Amazon started the Alexa Fund in 2015 to back early-stage voice startups. With the advent of large language models and Amazon launching Gen AI-powered Alexa+ along with a family of multimodal AI models, the fund now wants to broaden its scope and invest more in...
Audio startup Krisp on Wednesday said it is launching a new feature that uses AI to change a user’s accent during calls. The company is initially rolling out support for changing Indian English accents to U.S. English. The startup says the accent conversion process preserves...
Amazon continues to infuse AI into its shopping tools to encourage customers to make more purchases. The company announced on Wednesday a new feature called “Interests,” aimed at creating a more personalized and conversational search experience. With the new feature, customers can enter tailored prompts...
The clock is ticking — less than a week left until TechCrunch All Stage ticket prices go up! Save over $300 on founder and investor passes before March 31 at 11:59 p.m. PT. Founders, accelerate your path. Investors, empower their rise. On July 15, join...
It’s virtually impossible today to determine when a student’s writing has been composed using ChatGPT or another GenAI tool, and it can be a nightmare to disprove incorrect accusations. An AI edtech startup called Brisk has built a tool that could at least help teachers...
I spent 10 days competing in Crypto: The Game, a winner-takes-all contest where hundreds of players try to finesse and backstab their way to claiming a $140,000 cryptocurrency prize....
One of the simplest, most over-studied organisms in the world is the C. elegans nematode. For 13 years, a project called OpenWorm has tried—and utterly failed—to simulate it....
Once the grid goes down, an old programming language called Forth—and a new operating system called Collapse OS—may be our only salvation....
One of the simplest, most over-studied organisms in the world is the C. elegans nematode. For 13 years, a project called OpenWorm has tried—and utterly failed—to simulate it....
Microsoft is introducing a “deep research” AI-powered tool in Microsoft 365 Copilot, its AI chatbot app. There’s been a raft of deep research agents launched recently across chatbots, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and xAI’s Grok. Powering them are so-called reasoning AI models, which posses...
Using several recent innovations, the company Databricks will let customers boost the IQ of their AI models even if they don’t have squeaky clean data....
The startup uses AI to quickly search for minerals over wide areas, identifying promising potential deposits for exploration....
During a livestream on Tuesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced the first major upgrade to ChatGPT’s image-generation capabilities in over a year. ChatGPT can now leverage the company’s GPT-4o model to natively create and modify images and photos. GPT-4o has long underpinned the AI-powered chatbot...
On Tuesday, Google unveiled Gemini 2.5, a new family of AI reasoning models that pauses to “think” before answering a question. To kick off the new family of models, Google is launching Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental, a multimodal, reasoning AI model that the company claims...
Poe, Quora’s chatbot app, launched one of its most affordable subscription options on Monday, priced at just $5 per month. In addition, the company introduced its highest-priced plan at $250 per month, designed for users who need to send a large volume of messages on...
AI chipmaking company Cerebras Systems’ IPO is delayed again as the public listing’s national security review drags on. Cerebras, which originally filed its intent to IPO in September 2024, thought the incoming Trump administration would help it breeze through its national security review, according to...
The first in-person gathering devoted to those building with the AT Protocol — which powers Bluesky — was held in Seattle....
As the Trump administration continues its efforts to slash the US federal workforce, the team responsible for publishing data used in advanced research in astrophysics, nuclear fusion, and other fields appears to be on the chopping block....
Medina's new startup, called Paid, helps agentic startups profitably charge for their bots....
The premiere founder conference brought to you by TechCrunch is heading back to Boston on July 15. TC All Stage 2025 (formerly known as Early Stage) is our tentpole East Coast event that promises an agenda full of founder knowledge — for all stages —...
When Sam Weaver was vice president of product management at Unqork, he realized that the company needed a better way to manage its sprawling network of Kubernetes clusters — which are groups of computing nodes. When Unqork couldn’t find anything off the shelf, it assembled...
“Demand is off the charts!” Elon Musk crowed at the end of 2023, citing more than a million reservations for Tesla's polarizing polygonic pickup—so why has it still sold less than 50,000?...
“RISC architecture is gonna change everything.” Those absurdly geeky, incredibly prophetic words were spoken 30 years ago. Today, they’re somehow truer than ever....
OpenAI released updates Monday for Advanced Voice Mode, its AI voice feature that enables real-time conversations in ChatGPT, to make the AI assistant more personable and interrupt users less frequently. Manuka Stratta, an OpenAI post-training researcher, announced the changes in a video posted Monday to...
The Arc Prize Foundation, a nonprofit co-founded by prominent AI researcher François Chollet, announced in a blog post on Monday that it has created a new, challenging test to measure the general intelligence of leading AI models. So far, the new test, called ARC-AGI-2, has...
Earlier this year, DeepSeek briefly crashed Nvidia’s stock because of speculation that its models require far fewer chips. Now, Chinese fintech giant Ant Group, which is backed by Alibaba founder Jack Ma, is claiming a major AI breakthrough. Ant was able to use Chinese chips...
Last year, AI-powered sales automation startup 11x appeared to be on an explosive growth trajectory. However, nearly two dozen sources — including investors and current and former employees — told TechCrunch that the company has experienced financial struggles, largely of its own making. Numerous people...
Vertical farming company Plenty has filed for bankruptcy, the company said in a press release on Monday. In its statement, Plenty said it has received a commitment for $20.7 million in debtor-in-possession financing as part of a proposed restructuring plan. It plans to continue to...
DNA-testing company 23andMe has filed for bankruptcy, which means the future of the company’s vast trove of customer data is unknown. Here's what that means for your genetic data....
Developer tooling is changing rapidly with AI. So companies that are making it easier to adopt AI in their workflows are seeing a boom of attention. After a startup called n8n (pronounced “enay-ten”) pivoted its workflow automation platform to become more AI-friendly in 2022, it...