Technology
Airbnb announced Tuesday it is expanding its services feature with a new category for car pick-ups across 125 cities around the world. The company is partnering with transportation company Welcome Pickups to let users book a private car service in cities including Paris, Bali, and Mexico City. The travel company said that it has been…
Would you trade your manager for a chatbot? A growing number of Americans are saying yes. According to a Quinnipiac University poll published Monday, 15% of Americans say they’d be willing to have a job where their direct supervisor was an AI program that assigned tasks and set schedules. Quinnipiac surveyed 1,397 adults in the…
Yet another startup aiming to help enterprises build, secure and orchestrate AI agents has raised a honking big seed round. Sycamore on Monday announced a $65 million seed led by Coatue and Lightspeed, with a long list of angels including former OpenAI chief scientist Bob McGrew, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi, and others. A few things turned investors’ heads and drew them to participate in such a big round out of the gate. First, unlike many…
Apple has provided federal agents with the real identities of at least two customers who used one of the company’s privacy features designed to mask their email addresses from apps and websites. “Hide My Email” is a feature that allows paying Apple iCloud+ customers to generate anonymous email addresses that forward messages to a person’s…
Starcloud’s latest funding round values the space compute company at $1.1 billion, making it one of the fastest startups to reach unicorn status after graduating from Y Combinator. The company’s Series A, which closed 17 months after its demo day presentation, was led by Benchmark and EQT Ventures. It’s another sign of the interest in…
OpenAI’s decision last week to shut down Sora, its AI video-generation tool, just six months after releasing it to the public raised immediate suspicions. The app had invited users to upload their own faces — so was this some kind of elaborate data grab? According to a new WSJ investigation, the real explanation is considerably…
For years now, smartphone makers have made the camera bump on devices bigger in order to chase camera improvements. Even if that kind of design makes cameras better, at times it creates usability issues. With the Pixel 10a, Google took a new approach of entirely removing the camera bump and making a flat phone that…
OpenAI announced this week that it’s shutting down its Sora app and related video models just six months after launching the app. On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I debated what the decision means for OpenAI and for the industry more broadly. To some extent, the move seems…
The air felt different at this year’s SXSW, the annual March festival where tech meets pop culture in Austin. I was reminded of the 2019 SXSW when people packed downtown, and snake lines formed out of local ventures. Attendees said it was like that again this year, though my friend, who lives in the area and…
While there’s been plenty of debate about the tendency of AI chatbots to flatter users and confirm their existing beliefs — also known as AI sycophancy — a new study by Stanford computer scientists attempts to measure how harmful that tendency might be. The study, titled “Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence” and…
