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Apple has agreed to pay $250 million to settle a class action lawsuit over how it marketed its AI features ahead of the launch of the iPhone 16. The Financial Times was the first to report the news. The lawsuit alleged that Apple exaggerated the breadth of features Apple Intelligence would bring, which included a significantly upgraded version of its assistant, Siri. The complaint alleges that the company created the impression that advanced AI capabilities would be available to users sooner than they actually were. In particular, the plaintiffs allege that Apple overstated both the readiness and functionality of these…
Timothée Chalamet’s most recent role is no longer table tennis legend Marty Mauser. In his latest gig, Chalamet plays himself as a soccer fan. The movie is only five minutes, and there’s no need to hit theaters. This is the storyline of the five-minute, star-studded film Adidas debuted this week, the centerpiece of its sponsorship of the 2026 World Cup, which will run from June 11 to 19 in cities across North America. As a Tier 1 partner (a sponsorship reported to cost between $150M and $200 million), Adidas already enjoys a treasure chest of branding opportunities in the venues, online,…
You might think the big story out of Match Group’s first-quarter earnings is Tinder’s turnaround. The dating app’s revenue is slightly up again after quarter-after-quarter of declines. But we’d like to point to a comment the chief financial officer made about how the company is slowing its hiring right now because it needs more money to pay for AI tools for its employees. Ah, yes, the good ol’ “let’s blame AI” strategy! While speaking to analysts on the first-quarter earnings call, Match Group CFO Steven Bailey talked about how the dating app giant was investing in AI technology for internal…
Genesis AI, a startup that raised a $105 million seed round to build foundational AI for robotics, has unveiled its first model, GENE-26.5, and it comes with surprise hands. In a demo video, the company showcased various advanced tasks performed by a set of robotic hands it has designed in-house. “The model has always been the goal, because a better model means better intelligence,” Genesis co-founder and CEO Zhou Xian told TechCrunch. But the company soon realized that it needed control over the hardware. “So we decided to go full stack,” he said. Other well-funded companies operate at the intersection…
Earlier this week, five people who touch every layer of the AI supply chain sat down at the Milken Global Conference in Beverly Hills, where they talked with this editor about everything from chip shortages to orbital data centers to the possibility that the whole architecture that undergirds the tech is wrong. On stage with TechCrunch: Christophe Fouquet, CEO of ASML, the Dutch company that holds a monopoly on the extreme ultraviolet lithography machines without which modern chips would not exist; Francis deSouza, COO of Google Cloud, who is overseeing one of the biggest infrastructure bets in corporate history; Qasar…
DeepSeek is in talks to raise its first round of venture capital, and in just a few weeks, its potential valuation has soared from $20 billion to $45 billion, the Financial Times and Bloomberg reported. The Chinese AI lab came to prominence in early 2025 after launching a large language model that trained on a fraction of the compute power and at a fraction of the cost of the big U.S. models like those from OpenAI and Anthropic. It has since kept reasonable pace with the top models in the world in areas like reasoning and coding while remaining open…
Apple has agreed to pay $250 million to settle a false-advertising class-action lawsuit accusing the company of overhyping its Apple Intelligence features—specifically a promised AI overhaul of Siri that plaintiffs say never materialized and, according to their lawyers, may not arrive for years.The announcement comes just before Apple is supposedly set to finally unveil some form of AI-enhanced Siri at its developer conference in June, which would mark another swing at detailing a radically improved digital assistant for the iPhone.The legal complaint says that Apple allegedly saturated the market with deceptive ads, inducing consumers to purchase iPhones based on “the…
AI evaluation startup Braintrust has urged customers to revoke and replace their API keys after an earlier breach of customer secrets. According to an email sent to customers Monday and seen by TechCrunch, the startup confirmed “unauthorized access” in one of its Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud accounts, which contained API keys used by customers for accessing cloud-based AI models. “We’ve communicated with one impacted customer and to date have not found evidence of broader exposure,” read the email. The email asked “every customer to rotate” any of the API keys that they store with Braintrust. Braintrust disclosed the security…
That’s a lot of complaints, I know. But if you just need something simple and “good enough,” the Logitech Brio 300 will do and certainly has better lowlight performance over an older option like the Logitech C920. If you have decent lighting in your room, the Brio 300 will still be an upgrade over your laptop’s webcam in terms of image quality.The gap between the $150 and $50 is pretty wide, but honestly, there aren’t a lot of great options in between that I’ve tested. Check in my honorable mentions down below for some other options in between, but truthfully,…
A U.S. court has sentenced Latvian hacker Deniss Zolotarjovs to more than eight years in prison following his conviction for carrying out ransomware attacks. The Justice Department accused the hacker of working for a notorious Russian ransomware gang called Karakurt, which was led by former leaders of the Akira and Conti ransomware gangs, who were sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury for their alleged links to Russian intelligence. Prosecutors said members of Karakurt targeted U.S. government entities with attacks that disrupted 911 emergency dispatch systems, and also stole children’s health information. Zolotarjovs was responsible for “escalating pressure” on victims who resisted…
I like that the ReMarkable Paper Pure kept the thicker side bezel, which the pricier Paper Pro and Paper Pro Move don’t have. It’s a perfect resting spot for my thumb to grab it and start writing, and it responds to rotations, so you can use it comfortably whether you’re right- or left-handed (the stylus will only attach to the long side without the thicker bezel, though, which is a little inconvenient for lefties). It has a fast response time and a smooth writing experience that, like ReMarkable models before it, feels incredibly paperlike with a touch of texture and resistance…
On Wednesday, xAI and Anthropic announced a surprise partnership that has the Claude-maker buying out “all of the compute capacity at [xAI’s] Colossus 1 data center,” roughly 300MW that allowed Anthropic to immediately raise its usage limits. It’s a huge deal for xAI, likely worth billions of dollars. More importantly, it immediately monetized one of the company’s most impressive accomplishments, turning xAI from a consumer to a provider of compute. It’s tempting to see the arrangement as a shot at OpenAI amid the ongoing lawsuit. But Musk’s explanation on X was that xAI had already moved training to a newer…
As Mario Gomez-Hall walks me through his new restaurant discovery app, Zest Maps, the founder pauses on its user leaderboard and highlights a profile topping the charts with over 1,000 visits logged. It’s Foursquare cofounder Dennis Crowley helping test the beta version.“He’s given us really useful feedback,” Gomez-Hall says. “It’s sort of a spiritual successor to Foursquare.” (For those who may not remember, Foursquare was a hot location check-in social app around 2010 when GPS-enabled apps were first trending.)The core gist of Zest Maps, rolling out today for iOS users (no Android support yet), is the automatic logging of every…
Snap no longer has a deal with Perplexity, the company revealed on Wednesday as part of its quarterly earnings report. The deal, announced last November, would have seen Perplexity’s AI search engine integrated directly into Snapchat. Perplexity was set to pay Snap $400 million in cash and equity over one year as part of the deal. Snap said that the companies “amicably ended the relationship in Q1″ and that its sales guidance “assumes no contribution from Perplexity.” When Snap announced the deal as part of its third-quarter earnings last year, it said it expected revenue from the partnership to begin…
A few months before Elon Musk left OpenAI’s board of directors in February 2018, he tried to recruit Sam Altman to join a “world-class AI lab” within Tesla. Musk went as far as offering the OpenAI CEO a Tesla board seat, according to emails and testimony presented in federal court on Wednesday during the Musk v. Altman trial. The emails were shown to a jury during the cross examination of Shivon Zilis, a former OpenAI adviser and board member who is also the mother of four of Musk’s children.Musk’s core claim in this lawsuit is that Altman and OpenAI president…
This story was originally published in On Background with Mark Stenberg, a free, weekly newsletter that explores the key themes shaping the media industry. You can sign up for it here.On Wednesday, media scion James Murdoch joined the bidding war for Vox Media, which has in recent months signaled its openness to selling parts of its media empire.Murdoch, the son of media tycoon Rupert Murdoch and brother to Fox Corp. and News Corp. chairman Lachlan Murdoch, expressed interest specifically in the Vox Media Podcast Network and the New York Magazine house of brands, which include The Cut, Strategist, Grub Street, Curbed,…