One of Microsoft’s latest AI models can accurately predict air quality, hurricanes, typhoons, and other weather-related phenomena, the company claims. In a paper published in the journal Nature and an accompanying blog post this week, Microsoft detailed Aurora, which the tech giant says can forecast atmospheric events with greater precision and speed than traditional meteorological…
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. Despite Google I/O capturing as much attention as anticipated, some startups still took their chances and shared announcements this week, while others simply had to go with…
OpenAI is updating the AI model powering Operator, its AI agent that can autonomously browse the web and use certain software within a cloud-hosted virtual machine to fulfill users’ requests. Soon, Operator will use a model based on o3, one of the latest in OpenAI’s o series of “reasoning” models. Previously, Operator relied on a custom…
Privacy and digital rights advocates are raising alarms over a law that many would expect them to cheer: a federal crackdown on revenge porn and AI-generated deepfakes. The newly signed Take It Down Act makes it illegal to publish nonconsensual explicit images — real or AI-generated — and gives platforms just 48 hours to comply…
Welcome back to Week in Review! Tons of news from this week for you, including a hacking group that’s linked to the Spanish government; CEOs using AI avatars to deliver company earnings; Pocket shutting down — or is it?; and much more. Let’s get to it! More than 10 years in the making: Kaspersky first…
Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! For those U.S.-based readers out there, enjoy the long Memorial Day weekend, and if you’re on the road, expect it to be crowded. AAA projects 45.1 million…
Last week, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok experienced a “bug” that made it tell users about the “white genocide” conspiracy theory in South Africa, even when prompted with questions that had nothing to do with the topic … and soon after, Grok expressed skepticism over the Holocaust death toll, which it chalked up to a “programming…
Kesha may have taken the dollar sign out of her name, but now, the singer is thinking about money again — not for herself, but to fund the seed round of her new startup, Smash. According to Kesha’s Instagram post, Smash will be a “community-based platform to connect and protect music creators,” which aligns with…
Apple CEO Tim Cook reportedly called Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to make changes to or veto a newly passed law in the state that would require the company to verify the ages of device owners, according to The Wall Street Journal. Abbott has yet to sign the bill. But Apple, alongside Google, has been working…
Mistral AI, the French company behind AI assistant Le Chat and several foundational models, is officially regarded as one of France’s most promising tech startups and is arguably the only European company that could compete with OpenAI. But compared to its $6 billion valuation, its global market share is still relatively low. However, the recent…
