit replies. In addition, he says, Bluesky will create a way for users to set their default reply settings.…

Under European Union law, X is one of a handful of major social media platforms that has a duty to facilitate public interest researchers’ access to support the study of systemic risks — such as to elections and other democratic processes. But the Elon Musk-owned company formerly known as Twitter has been blocking civil society…