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The end of the biggest World Cup ever is almost here. Following 100 matches, there are just four teams left and two more games to play.The tournament has been hosted by three countries: Mexico, Canada, and the US. All of those host countries are now out of the running. The final teams are France, Spain, England, and Argentina. Those teams will play two more games: one to determine who gets third place, and a final match to decide the winner and the runner-up.Going into this year’s World Cup, FIFA anticipated that it would be the most watched tournament in the…
Chinese company Moonshot AI released a new version of its Kimi model this week, generating another wave of discourse about China and open source AI. Moonshot said that although Kimi K3 “still trails the most powerful proprietary models, Claude Fable 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol,” the new open source model “demonstrated frontier-level performance across our evaluation suite, consistently outperforming other tested models.” Independent analyses from Arena.ai and Vals AI also suggested that Kimi is competitive with flagship frontier models. The announcement, which coincided with a speech from Chinese president Xi Jinping at the World AI Conference in Shanghai, seems to…
Waymo said it’s making “temporary adjustments” to its robotaxi service in San Francisco amidst a power outage that appears to have affected around 7,000 PG&E customers in the city. According to a screenshot posted on social media, Waymo is telling SF customers that service is “temporarily paused” and that “freeway routes are unavailable.” When TechCrunch reached out to the Alphabet-owned company for comment, a spokesperson said in a statement, “We are making temporary adjustments to our service while we monitor local conditions. We know riders depend on us, and we will return to normal operations as soon as possible.” This…
The Department of Justice says that federal employees can now download TikTok on their government devices, according to Reuters. A 2022 law banned federal employees from using the short-form video app on those devices, but the DOJ reportedly says the law no longer applies, thanks to a deal transferring ownership of TikTok’s U.S. operations to a joint venture backed by Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX. (Oracle serves as the security partner for the new joint venture, while previous owner ByteDance retains a 19.9% stake.) The DOJ memo reportedly says President Donald Trump has cleared “employees of Executive Branch agencies” to…
The Honda Prologue, you may have heard, is officially dead — a decision the company confirmed to TechCrunch, removing the last all-electric vehicle from the automaker’s U.S. portfolio. The Prologue’s departure signals more than Honda’s EV backpedaling. It also illustrates a broader EV industry retreat from the U.S. market (in stark contrast to the rest of the world). The demise of the Honda Prologue got us thinking: What other EVs have left the U.S., and why? The end of the $7,500 federal tax credit had an outsized effect on EV sales in the United States. But there are other reasons…
Prompt injections, the malicious commands attackers embed into content to entice large language models to follow them, have been attackers’ go-to tool for turning AI platforms against their users. A well-phrased command sneaked into an email or calendar invitation is often all it takes to cause the LLM to exfiltrate sensitive data or follow other harmful actions.Now, defenders are embracing the prompt injection, too.Researchers from Tracebit on Monday said they found that placing prompt injections alongside passwords, cryptographic keys, and other secrets stored on Amazon Web Services was often all that was needed to shut down attacks from AI hacking…
In the minds of prospective EV buyers, charging looms large. Just over half of those surveyed by AAA last year said that public charging infrastructure was a key concern. Those concerns aren’t unfounded. EV fast charging has historically been lackluster. In 2023, after a disastrous road trip, I drafted an EV fast-charging “bill of rights,” outlining seven improvements charging networks needed to make to turn things around. What a difference a few years can make. During a recent road trip, I was surprised by how much the situation has improved. With one small exception, my charging experience was flawless, something…
A Dyson fan costs around $400, which is to be expected from a brand known for status-symbol appliances. But what if I told you there was a fan that costs even more?Though the brand may not be a household name in the US, Tokyo-based Balmuda is well known in Japan for its high-end, minimalist appliances like The Brew and The Toaster (there’s also The Clock, The Speaker, and … The Teppanyaki). Its latest release, a pedestal-style fan, is not called “The Fan” but rather the NatureWind Studio. It retails for $429 and is available in black and white.The NatureWind Studio…
Google doesn’t specify what the usage limits are on the free tier—it describes them only as “standard.” You then get 2x these “standard” limits on the AI Plus plan, and 4x on the AI Pro plan. The AI Ultra limits are either 5x or 20x higher than those on AI Pro, depending on which level of payment you’re on.All users have access to all the Gemini AI models, including Flash-Lite, Flash, and Pro. As you progress through those models, they get smarter and will count more toward usage. Each model also has different “thinking” levels—Standard, Extended, and Deep Think—which also…
Kini is very reliable. I tested it in a drawer and a cabinet, and it always alerted me when they were opened. It also keeps a log with times listed. While alerts go via the cloud, maker Kinisium says it doesn’t collect data, and you can turn off logging entirely if you prefer. Kini also has a Stasis mode, so you can reverse it and have it alert you when there has been no movement for a set period. This makes it a versatile monitoring device, and you could use this mode to ensure an elderly relative opens their medicine…
Hours of San Francisco Police Department drone video footage exposed on the open web illustrates a new era of incredibly granular—and consequential—urban surveillance. Meanwhile, the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office sent cease-and-desist letters to Apple and Google this week demanding that the tech giants delete 13 AI nudifying “face-swap” apps from their app stores that are almost exclusively used to target women and girls.Since WIRED first reported in June about Meta’s NameTag face-recognition system, company executives have made opaque and conflicting comments about whether the feature even exists. We took a step back to lay out both the claims and…
The biggest game in soccer is set for Sunday, when Argentina and Spain will meet in the World Cup final, held just outside of New York City. There’s just one problem. Wildfire smoke now threatens the match—and FIFA, the sport’s governing body, doesn’t appear to have any plan in place to protect the health of players or fans.Wildfire smoke blowing from Canada has blanketed large swaths of the Midwest and East Coast in recent days, impacting more than a dozen states, with some of the worst-hit cities facing air quality in ranges considered hazardous. New Yorkers are among those who…
As summer melts away like a fruity Popsicle left on a poolside deck chair, our thoughts turn to the coming school year.Whether they’re prepping for middle school, high school, or college, all students heading back to class will need the right gear. The WIRED Reviews team has spent years extensively testing consumer tech for students—giving it to our own youngsters to abuse, or putting it through the paces ourselves—and we’ve compiled this list of items we consider truly essential. Not all of these products are guaranteed to help you learn better, but they’ll make note-taking, homework, arriving on time, and…
Zoox has issued a software recall after one of its robotaxis struggled to navigate a smoke-filled emergency fire scene in June. The Amazon-owned company said Friday that it has shipped to its fleet of 105 vehicles a software update that should address the issue. Zoox told TechCrunch in a statement that the software update “enhances the existing capability of detecting active [emergency] scenes by adding the ability to detect and respond to heavy smoke in certain situations.” Nobody was on board the vehicle during the June incident, and Zoox told the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) that it is…
It’s not just you: AI startups are taking in a huge amount of seed funding, and in the process making things harder for anyone looking for funding even at a pre-seed stage. We’ve covered the trend in detail, and at this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt event, we want to help pre-seed founders now being held to seed-stage expectations. With AI making the development of a minimum viable product swifter than ever, is there even hope for a founder who has a compelling idea, but nothing concrete to show for it? That’s what our “Winning Pre-Seed Without a Product” panel will seek to answer. And it’s just one of the many sessions…
Patreon, the membership platform for creators, is cracking down on AI scraping its content for training purposes. On Thursday, the company shared that it’s working with internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare to directly block access to AI bots designed to train their AI models on creators’ work without permission. The strengthened measures were necessary because AI scraping has become more sophisticated since it first put measures in place to deter AI crawlers in 2023, the company says. In addition, Patreon’s paywall has long locked much of creators’ content out of reach of crawlers. But more recently, the company introduced new discovery…