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Threads is testing a shortcut to make it easier to DM someone, the Meta-owned company announced on Thursday. Users who are part of the test can type “DM me” or “Message me” in a post or reply to automatically generate a hyperlink that invites others to start a private conversation with them. Tapping on the shortcut will take you to a one-on-one direct messaging chat with the person. If you both follow each other, the message will go directly to their primary inbox. If you don’t follow each other, the message is filtered through the “Message Requests” folder to prevent…
It’s the classic awkward icebreaker: If you could invite anyone, dead or alive, to a dinner party, who would it be? Aristotle? Ailias is a company based in Surrey, UK, which promises to make that hypothetical a reality. It can reanimate historical and current legends with 3D hologram avatars that are fully conversational, knowledgeable, and can be delivered to you in a box.The technology isn’t bespoke. Many companies provide life-size hologram displays for events and parties, everything from floating 3D displays of Santa’s sleigh or 3D Holo-Trucks. The physicist Dennis Gabor even won a Nobel Prize in 1971 for his…
Today continues to be America’s No. 1 morning show for the week of February 16. However, the good news ends there for NBC News’ morning show, as it was the only morning show to lose viewers in both total viewers and the Adults 25-54 demo. Coverage of the Milano Cortina 2026 Olympics helped Today maintain its lead in both measured categories, but the big winner of the week was CBS Mornings, which recorded double-digit growth in the advertiser-prized demo.NOTE: GMA and CBS Mornings were coded as specials, and Today was retitled to Today-TS on Monday (02/16/26) due to the Presidents Day…
Meeting notetaker Read AI on Thursday launched an AI-powered email-based assistant called Ada, saying it helps users manage their schedules, answer questions based on a company’s knowledge base, and reply to out-of-office emails. The company is calling Ada a “digital twin” that handles tasks for you around the clock. Read AI said that the assistant will be available to all users, and they can start configuring it by sending an email to “ada@read.ai” and writing “Get me started.” When you ask Ada to find a time to meet with someone, it replies to the other person in the thread with…
A former candidate in the 2026 race for governor of California and a popular YouTuber have been kicked off Kalshi’s platform for alleged violations related to insider trading, the popular prediction market revealed Wednesday.In a blog post detailing the cases, Kalshi’s head of enforcement, Robert DeNault, noted that the company’s surveillance system had flagged suspicious behavior in both instances.In the case of the political candidate, Kalshi cited a video posted online “that appeared to show him trading on his own candidacy.” Kalshi froze the candidate’s accounts and reported the activity to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the government agency that…
The numbers$9.5 billion—Warner Bros. Discovery’s total revenues in Q4. Total revenue for fiscal 2025 was $37.3 billion, a 5% decrese.-9%—Ad revenues decline, as ad-lite streaming subscriber growth was more than offset by domestic linear audience declines. The loss of the NBA negatively impacted the growth rate by 4%.-10%—Content revenues decrease, driven by lower content sales due to the timing of renewals at the studios and global linear networks segments.131.6 million—WBD’s total streaming subscribers across HBO Max and Discovery+, an increase of 3.5 million from Q3. However, WBD said Q4 2025 was also the final quarter it would consistently report subs.The…
Bumble announced on Thursday that it’s adding a series of AI-driven features intended to help turn matches into lasting connections, including those that offer feedback and guidance on users’ bios, photos, and prompts. The dating app’s new AI-suggested profile guidance tool will roll out globally and give “personalized, actionable feedback” on users’ bios and prompts. For users in the U.S., the profile guidance feature can be augmented with an AI photo feedback tool, which can “help you choose the best photos and show up as your most authentic self.” According to Bumble’s blog post explaining these features, it doesn’t seem…
OpenAI has announced plans to turn its London office into its largest research hub outside of the United States.The company—which established a UK office in 2023—says it will expand its London-based research team, scooping up talent emerging from leading British universities. It has not indicated how many researchers it will hire.“The UK brings together world-class talent and leading scientific institutions and universities, making it an ideal place to deliver the important research which will ensure our AI is safe, useful, and benefits everyone,” said Mark Chen, chief research officer at OpenAI, in a statement.The plans bring OpenAI into direct competition…
After just under six months as chief executive (CEO) of WPP, Cindy Rose has unveiled a two-year turnaround plan designed to revive the ailing business. When Rose joined in September 2025, WPP’s share price had just hit a 16-year low. On Thurs (Feb. 26), it posted an 8.1% year-on-year revenue decline, sending shares tumbling a further 10% as trading opened. Before she unveiled the reset to investors at WPP’s annual strategy update in London, Rose told journalists: “What has made us successful in the past will not make us successful in the future. You can see from our numbers this morning that…
A Greek court on Thursday sentenced the founder of Intellexa, a collective of spyware makers, to eight years in prison for illegal wiretapping and privacy violations, according to several reports. Tal Dilian and three other Intellexa executives were tried for their role in a scandal dubbed “Greek Watergate,” which dates back to 2022. The Greek government was accused of wiretapping the phones of politicians, journalists, businesspeople, and military officials with spyware developed by Intellexa. The other people sentenced today include Dilian’s business partner Sara Aleksandra Fayssal Hamou; his former deputy administrator and shareholder of Intellexa, Felix Bitzios; and Yiannis Lavranos,…
Supercomputers can be measured in several ways, but the vital statistic is their ability to perform floating-point operations per second, or flops. Flopping as fast as possible is what makes you successful. At her peak, Sierra could hit 94.64 petaflops—94.64 quadrillion floating-point operations—per second. El Capitan, at 1.809 exaflops, is about 19 times faster. In late 2025, he was officially declared the world’s fastest supercomputer. Sierra’s juice, Neely says, was no longer worth the squeeze.There was no big red button, no giant lever, that turned Sierra off. Someone could’ve just cut the cords, sure, but that’s not the recommended procedure.…
MS NOW announced that Scott Foster will be joining the network’s Washington, D.C. bureau as its new White House Director.Sudeep Reddy, MS NOW’s Washington Bureau chief, made the announcement on Thursday morning, saying Foster will be responsible for all aspects of the network’s White House coverage. He will lead the team of reporters and producers and guide the day-to-day editorial agenda.In addition, Foster, who starts his new assignment on Monday, March 2, will oversee original White House reporting across all platforms and lead the production elements of covering the president in Washington and across the globe. “[Foster’s] decades of newsroom experience…
For all their potential, AI agents have been slow to make an impact in the enterprise, and one new startup is betting that the reason they haven’t is a lack of context. Launched as part of Y Combinator’s 2025 summer cohort, Trace is a workflow orchestration startup aimed at filling that gap. The company maps complex corporate environments and processes so that agents have the context they need to scale quickly. “OpenAI and Anthropic are building these brilliant interns that can be leveraged within the company,” says Trace CEO Tim Cherkasov, referring to the AI labs’ tools. “We’re building the…
The first time Alesandra Madison’s husband incorporated AI into their relationship was in late 2024.She’d forgotten to do her “nightly kneeling ritual,” and he asked ChatGPT how to properly discipline her. The large language model suggested “a two-in-one punishment,” she says—write 100 lines of “I will remember to kneel for my Dom every night” while kneeling the entire time.Though the couple started exploring kink in their marriage 15 years ago—they are in a dominant-submissive relationship—the AI-generated punishment was new territory for them.Since then, Madison, who is 44 and lives in Los Angeles, says she has come to think of AI…
Brandtech Group has appointed three regional chief executives — Lisa De Bonis in the UK, Jeff Matisoff in North America, and Julie Hardy in France — as it bolsters its leadership in key markets with AI-forward talent.De Bonis joins from Huge, where she served as global CEO and chief experience and product officer. Before that she spent years at Accenture Interactive across commercial and operational roles.Matisoff joined Brandtech in 2021 from WPP, where he was global president of Eightbar, IBM’s dedicated agency. He helped lead the acquisition and integration of media agency Jellyfish, which manages more than $2 billion in…
This week on TechCrunch’s founder-focused podcast, Build Mode, Isabelle Johannessen is joined by Sarah Lucena, the CEO and co-founder of Mappa, a behavioral intelligence platform that uses voice AI to decode human behavior in less than 60 seconds. Lucena got the idea for Mappa after trying to build a marketing team but continually feeling like she had made the wrong hires. “And I was so frustrated because I was hiring for what I thought were the right skills. It looked great on paper but didn’t really work in real life,” Lucena said. She had learned firsthand that hiring is typically based on markers of success like college degrees, previous work experience, and…