AI News
Recent AI news and official updates
Follow recent AI announcements and reporting with concise PopAIExplorer summaries and direct original-source links.
Source: Elastic agrees to buy CRV-backed Deductive AI for up to $85M
TechCrunch AI published: Deductive AI, a startup that uses AI to catch and resolve bugs in software, was founded just three years ago.
AI inference startup Baseten reportedly raising $1.5B months after its last mega-round
TechCrunch AI published: Startup Baseten is reportedly close to finalizing a $1.5 billion round at a $13 billion as the “inference gold rush" marches on.
Snap spins off AI video team into new company, Dotmo, due to costs
TechCrunch AI published: The Snapchat maker is spinning off yet another internal unit. Dotmo will be composed of current Snap staff who are leaving the social media company to focus on AI video development.
OpenAI is bringing on some big guns in the lead-up to its IPO
TechCrunch AI published: OpenAI is bulking up before its IPO, landing Transformer co-inventor Noam Shazeer from Google DeepMind and former Trump AI policy official Dean Ball in the same week.
Almost half of US singles feel negatively about AI in dating, Match says
TechCrunch AI published: About 47% of singles look negatively at the use of AI in dating -- but many dating app users are open to AI helping with profile punch-ups and conversation starters.
Amazon hopes to challenge Nvidia more directly by selling its AI chips
TechCrunch AI published: AWS is in talks to sell its chips to other data centers. CEO Andy Jassy has said this represents a $50 billion opportunity for the company.
AI data centers just got a government-mandated fast lane to the grid
TechCrunch AI published: FERC told grid operators to give data centers a fast lane for interconnections, but it failed to address electricity supply shortages.
How to turn off AI in your Google Docs
TechCrunch AI published: Here's what you need to do to get those pesky "write with Gemini" pop-ups to go away.
‘Queer Eye’ life coach Karamo Brown launches Kē, a wellness app featuring his AI digital clone
TechCrunch AI published: After spending a year and a half focusing on his own journey — from fitness and nutrition to meditation, sobriety, relationships, and personal growth — Brown wants to help others do the same.
General Intuition in talks to raise $300M at around $2B valuation
TechCrunch AI published: The startup trains embodied AI and world models using Medal’s dataset of 2 billion videos per year from 10 million monthly active users.
A tech worker-backed PAC is bringing a $5M knife to Big Tech’s $100M gunfight
TechCrunch AI published: Guardrails positions itself as a populist political movement that runs on small donations from people in the trenches of the AI boom.
How to turn off AI in your Google Docs
TechCrunch AI published: Here's what you need to do to get those pesky "write with Gemini" pop-ups to go away.
NEA’s Tiffany Luck says enterprises are still figuring out their AI ROI
TechCrunch AI published: Tokenmaxxing was the hottest trend in Silicon Valley earlier this year, with CEOs encouraging employees to push AI usage as far as it would go. Then the bill came due. Uber reportedly blew through its annual AI budget in a few months, some companies cut Claude licenses for parts of their org, and Meta killed its internal leaderboard. This tension between […]
World leaders want American AI. They just don’t want America to be able to turn it off.
TechCrunch AI published: French President Macron and Indian PM Modi raised alarms at the G7 summit that the U.S. could cut off access to American AI overnight — a fear the Anthropic blackout just made real.
Anthropic becomes first AI startup to join the Frontier carbon removal coalition
TechCrunch AI published: Anthropic has joined the Frontier coalition, which received another $915M in pledges to fund carbon removal projects.
NEA’s Tiffany Luck on AI IPOs, personal agents, and the ROI reckoning
TechCrunch AI published: Tokenmaxxing was the hottest trend in Silicon Valley earlier this year, with CEOs encouraging employees to push AI usage as far as it would go. Then the bill came due. Uber reportedly blew through its annual AI budget in a few months, some companies cut Claude licenses for parts of their org, and Meta killed its internal leaderboard. This tension between […]
World model maker Odyssey nabs $1.45B valuation backed by Amazon and other big names
TechCrunch AI published: World models are the next big thing in AI beyond LLMs and, with this round, Odyssey has cemented itself as one of the startups to watch.
Only 16 percent of Americans think AI will have a positive impact on society, a new study shows
TechCrunch AI published: Although Wall Street loves AI, every day Americans are significantly less optimistic about the industry, a new report from Pew Research shows.
Google bets on Gemini to reinvent the smart home speaker
TechCrunch AI published: Google is betting generative AI can breathe new life into the smart speaker. The company's new $99.99 Google Home Speaker replaces the rigid commands of the Google Assistant era with more conversational Gemini interactions.
Collecting robot training data is dirty, unglamorous work. Some AI labs are already paying XDOF to do it.
TechCrunch AI published: If physical AI is going to match the accomplishments of LLMs, there's a data problem that needs to be solved.