Author: admin

In late May, Neil Rimer said something during a sit-down I had with him in Athens that I haven’t been able to shake. At a vibrant new tech festival in the city, talking about the wealth piling up around AI, he said he has “a strong sense that there will be some sort of a redistribution.” He continued on. “It’ll either be voluntary or it’ll be involuntary, but it’ll happen, and I hope it’s voluntary,” he told me, adding that he thinks tech leaders “can play a leading role in seeing that through.” Coming from most people, that would sound…

Gaming is better with great gear. A powerful gaming headset and a good keyboard are two must-haves for me, whether I’m playing Stardew Valley or firing up my latest unfinished run of Baldur’s Gate 3 (I’ll move on eventually to Expedition 33, I promise). A longtime favorite brand of WIRED’s for this kind of gaming gadgetry comes from SteelSeries. SteelSeries’ latest gaming headphones and mice have been a hit in testing, and now you can score your very own with the help of a SteelSeries discount code.Whether you’re shopping for a new gaming headset or keyboard, or looking for a…

As parents become increasingly concerned about the potential dangers of unrestricted smartphone access for children, a growing number of companies are developing devices specifically designed for kids.  Today’s kid-friendly phones typically feature touchscreens, cameras, and communication capabilities similar to regular smartphones. However, the software on these devices is heavily modified to remove or restrict access to web browsers, social media, app stores, and other distractions. Parents can usually manage these devices through a companion app, allowing them to approve contacts, monitor locations, set screen time limits, select available apps, and, in some cases, receive alerts regarding cyberbullying, explicit content, or…

Valar Atomics, a startup building small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) — essentially miniaturized, factory-built power plants designed to be cheaper and faster to deploy than traditional reactors — is in talks to raise a new round of capital, according to three sources familiar with the company. The three-year-old company is seeking a valuation of about $6 billion, and Sequoia is expected to lead the deal, the people said. The Information was the first to report the funding discussions, including that the El Segundo, California, startup is raising a $1 billion equity round. Part of that capital has been raised previously…

Months after analysts warned that AI-driven demand for memory chips would ripple through consumer electronics, India is providing the strongest evidence yet that the disruption has arrived, with rising handset prices reshaping the smartphone market. The memory chips in question — RAM and storage components — are the same ones tech giants need by the truckload to build AI data centers. Manufacturers like Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron have been shifting production capacity toward high-bandwidth memory, the specialized chips used in AI accelerators, because they’re much more profitable per wafer than the standard memory used in phones and laptops —…

VC Jeremy Levine has a wry solution to something that routinely annoys him, according to a new Wall Street Journal article on the rise of AI transcription apps. On Zoom, he is no longer “Jeremy Levine” but instead “Jeremy Levine I do not consent to transcribing or recording.” It may sound petty or brilliant, depending on your point of view, but what’s clear is that always-on recording is becoming ubiquitous, thanks to a growing crop of AI note-taking apps and devices, many of which we’ve covered here at TechCrunch (we’ve even ranked some). VC Eric Bahn tells the outlet he…

Some companies want their humanoid robots to fold your clothes. Others want them in the workplace. Sankaet Pathak and his startup Foundation Future Industries have a slightly different goal: produce an all-American robot supersoldier.Pathak, Foundation’s CEO, says his company plans to start giving its humanoids lethal capabilities soon, although he declined to share specifics. “We have some kinetic things we’re exploring,” he tells WIRED. (He means weapons systems.) “We’ll probably unveil something in the next couple of months,” he adds. Besides combat, the company says its robots could be useful for logistics, reconnaissance, and inspection.The US military has a long-standing…

AI has become the smartphone industry’s latest battleground, with manufacturers racing to add AI-powered features to attract mainstream consumers. Vertu is taking a different path: the UK-founded luxury phone maker, known for hand-finished devices often costing tens of thousands of dollars, has built its business selling status symbols to the ultra-wealthy rather than competing on specs. Its Alphafold targets affluent buyers, particularly chief executives, pairing luxury materials with an AI agent designed to automate parts of an executive’s working day. I decided to test that claim on its own terms. Rather than focusing on benchmark scores, camera comparisons, and media…

As cases of the diarrhea-causing parasite cyclospora rise across the US, former employees of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say the country’s response is being severely hampered by personnel cuts at the agency.Amid mass government layoffs last year implemented by President Donald Trump and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, the CDC lab that responds to outbreaks of the parasite cyclospora was downsized from 11 people to just three, according to Joel Barratt, a molecular parasitologist and assistant professor at Emory University School of Medicine who previously led that team.“Based on simple math, these outbreak responses—which require rapid,…

The window is almost shut. On August 19, eight startups will take the stage at Stripe Tour Sydney in front of investors, global press, and the Australian tech community. One startup walks away with automatic entry into TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco — no application, no further competition, a guaranteed spot on the world’s most iconic startup stage. There are only 48 hours left to apply. Don’t wait.  Here’s everything you need to know. What is Stripe x Startup Battlefield? Startup Battlefield is TechCrunch’s flagship pitch competition — the one that launched Dropbox, Cloudflare, Discord, and Trello. Collectively, Startup Battlefield…

Apple and Google have been ordered to take down apps that can “nudify” or “undress” people and told that they must stop profiting from the harmful technology, according to cease-and-desist letters sent to the companies seen by WIRED.On Thursday, San Francisco city attorney David Chiu sent legal notices to Apple and Google demanding that they remove from their app stores 13 face-swapping apps, which allow users to create AI-generated nonconsensual nude images. The letters say the Silicon Valley giants should stop “aiding and abetting” the sale of explicit deepfake images and “sever” business relationships with the app developers.“Generating non-consensual intimate…

Databricks on Thursday announced a new round of funding that values the company at $188 billion. The round was led by Coatue. Databricks didn’t disclose exactly how much it raised; it said the money isn’t in its hands yet and that the round will close later in this summer. (Other outlets have since reported the raise is roughly $3 billion.) While it’s unusual for a company to announce before it gets the money, a VC tells TechCrunch that the deal is solid, with so many firms wanting in that the company had no reason to keep its shiny new valuation…

On the day of its release, I woke up at dawn and drove 25 miles to the Philadelphia suburbs to see Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, at one of the few remaining cinemas in the northeast equipped to screen large-format, super-high-resolution 70-mm IMAX movies.I arrived to find clusters of idlers in “NOLAN” sweatshirts and Letterboxd dad hats shifting their weight, grousing outside the theater. The power had gone out, and the 8 am screening of The Odyssey would have to be canceled. Stressed-out employees manually jotted down ticket numbers in order to issue refunds (when the computers were back up and…

Top of the Ticker: Thursday’s edition of NBC News’ morning show, Today, appeared to run smoothly, but behind the scenes, an unsettling situation took place as an intruder made his way into the secure production area.During a break in the show, Andrew Truelove allegedly managed to bypass security at NBC News’ offices at 30 Rockefeller and find his way to the street-level studio where he confronted Today co-anchor Craig Melvin and hurled racial slurs. In a statement provided to TVNewser by NBC News, Melvin alerted security, and Truelove was detained and taken into custody by law enforcement without further incident.On…

Agility Robotics is opening a 60,000-square-foot facility to train its humanoid robots in Fremont, California, just up the highway from the factory where Tesla is expected to start manufacturing its Optimus robots this year. Tesla has increasingly bet on Optimus. Elon Musk recently said he expects it to be “the biggest product ever” once it’s “useful outside of Tesla sometime next year.” While Agility doesn’t have Tesla’s capital, it does have a robot, Digit, that is already useful in the real world. The robot is already generating revenue, carrying totes and bins in manufacturing and warehouse settings for customers like…

Hot dogs, beach days, and iced tea on the porch are some of the rites of summer. But in an era of global warming, a new rite has emerged: choking down smoke from wildfires burning hundreds of miles or more away.The Midwest, Northeast, and parts of Canada have been blitzed with thick smoke that turned skies an eerie shade of orange and triggered widespread air quality alerts. The source? Fires burning in Minnesota as well as western Ontario.Canada is where the bulk of the fires are burning, with 119 out of control blazes across the country as of Friday afternoon.…