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Meta is using AI to quickly launch apps, and more are on the way. During this week’s second-quarter earnings call, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the social giant has new apps in the works, following a recent spate of other launches that included an app for Marketplace sellers, one for Facebook Groups, a vibe-coded gaming app, a new photos app from Instagram, and an experiment involving AI bedtime stories. Meta has spent years trying and failing to produce new, stand-alone social apps to complement its core platforms. Now, the company says that large language models (LLMs) make it possible to ship software faster, allowing…

Summer heat is about to go from bad to worse, as multiple regions around the world face another round of record-breaking temperatures.The heat will be fueled by unusually hot ocean waters and El Niño as well as changes to the jet stream that lock high temperatures in place—and man-made climate change, of course.Western Europe endured its hottest June on record and record-breaking wildfires in July. Now, it’s facing another round of blistering temperatures. On Tuesday, French president Emanuel Macron said the one-two punch of high heat and intense wildfires are creating a dangerous situation, which he called “the toughest since…

Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) is the best-funded fusion power startup, having raised $4 billion from investors over the last seven years, including the $1 billion the company has raised now. Now, developments at CFS, plus rumblings from industry sources TechCrunch has spoken with in recent months, suggest that the startup might go public in the next two or three years. One of those developments was the appointment of Lorence Kim as CFS’s new chief financial officer this week. Kim’s previous stint as a CFO was at Moderna, a biotech which specializes in mRNA therapies, which he joined in 2014 and…

Spotify is giving users a new way to personalize their playlists with “User Notes,” a feature that lets them add their own notes to individual tracks, the company announced on Thursday. The streaming service says the new feature is designed to let users add personal captions to their favorite songs, such as noting why a track was added to a playlist or when they first discovered it. For example, you could note that you discovered a specific track while walking the streets of Paris on vacation or that it was playing during a first date. The launch reflects Spotify’s efforts…

Add another member to the fast-and-furious AI unicorn club: Simile. Just five months after emerging from stealth and announcing a $100 million Series A led by Index Ventures, it has closed a $200 million Series B at a $2 billion valuation, the startup says. The B round was led by Greenoaks with participation from Index, Hanabi, Bain Capital Ventures, A*, Factory, Definition, and CVS Health Ventures. CVS is also one of Simile’s marquee customers. The startup offers simulated users for areas like marketing and product research. It was founded by Stanford PhD graduate Joon Sung Park, whose dissertation involved a…

After living in over a dozen apartments with the “Landlord’s Special” fixes, like shoddy paint jobs and unsealed, leaky window panes, I know what a difference nice additions like window treatments can make. Please God, don’t make me live in another place with long, vertical white plastic blinds that seem to never-endingly collect dust and have a propensity to fall out, giving my windows the look of a toothless smile. I’m in my thirties now and want my place to reflect a more sophisticated style, even if that’s with something as simple as upgraded window treatments.That’s where SelectBlinds comes in.…

Only one state boasts more EVs than Florida, but the state has fewer chargers per vehicle than the national average. Despite that, state officials have decided to redirect federal funding intended for EV charging to build out an electric air taxi network, according to a report from the Miami Herald.  Florida was awarded nearly $200 million under the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program that is part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. But the state never spent the money, claiming that private companies have done a sufficient job building EV charging networks. The Florida Department of Transportation said it will…

Founded in 2007, Alo Yoga (short for ‘Air, Land, and Ocean’) started as a yoga brand, but somewhere along the way, it became the model off-duty uniform. The brand’s rise was helped along by its celebrity fan club: Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid, Hailey Bieber, and basically every supermodel whose workout fit has made us question our entire wardrobe. What began with buttery-soft leggings and yoga pants has expanded into a lifestyle empire, with travelwear, wellness supplements, and even a collection of luxury Alo bags.I’m also guilty of the Alo effect. I’ve been a longtime fan, and my overstuffed closet has…

Apple says it has now topped 1.5 billion subscribers for its services business, up from 1 billion in January 2025. However, this segment of Apple’s business, which includes the Apple Store, AppleCare, music, video, and cloud services, was the only miss in what was otherwise a record-breaking quarter for the company’s hardware sales. In Apple’s fiscal third quarter, the company reported $30.74 billion in services revenue, falling short of the $31.22 billion Wall Street analysts had expected. Combined with a miss in China, Apple’s stock tumbled over 4% in after-hours trading. When asked to dive into what led to the…

Amazon reported better-than-expected second-quarter earnings on Thursday, and investors loved what they saw. Net sales rose 20%, and cloud revenue stood out as a particular bright spot. This combination of positive results was enough to send Amazon’s stock up nearly 10% in after-hours trading. Crucially, Amazon isn’t slowing down on data center spending, despite the conventional wisdom that investors want companies to rein it in. One line item, in particular, illustrates Amazon’s appetite for investing in infrastructure. Amazon spent $173 billion for the fiscal year ended June 30 on property and equipment — a category that covers GPUs, natural gas…

TCL also offers what it calls Magic Hub, a kind of side drawer where you can stash clips of text or photos for later use. Magic Hub lives in a sidebar on the right side of the screen, and while I’ve used it a little on TCL’s phones before, it’s much more useful here, especially when used with a split-screen view. I frequently need to clip a bit of text from one tab to another, and while I can do this manually, it’s easier and faster using Magic Hub.To further extend the usability, TCL supports what it calls extend mode,…

Situational Awareness, a hedge fund formed by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, has sold the majority of its public stock portfolio to Ken Griffin’s Citadel following steep losses over the past month, The Wall Street Journal reported earlier on Thursday. It’s a big comedown for the rising star who has been described as both “scarily smart,” and “brash.” German-born Aschenbrenner, who is 25, had no prior trading experience before launching the fund in 2024. He gained prominence for his investment thesis after publishing essays arguing that scaling AI would require a major build-up in semiconductors, compute, memory, and energy infrastructure.…

Anthropic disclosed on Thursday that its AI models gained unauthorized access to the systems of three different unnamed organizations during cybersecurity testing. The company says Claude reached the internet “from within or while interacting” with a third-party evaluation environment. The announcement comes more than a week after OpenAI revealed that one of its AI agents hacked into Hugging Face during a separate cybersecurity test.The discovery came after Anthropic decided to conduct “a large-scale retrospective review of our own cybersecurity evaluations” following the OpenAI incident, according to a blog post Anthropic published Thursday. The AI lab says it first identified 141,006…

Anthropic said Thursday that an internal investigation uncovered three incidents in which its AI model Claude breached the systems of three organizations while conducting cybersecurity tests. The investigation, and disclosure, comes more than a week after OpenAI disclosed that one of its unreleased models breached Hugging Face’s systems during internal testing. In all three cases, a Claude model reached the internet from within a testing environment while interacting with a third party and then gained unauthorized access to the live systems of these organizations, Anthropic said in a blog post, describing what it found and what the company plans to…

Unlike many other big tech platforms, LinkedIn has decided it won’t spend aggressively on expanding its AI data centers this fiscal year. Executives at the professional social network tell WIRED that it plans to keep its investment in GPUs steady, and its compute and storage footprint is also remaining flat.The spending calculations apply to LinkedIn’s fiscal year that began last month and ends next June. The company says it was able to avoid spending big on AI hardware because it found ways to use its existing GPUs twice as efficiently over the past six months. LinkedIn’s plan could still unravel…

As the generative AI boom drives steep demand for hardware components, Apple and other hardware makers are facing what outgoing CEO Tim Cook calls “a hundred-year flood [on] memory pricing,” which is severely impacting the cost of producing iPhones, MacBooks, and other devices. Apple described its recent earnings report as its “strongest June quarter ever,” with iPhone and Mac sales performing better than expected, growing 22% and 29%, respectively, year-over-year. Yet the company is bracing for memory shortages, known as RAMageddon, to get even worse. Apple’s biggest challenge is securing the advanced memory nodes used in its Apple silicon chips,…