Technology
David Sacks has used up his days as Donald Trump’s AI and crypto czar. Speaking with Bloomberg on Thursday, the longtime entrepreneur, investor, and podcaster, confirmed that his non-consecutive 130-day stint as a special government employee is over and that he’s moving on to co-chair the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST)…
Mastodon is making changes in the hopes of making its social networking service more appealing and easier to use, especially for more mainstream users looking for an alternative to X or Threads. On Thursday, the decentralized social networking software maker said it’s redesigning a key part of its platform by giving people’s user profiles a…
OpenAI may be dialing back its efforts in the video generation market with the shutdown of its Sora app, but ByteDance on Thursday confirmed that its new audio and video model, Dreamina Seedance 2.0, is now rolling out in its editing platform, CapCut. ByteDance says the model allows creators to draft, edit, and sync video…
Mate Rimac, the founder of Croatian electric vehicle maker Rimac Group, started working on electric robotaxis seven years ago. Now, part of his vision is coming to fruition through a strategic partnership between Uber, Chinese autonomous vehicle company Pony.ai, and his own robotaxi startup Verne. The three companies announced plans Thursday to launch a commercial…
Okay, so the U.S. and China are locked in an all-out race to build the most powerful AI on the planet. Beijing is throwing billions at homegrown models, tightening its grip on the tech sector, and watching nervously as its best AI talent gravitates to U.S. companies. Yet Manus — one of China’s most buzzed-about…
Anthropic’s latest research suggests that while AI is rapidly changing the way work gets done, it hasn’t meaningfully eliminated jobs. At least, not yet. But beneath what Anthropic’s head of economics, Peter McCrory, says is a “still healthy” labor market, early signs are pointing to uneven impacts, especially for younger workers just entering the workforce. …
One day after Meta lost a similar child safety lawsuit in New Mexico, a Los Angeles jury on Wednesday handed the social media giant — along with YouTube — another defeat. In a case arguing that social media platforms played a major role in harming a young woman’s mental health, jurors have sided with the…
Andrew Ashur, the founder and CEO of window cleaning robot startup Lucid Bots, likes to joke that his company is the antithesis of the robotics industry right now. While many companies are trying to build humanoids or tout demos of their robots dancing and doing flips, Lucid Bots’ drones are out in the field making…
When I speak to Blake Resnick, he’s walking around his drone startup’s newest office space in Seattle—a cavernous 50,000-square-foot facility that, Resnick estimates, won’t be fully set up until later in the year—potentially November. Still, the big (and for now, largely empty) building offers the promise of a fast-growing company intent on conquering its particular…
Amazon has confirmed that it has acquired Fauna Robotics, a two-year-old startup founded by former Meta and Google engineers who are developing kid-size humanoid robots. The acquisition was first reported by Bloomberg. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. What we do know is that Fauna’s employees, including its two founders, will join Amazon in New…
