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“On the matchmaking app, if we ask you a question and your tonality changes in the response, it cues to us that you may not be telling us the full truth. And so we’ll ask you that same question in two or three different ways throughout your experience,” Cohen-Aslatei says. “We built this to mimic what a matchmaker would do for a client. The LLM is tracking pitch and tone change in your voice because we want to make sure that we have an accurate understanding of who you are and what you’re looking for.”After answering dozens more questions about…
Every year, about 60 brands spend millions—in 2026, up to $10 million— to advertise in the Super Bowl. They try to shock, delight, surprise, confuse, and inspire the upwards of 127 million-strong audience in the hopes that they’ll be remembered long after the Big Game ends.Jon Evans thinks those advertisements have room to improve. “The average Super Bowl ad on our five-star scale is actually only three stars,” said Evans, chief customer officer at behavioral science research firm System1. His advice for making a better ad: “Spend the money on making sure that you create emotion and the right memory.”Ahead of Super…
Henry Soong is trying to make vertical microdrama series that don’t suck. That makes the Watch Club founder quite unique within this multibillion-dollar industry of apps that churn out formulaic, cringe-worthy content and use aggressive tactics to maximize in-app spending. “Ninety percent of these stories are, ‘I’m a poor girl! I fell in love with a secret billionaire! He’s a werewolf, and his mother is a vampire, and she disapproves of me!’” Soong told TechCrunch. “There’s a market for that, and we shouldn’t laugh at that, but I think this can be so much bigger than just sloppy, AI-adjacent romance…
I’ll confess I would have a nerdy admiration for ExpeDry down even if it didn’t work, just for its use of basic chemistry, which even I dimly remember from high school but for some reason never made it into a product until recently. What’s even better is that it does work.I don’t have a lab, and I’m not particularly interested in what happens in one anyway, but I am a backpacker, living in a cold climate, with a deep dislike for being cold. In the real world, where I live, if your jacket loses loft and you get cold, bad…
After logging off from his job as integrated media supervisor at North Carolina agency Luquire, Dominique Robinson shifts into planning mode for his golf apparel brand Urban Eagle. Instead of media strategies and client KPIs, he’s thinking about shirt designs or planning the brand’s next community activation. Robinson, along with two fellow golf-loving friends, co-founded Urban Eagle in January 2025 as their way of making the sport more inclusive—and maybe find more partners to add to their tee time. Robinson often golfs at public courses, where many of the strangers he’s been paired with have become his friends. “I can’t tell…
New York City and others like it are filled with old buildings that are for the most part fine, except they’re not all that comfortable to live in. Built in an era when massive boilers were cutting-edge technology, the buildings are usually too hot or too cold, but seldom just right. There are companies trying to rectify that using clever horseshoe-shaped heat pumps. Superficially, they’re similar to window air conditioners, except they don’t block the view and they can heat as well as cool. Gradient makes one of those heat pumps, but now it’s adding a twist: In multifamily buildings,…
For Publicis CEO Arthur Sadoun, Working With Cancer isn’t a side project. The initiative, launched at the World Economic Forum in Davos three years ago to eradicate the stigma of cancer in the workplace, is inseparable from his role as CEO. “I want to erase the stigma of cancer in the workplace,” he said.On Wednesday (Feb. 4), World Cancer Day, Publicis Groupe announced it has expanded the initiative with new peer-reviewed research and an AI-powered coach designed to help employees, managers, and companies navigate cancer at work: safely, privately, and without replacing human judgment.The research, led by Memorial Sloan Kettering…
Semiconductor startup Positron has secured $230 million in Series B funding, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. The outfit plans to use the capital to speed up deployment of its high-speed memory chips, a critical component for the chips used for AI workloads, sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. Investors in the round include Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), the country’s sovereign wealth fund, which has been increasingly focused on building out AI infrastructure, the sources said. The Reno-based startup’s Series B comes as hyperscalers and AI firms push to reduce their reliance on longstanding leader Nvidia. These firms include OpenAI, which,…
Apple is bringing agentic coding to Xcode. On Tuesday, the company announced the release of Xcode 26.3, which will allow developers to use agentic tools, including Anthropic’s Claude Agent and OpenAI’s Codex, directly in Apple’s official app development suite. The Xcode 26.3 Release Candidate is available to all Apple Developers today from the developer website and will hit the App Store a bit later. This latest update comes on the heels of the Xcode 26 release last year, which introduced support for ChatGPT and Claude within Apple’s integrated development environment (IDE) used by those building apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac,…
There’s also the physiological effect of heat itself on our breathing. “Heat may also destabilize breathing control, increase fluid retention, and promote dehydration, all of which can make the upper airway more collapsible and increase the likelihood of sleep apnea,” says Lucia Pinilla, another researcher at Flinders University investigating the subject.At the same time, sleep apnea is already expected to become a growing problem for those living in cities, due to the chronic impact of air pollution on nighttime breathing, something which is only predicted to get worse. Last year, Hong Kong researchers led a study where they found that…
Skyryse, an El Segundo, California-based aviation automation startup, has raised more than $300 million in a Series C investment, pushing its valuation to $1.15 billion and into unicorn territory. The round, which was announced Tuesday and led by Autopilot Ventures, provided a multimillion-dollar accelerant for the startup as it nears the end of a lengthy Federal Aviation Administration certification process for its flight control system. The capital will also be used to integrate its operating system, known as SkyOS, across numerous aircraft, including U.S. military Black Hawk helicopters. Other investors in this round include Fidelity Management & Research Company, ArrowMark…
In the 100-plus years since the first Winter Olympics took place in 1924 in Chamonix, France, many events have come and gone. Curling and short track have held on. Slightly quirkier events like ski ballet have fallen by the wayside. Below are several of the events you will definitely not be seeing at the 2026 Winter Olympics.The Lost Sports Not Being Held at the 2026 Winter OlympicsAccordionItemContainerButtonBandyA mix of field hockey and soccer, bandy—also known as “banty” or Russian hockey—was a demonstration sport at the 1952 Winter Olympics in Oslo. Unlike a hockey stick, the bandy stick is curved; instead…
The Department of Homeland Security has been quietly demanding tech companies turn over user information about critics of the Trump administration, according to reports. In several cases over recent months, Homeland Security has relied on the use of administrative subpoenas to seek identifiable information about individuals who run anonymous Instagram accounts, which share posts about ICE immigration raids in their local neighborhoods. These subpoenas have also been used to demand information about people who have criticized Trump officials or protested government policies. Unlike judicial subpoenas, which are authorized by a judge after seeing enough evidence of a crime to authorize…
With each passing Olympic Games, there’s something new to admire. Typically, it’s a cool costume at the opening ceremony, or a new cauldron for the Olympic flame, or maybe a new fancy stadium the host city will have no use for in 10 years. Then there are the brand-new records set during each Games, jaw-dropping examples of human strength, talent, and mind-melting perseverance.But for the 2026 Winter Olympics, some of the most notable firsts are coming out of the Olympic Village rather than the individual venues. They are the ones pushing their sports forward and making history in the process.…
Sabrina Carpenter is sick and tired of all these man-children. The pop star fronts Pringles’ Super Bowl 60 ad, “Pringleleo,” released today, in which she laments being “so tired of boys.” “I need a man,” she says, holding a tin of Pringles. Suddenly, the chip brand’s mustachioed mascot, Julius Pringle, comes to life on the tin and replies in an ominous whisper, “Build him.” Carpenter proceeds to build her perfect man out of a stack of Pringles, naming him “Pringleleo.” The couple share a series of romantic experiences, from dinner dates to long drives in a convertible to lazy mornings in bed, with…
TechCrunch Startup Battlefield 200 is the flagship early-stage startup competition held at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, spotlighting the world’s most promising young companies. Each year, thousands of applicants from around the globe vie for one of 200 slots in the cohort, which provides unparalleled visibility, access to top-tier investors, and opportunities to grow. Early-stage startups from around the world are joining the Startup Battlefield email list to be the first to know when applications open this month. Don’t miss a beat if you’re ready to join the action. What is Startup Battlefield? Image Credits:Kimberly White / Getty Images Startup Battlefield 200 is a highly selective startup launch program designed to…