Figure AI founder and CEO Brett Adcock announced Tuesday that the humanoid robotics firm is exiting a deal with OpenAI. The Bay Area-based robotics company has instead opted to focus on in-house AI, owing to a “major breakthrough.” Adcock was tightlipped in terms of specifics, but he promised to deliver “something no one has ever […]
Figure drops OpenAI in favor of in-house models Read More »
Hiya, folks, welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. If you want this in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. You might’ve noticed we skipped the newsletter last week. The reason? A chaotic AI news cycle made even more pandemonious by Chinese AI company DeepSeek’s sudden rise to prominence, and the response from practically ever corner
This Week in AI: Billionaires talk automating jobs away Read More »
Thomas Shedd, the former Tesla engineer now serving as the director of Technology Transformation Services, reportedly outlined an “AI-first strategy” for the U.S. government department. According to a report from Wired citing multiple sources, the Musk ally described the plan to run the office like a “startup software company” during a Monday meeting. The New
Former Tesla engineer heading government agency reportedly outlines ‘AI-first strategy’ Read More »
Researchers from TikTok owner ByteDance have demoed a new AI system, OmniHuman-1, that can generate perhaps the most realistic deepfake videos to date. Deepfaking AI is a commodity. There’s no shortage of apps that can insert someone into a photo, or make a person appear to say something they didn’t actually say. But most deepfakes
Deepfake videos are getting shockingly good Read More »
OpenAI gave me one week to test its new AI agent, Operator, a system that can independently do tasks for you on the internet. Operator is the closest thing I’ve seen to the tech industry’s vision of AI agents — systems that can automate the boring parts of life, freeing us up to do the
OpenAI’s Operator agent helped me move, but I had to help it, too Read More »
Snap has unveiled an AI text-to-image model for mobile devices that will power some of Snapchat’s features in the coming months. The company said on Tuesday that the model can produce high-resolution images in around 1.4 seconds on an iPhone 16 Pro Max. The new diffusion model runs entirely on the device, which reduces computational
Snap unveils AI text-to-image model for mobile devices Read More »
While the U.S. and Canada duke it out over tariffs between the two countries, a tech company based out of Toronto is announcing a major round of funding led by a homegrown VC. StackAdapt, a programmatic advertising startup, says that it has raised $235 million in equity funding, with Teachers’ Venture Growth (TVG) — the
Canada’s StackAdapt snaps up $235M for its AI-based programmatic platform Read More »
Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal is investing $230 million into an AI startup he founded as the country pushes to establish itself in a field dominated by U.S. and Chinese firms. Aggarwal is financing the investment in Krutrim largely through his family office, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. In a post on X
SoftBank-backed billionaire to invest $230M in Indian AI startup Krutrim Read More »
AI is changing how we shop online, making our experiences more personalized. Smart assistants recommend products, negotiate deals, and even handle customer service. Big retailers and smaller businesses are using AI to improve search, supply chains, and checkout. If AI companies (and their investors) have their way, shopping will soon be focused on chatting with
AI agents for e-commerce startup, founded by Google and DeepMind alums, raises $10M seed Read More »
Tabular data is a broad term that encompasses structured data that generally fits into a specific row and column. It can be a SQL database, a spreadsheet, a .CSV file, etc. While there has been tremendous progress on artificial intelligence applied to unstructured and sequential data, these large language models are fuzzy by design. They
Neuralk-AI is developing AI models specifically designed for structured data Read More »
