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Monday night, xAI co-founder Yuhuai (Tony) Wu announced he was leaving the company. “It’s time for my next chapter,” Wu wrote in a late-night post on X. “It is an era with full possibilities: a small team armed with AIs can move mountains and redefine what’s possible.” Less than a day later, on Tuesday afternoon, xAI co-founder Jimmy Ba, who reported directly to Musk, said that he, too, is bouncing, posting a gracious note on X on his way out. “Enormous thanks to @elonmusk for bringing us together on this incredible journey. So proud of what the xAI team has…
Frequently Asked QuestionsAre Large Heaters More Powerful Than Small Ones?AccordionItemContainerButtonNope! It may seem counterintuitive, but large heaters don’t necessarily heat any better than small ones.Whatever their physical size, most space heaters in the US and Canada deliver about the same amount of heat. Space heaters top out at 1,500 watts, which is the highest safe operating load for a 15-amp household circuit. And aside from some low-power personal heaters here and there, most space heaters you’ll find on the market are 1,500-watt heaters.What’s more, electric space heaters are all pretty much 100 percent efficient in converting that electricity to heat.…
The Seahawks and Patriots weren’t the only ones doing battle on Super Bowl Sunday. Advertisers across multiple categories also went to war. TV measurement firm EDO documented the most effective ads of this year’s Big Game, ranking each spot based on consumer engagement data, such as search, that predict future sales. Each ad was scored against a median of 100; so if an ad tallied a score of 260, that means it generated more than 2.5X the consumer engagement of a standard Super Bowl ad. The Seahawks ultimately won out in the NFL. Here are the winners across ad each category.AI Services: AI.comThe…
Ryan Beiermeister, who served as OpenAI’s vice president of product policy, was fired in January after a male colleague accused her of sex discrimination, the Wall Street Journal has reported. “The allegation that I discriminated against anyone is absolutely false,” Beiermeister told the Journal. TechCrunch reached out to OpenAI for comment and also contacted an email that appears to be associated with Beiermeister; neither had responded at the time of publication. Per the Journal’s report, Beiermeister’s termination came after she expressed criticism of a planned ChatGPT feature dubbed “adult mode.” The new mode would introduce erotica into the chatbot user…
And then there are the ethical implications of Conversate. Unlike Meta’s smart glasses, there’s no visible indicator that a conversation is being recorded. Even Realities told me the audio isn’t saved, only the transcribed text, but it still feels like something you should ask permission for before switching it on. I can see the appeal of having AI quietly prompting you during a meeting or even a job interview if you’re brave, but that usefulness arguably depends on it being covert, which puts you on thin ice. At the same time, openly flagging that you’re using AI would rather defeat…
Bad Bunny helped bring good ratings.Despite a relatively uneventful game, where the Seattle Seahawks defeated the New England Patriots by a score of 29-13 at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, Super Bowl 60 scored huge ratings for NBCUniversal.According to broadcaster NBCU, the game averaged 124.9 million viewers on NBC, Peacock, Telemundo, NBC Sports Digital, and NFL+, based on official live + same-day Nielsen big data + panel. It was down around 2.8 million viewers from Super Bowl 59 on Fox, which drew 127.7 million viewers to become the most-watched Super Bowl.Regardless, NBC’s game was the second-most-watched Super Bowl ever.…
The AI industry’s pursuit of licensable content has been a messy affair, filled with lawsuits and accusations of copyright infringement. Now, as tech companies look for legally safe sources of AI training data, Amazon is reportedly considering launching a marketplace where publishers can license their content directly to AI companies. The Information reported Monday that the e-commerce giant has been meeting with publishing executives and alerting them to its plans to launch such a marketplace. Ahead of an AWS conference for publishers that occurred Tuesday, Amazon “circulated slides that mention a content marketplace,” wrote the outlet. Reached by TechCrunch, an…
A 30-second Super Bowl ad featuring boxing legend Mike Tyson and paid for by the nonprofit MAHA Center encourages viewers to avoid processed foods and visit Realfood.gov. The government website, which Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is promoting, provides resources on the administration’s new dietary guidelines, released in January, and encourages people to use Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok to “get real answers about real food.”I decided to see how Grok’s advice aligns with the administration’s recommendations, particularly around protein intake. The new guidelines say to get 1.2 to 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram of…
Amazon Expands Sports Ad Playbook Heading Into Upfront Inside Prime Video’s NBA studio.Prime Video Amazon believes advertisers will add a few more sports to their carts this year.With the NFL coming off record-setting ad sales for Super Bowl 60 and sports continuing to drive massive audiences for publishers, Amazon is expecting an increase in multi-sport buys across Prime Video as it heads into the upfront, touting the NFL, NBA, WNBA, NASCAR, The Masters, and NWSL.The company told ADWEEK that campaigns running across multiple Prime Video sports are seeing 24% higher interaction rates than single-event activations. Additionally, consumers who stream content…
Czech ice dancers Kateřina Mrázková and Daniel Mrázek made their Olympic debut on Monday, an unfathomable feat that takes a lifetime of dedication and practice. But the sibling duo used AI music in their rhythm dance program, which doesn’t break any official rules, but serves as a depressing symbol of how absolutely cooked we are. As Mrázek spun his sister in a crazy cartwheel lift sort of move that made them look superhuman, one of the NBC commentators mentioned in passing, “This is AI generated, this first part,” referring to the music. Somehow, that admission is even more baffling than…
Employees at Salesforce are circulating an internal letter to chief executive Marc Benioff calling on him to denounce recent actions by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, prohibit the use of Salesforce software by immigration agents, and back federal legislation that would significantly reform the agency.The letter specifically cites the “recent killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis” as catalysts, calling them the “devastating indictment of a system that has discarded human decency.” It’s unclear how many signatories the letter has received so far.The letter, which has not been reported on previously, is being organized amid Salesforce’s annual leadership…
EXCLUSIVE: These Super Bowl Ads Won With AI, but Not Social Media Some Super Bowl 60 advertisers outperformed inside AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini even when their social media engagement lagged, according to a new analysis from Emberos’ AI Influence Index. The findings highlight a growing divergence between traditional metrics of buzz and the way large language models recall brands.Emberos compared post-Super Bowl responses from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Grok against social volume rankings. Social activity explained between 30% and 45% of a brand’s visibility inside AI. The rest, the firm said, came from how easily brands could…
Boston Dynamics, the Massachusetts robotics company known for its four-legged robots and humanoids, is going through a leadership change. Robert Playter announced in an internal memo on Tuesday that he would be stepping down as the company’s chief executive, as first reported by A3. Amanda McMaster, the company’s chief financial officer, will stand in for the top job while the company looks for a replacement. TechCrunch reached out to Boston Dynamics for more information. Playter took the helm at Boston Dynamics in 2020, taking over from founder Marc Raibert. Playter worked at Boston Dynamics for 30 years where he held other roles, including vice president of engineering,…
In figure skating, the quadruple axel is generally considered the most difficult jump. Until 2022, when US skater Ilia Malinin—currently riding high as the “Quad God” at the 2026 Winter Olympics—started doing them, they seemed impossible. Landing one, naturally, can give an athlete a higher score. But for skaters who aren’t generational talents like Malinin, grasping exactly how to pull off a quadruple axel can be tricky. But physics can offer some clues.In 2024, the journal Sports Biomechanics published a study by Toin University researcher Seiji Hirosawa that brought science a little closer to understanding how quad axels work. One…
Pinterest’s Kate Hamill on Visual Search, AI, and the New Path to Purchase In this episode of Brave Commerce, Rachel Tipograph and Sarah Hofstetter sit down with Kate Hamill, VP of North America enterprise sales at Pinterest, to unpack how the platform is evolving from an inspiration engine into a more measurable driver of commerce outcomes. Kate shares how Pinterest is compressing the funnel between discovery and conversion, and how brands can think differently about visual-first experiences across the shopping journey.The conversation also dives into why social search is capturing more search budgets, how Pinterest’s AI powers proactive discovery, and…
Google handed over a trove of personal data about a student and journalist to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in response to a subpoena that had not been approved by a judge, according to a report by The Intercept. The search and advertising tech giant provided ICE with the usernames, physical addresses, and an itemized list of services associated with the Google account of Amandla Thomas-Johnson, a British student and journalist who briefly attended a pro-Palestinian protest in 2024 while attending Cornell University in New York. Google also turned over Thomas-Johnson’s IP addresses, phone numbers, subscriber numbers and identities, and…