Savings and investing startup Acorns has acquired EarlyBird, an investment gifting platform for families, the company told TechCrunch exclusively. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. As part of the acquisition, EarlyBird will shut down, and all customer accounts will officially close on...
Hedra, which offers a video generation and editing suite powered by its Character-3 model, has raised $32M....
As the FDA halts the sale of Ozempic and Zepbound copycats, online clinics have begun offering liraglutide, an older GLP-1 medication injected daily instead of weekly....
Harvey AI is in discussions to raise more than $250 million in a funding round led by Kleiner Perkins and Coatue that would value it at $5 billion, Reuters reported...
In response to X user queries about everything from sports to Medicaid cuts, the xAI chatbot inserted unrelated information about “white genocide” in South Africa....
Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok appeared to experience a bug on Wednesday that caused it to reply to dozens of posts on X with information about genocide in South Africa, even when the user didn’t ask anything about the subject. The strange responses stem from...
OpenAI is releasing its GPT-4.1 and GPT-4.1 mini AI models in ChatGPT, the company announced in a post on X Wednesday. The GPT-4.1 models should help software engineers who are using ChatGPT to write or debug code, OpenAI spokesperson Shaokyi Amdo told TechCrunch. GPT-4.1 excels...
Microsoft is limiting access to tools that boosted its rivals, but larger customers like DuckDuckGo say they won’t be affected....
Microsoft is limiting access to tools that boosted its rivals, but larger customers like DuckDuckGo say they won’t be affected....
Despite courtroom chaos, Rippling is still going full steam ahead. The HR tech startup at the center of an increasingly dramatic legal battle with rival Deel just raised a fresh $450 million in funding at a $16.8 billion valuation, and launched a new “Startup Stack”...
SoundCloud says it’s revising its terms after widespread backlash over a clause related to AI model training. Earlier this year, SoundCloud quietly updated its usage policies, adding wording that many users interpreted as legal cover to allow the company to train AI on audio uploaded to...
OpenAI is moving to publish the results of its internal AI model safety evaluations more regularly in what the outfit is pitching as an effort to increase transparency. On Wednesday, OpenAI launched the Safety evaluations hub, a web page showing how the company’s models score...
AI startup Stability AI has released Stable Audio Open Small, a “stereo” audio-generating AI model that the company claims is the fastest on the market — and efficient enough to run on smartphones. Stable Audio Open Small is the fruit of a collaboration between Stability...
OpenAI is reportedly considering building data centers in the United Arab Emirates to greatly expand its Middle East footprint. A deal could be announced as soon as this week, according to Bloomberg. As Bloomberg notes, OpenAI has a long relationship with the UAE. In 2023,...
A new system that combines Gemini’s coding abilities with an evolutionary approach improves datacenter scheduling, chip design, and fine-tune large language models....
Google’s AI R&D lab, DeepMind says it has developed a new AI system to tackle problems with “machine-gradeable” solutions. In experiments, the system, called AlphaEvolve, could help optimize some of the infrastructure Google uses to train its AI models, DeepMind said. The company says it’s...
Gemini, Google’s AI-powered chatbot, can now connect to GitHub — for users subscribed to the $20-per-month Gemini Advanced plan, that is. As of Wednesday, Gemini Advanced customers can directly add a public or private codebase on GitHub to Gemini to allow the chatbot to generate...
Enterprises want access to new software and AI tools but can’t risk sending their sensitive data out to a third-party software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers. Tensor9 looks to help software companies land more enterprise customers by helping them deploy their software directly into a customer’s tech stack....
Data analytics platform Databricks said on Wednesday that it has agreed to acquire Neon, a startup building an open source alternative to AWS Aurora Postgres, for about $1 billion. Databricks said acquiring Neon’s tech would let it combine the startup’s serverless relational database management system...
TensorWave, a data center provider building facilities primarily with AMD hardware, has raised $100 million as it seeks to further build out its data center infrastructure. The funding round was led by Magnetar and AMD Ventures, and brings the company’s total capital raised to $146.7...
We’re excited to announce a big surprise for the AI community — TechCrunch Sessions: AI is getting a limited-time discount to broaden the number of people who can attend and learn from some of the brightest minds in the industry. For just $292, you can...
Google is testing a redesign of its Search homepage in which “AI Mode,” the experimental AI-powered search feature the company rolled out earlier in May, replaces its longstanding “I’m Feeling Lucky” button under the Search bar. A company spokesperson confirmed to The Verge, which was...
At long last, digital consumer bank Chime has moved forward with its IPO by filing its S-1 paperwork Tuesday. Chime had reportedly filed confidential S-1 paperwork back in December. S-1 filings typically reveal all kinds of information, covering financial, legal, and other risk factors. But...
Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, has missed a self-imposed deadline to publish a finalized AI safety framework, as noted by watchdog group The Midas Project. xAI isn’t exactly known for its strong commitments to AI safety as it’s commonly understood. A recent report found that the...
Popular legal AI tool Harvey will now be using leading foundation models from Anthropic and Google, moving beyond strictly using OpenAI’s, Harvey announced in a blog post on Tuesday. This is noteworthy because Harvey is one of the OpenAI Startup Fund’s most successful early-backed portfolio...
Fabled startup investor and accelerator Y Combinator has some choice words for Google in an amicus brief it just submitted in the U.S.’s monopoly case against the search giant. In the brief, YC charged that Google is a “monopolist” that has “stunted” the U.S. startup...
Amazon says it will work with Humain, the AI company recently launched by Saudi Arabia’s ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, to invest “$5 billion-plus” in a strategic partnership to build an “AI Zone” in Saudi Arabia. The AI Zone will include dedicated Amazon Web Services (AWS)...
CEO Brian Chesky is spending hundreds of millions to relaunch his travel company as an everything app. Fitness! Food! Microdermabrasion? A WIRED exclusive....
WizardLM, a Beijing-based Microsoft AI research group, appears to have joined Tencent, the Chinese company that owns WeChat and blockbuster games like PUBG Mobile. In a post on X on Tuesday, Can Xu, a senior AI researcher who led a number of projects within WizardLM,...
TikTok is launching its first image-to-video AI feature, the company announced on Tuesday. The new feature is called “TikTok AI Alive” and allows users to turn static photos into videos within TikTok Stories. The feature is only accessible via TikTok’s Story Camera and uses AI...