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Jeff Bezos-backed electric vehicle startup Slate Auto has raised another $650 million as the company prepares to put its first affordable pickup trucks into production by the end of 2026. The carmaker said Monday that the Series C funding round was led by TWG Global, a firm run by Guggenheim Partners chief executive (and Los Angeles Dodgers owner) Mark Walter and investor Thomas Tull. Slate Auto’s press release thanked “visionary investors” but the company did not name any others who were involved in the fundraise. The new round means Slate Auto has raised roughly $1.4 billion to date. Previous investors…
In the wee hours of the night last April, someone stopped at roughly 20 street intersections across Silicon Valley and launched an unprecedented cyberattack that would eventually spread to multiple states, embarrassing local officials and prompting them to question their security practices. Authorities suspect the unknown culprit took advantage of weak and publicly available default passwords to wirelessly upload custom recordings that played whenever a pedestrian pressed a crosswalk button.Instead of the normal recordings telling people to either wait or cross the street, pedestrians heard the spoofed voices of billionaire tech CEOs. A fake Mark Zuckerberg said at one Menlo…
Those fortunate few fans who lucked into a ticket for the 2025 NBA Draft got a peek at plenty of stars, including Cooper Flagg, Ace Bailey, V.J. Edgecombe, and Dylan Harper. But long before any of them stepped into the spotlight at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, another celebrity had his moment: Jake from State Farm stood on the red carpet, stopped by the anchors’ desk, and even got time on the Jumbotron.State Farm has been a major NBA sponsor since 2010. But this time, Jake simply stepped into the fray as any VIP would. It wouldn’t be his last time…
Roblox is introducing new account types designed to give kids and younger teens age-appropriate access to chat and games, the company announced on Monday. The move comes as Roblox implemented mandatory age checks in January for all users who want to access chats. The same age-check technology will be used to assign users to these new accounts. As part of the changes, users who haven’t completed age checks will only be able to play a selection of games rated for younger audiences. Users aged five to nine will be assigned to a “Roblox Kids” account, and users aged nine to 15…
This does not amount to an antimicrobial certification, hence Lifestraw’s caution to market the device for anything but municipal water. But if my primary worry were the bacteria or mold known to potentially accumulate in other water filters and pitchers, I would certainly spring for this Lifestraw. The same IAPMO India lab data also shows good removal of PFAS and PFOA “forever chemicals,” though not quite to the levels of my top filter picks.This doesn’t mean the filter is perfect. The Home’s tall dual-stage filter, comprising both a membrane filter and a replaceable activated carbon filter, causes the 10-cup Lifestraw…
Dollar General selected retail adtech firm Qsic to outfit 6,000 of its roughly 21,000 stores with in-store audio ad and measurement equipment, effectively doubling the size of its existing network and adding a more sophisticated AI-powered measurement solution.The discount retailer has piloted in-store audio ads in 6,000 of its stores. With the addition of Qsic—which will handle audio ad delivery and measurement—audio ads will be live in 12,000 stores by the end of the second quarter. The partnership is the result from a months-long competitive request for proposal (RFP) process.“Qsic stood out for its ability to combine AI, point-of-sale data,…
This month, USA Today published an excellent report that revealed how US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement delayed disclosing key information about the impacts of its detainment policies. The authors used the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to compile and analyze detention statistics from ICE and track how the agency had changed under the Trump administration. The story is one of countless examples of how the Wayback Machine, which crawls and preserves web pages, has helped preserve information for the public good. It was also, Wayback Machine director Mark Graham says, “a little ironic.”USA Today Co., the publishing conglomerate formerly known as…
This past month, CNN made noticeable on-air design changes to two of its marquee programs, Anderson Cooper 360 and The Lead with Jake Tapper, giving them a dressed-down, podcast-like aesthetic.Both shows were temporarily moved out of their glossy, flashy studios, with Cooper relocated to the network’s New York newsroom, shedding his jacket, loosening his tie, and leading his show from behind a table topped with a large image of the Middle East. Completing the new look, exposed mics, reminiscent of the Larry King era at the network, were placed in front of Cooper and his guests.
On a Monday afternoon in March, I watched a pixel-art avatar prowl the corridors of a virtual office campus looking for a buddy. With dark brown hair and stubbled chin, the sprite was a representation of me—an AI agent instructed to converse with other people’s agents to see if we might vibe in real life. It jumped into its first interaction: “I’m Joel, by the way.”Running the simulation were three London-based developers: Tomáš Hrdlička and siblings Joon Sang and Uri Lee. The thesis behind their project, Pixel Societies, is that personalized AI agents could help to match real people with…
Last month, a Jury in Los Angeles found Meta and YouTube liable for intentionally making its platforms addictive. Scrolling delivers dopamine hits, “which is why social media often feels good while we’re doing it,” Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lembke has written, “but horrible as soon as we stop.”That’s the message of a new campaign from Pinterest: Stop, put your phone down, and get out into the world.Kicking off the effort is a 60-second spot that stitches together home movies shot in the 1950s through the 1980s, where young people happily frolic in the pre-internet age. The unseen narrator, voiced by a…
For all the hype about data centers in space, there just aren’t very many GPUs up there. As that starts to change, the near-term business of orbital compute is starting to take shape. The largest compute cluster currently in orbit was launched by Canada’s Kepler Communications in January, and boasts about 40 Nvidia Orin edge processors onboard 10 operational satellites, all linked together by laser communications links. The company now has 18 customers, and announced its newest on Monday — Sophia Space, a startup that will test the software for its unique orbital computer onboard Kepler’s constellation. Experts expect that…
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell summoned bank executives for a meeting this week where they encouraged the executives to use Anthropic’s new Mythos model to detect vulnerabilities, according to Bloomberg. Indeed, while JPMorgan Chase was the only bank listed as one of the initial partner organizations with access to the model, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley are reportedly testing Mythos as well. Anthropic announced the model this week but said it would be limiting access for now, in part because Mythos — despite not being trained specifically for cybersecurity — is…
Apple plans to sell its first smart glasses in 2027, with a possible unveiling at the end of this year, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. Gurman has been reporting steadily on the evolution of the company’s smart glasses strategy, but now he has more details about how they’ll look — he said Apple is testing four designs, and could ultimately launch with some or all of them. Those designs reportedly include a large rectangular frame, a slimmer rectangular frame (similar to the glasses worn by CEO Tim Cook), a larger oval or circular frame, and a smaller oval or circular…
At the HumanX AI conference in San Francisco this week, thousands of techies descended upon the city’s Moscone Center, where discussion focused on the ways agentic AI is changing the business. Agents, which automate business and coding tasks, have begun to be deployed across industries — largely through enterprise and consumer-focused chatbots. Naturally, I wanted to know which chatbot was the most popular, and I consistently heard one name most often: Claude. Anthropic got shoutouts in many of the panels held throughout the week, but it also was a topic of discussion with the vendors I spoke to while perusing…
Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility, your hub for the future of transportation and now, more than ever, how AI is playing a part. To get this in your inbox, sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! Normally, I have an analysis and then a little bird (my insidery bits curated just for you). But today I am combining them because I simply have too many little birds talking to me about the new talent wars. About seven years ago, the founder of a self-driving vehicle company told me that competing with the likes of Waymo for talent was…
X is cutting back on payments to accounts that are “flooding the timeline” with clickbait and rapid-fire news aggregation, according to its head of product Nikita Bier Bier wrote Saturday that “[a]ll aggregators had their payouts reduced to 60% this cycle” and said they’ll see another 20% reduction in the next pay cycle. He also said the Elon Musk-owned social network will be reducing payments for “habitual bait posters who use ‘🚨BREAKING’ on every post.” “It became abundantly clear: flooding the timeline with 100 stolen reposts and clickbait everyday crowded-out real creators and hurt new author growth,” Bier said, adding,…