Author: TechCrunch News

Every company or organization putting out an AI model has to make a decision on what, if any, boundaries to set on what it will and won’t discuss. Goody-2 takes this quest for ethics to an extreme by declining to talk about anything whatsoever. The chatbot is clearly a satire of what some perceive as…

We may not be using the M word much these days, but the race to build an interconnected avatar-driven virtual world didn’t take the last year off. The metaverse, a tech buzzword sandwiched in between the hype eras of NFTs and AI, is still being built, regardless of what we’re calling it. And in light…

Kai Kloepfer started biometric “smart” gun startup Biofire as a science fair project after the Aurora, Colorado, mass shooting in 2012 brought the U.S.’s gun violence problem close to home. Kloepfer began thinking of ways to solve the problem using what he knows: technology. Twelve years later, that project has turned into Biofire, a firearms…

20VC founder Harry Stebbings unveiled his third, and final, offshoot fund called 20PRODUCT that kicks off with $5 million in capital commitments. Similar to his earlier funds, 20SALES and 20GROWTH, 20Product brings together a group of experts that will invest in early-stage founders looking to start, grow and scale their companies. Essentially, it’s like having…

When I was a student in the UK, I remember that renting appliances like washing machines and televisions was the norm for some people, especially students living in short-term accommodation. Israeli startup Xyte (pronounced “excite”) has just raised $30 million, as it sees a return to this sort of hardware-as-a-service model to be the way…

2023 was the year social networks realized that they were sitting on massive troves of data. And some companies, such as Twitter (now X) and Reddit, decided to change their terms to shut out third-party experiences on these platforms. In the process, they also put a price on their data — something they believe is…

Meta is challenging a fee levied by the European Union on larger online platforms under its rebooted ecommerce rules. While a number of tech giants have taken issue with their designations under the law, this is the first suit that’s focused on the supervisory fee. The news of Meta’s legal challenge was first reported yesterday…

Technical assessment company CodeSignal, which counts Index Ventures and Menlo Ventures as backers, is launching a learning platform called CodeSignal Learn. The new platform, aimed at audiences wanting to learn technical subjects, also has an AI-powred bot called Cosmo, which helps users with learning. The company said that there are hundreds of courses available at…

To build a fusion power plant, engineers are forced to make some difficult choices. Do they go with the simpler design and then, while in operation, force the plasma to behave so it doesn’t snuff itself out? Or do they opt for a complex design that’s challenging to build but leads to happier plasma? Or…

Apple has launched a redesigned iCloud app for Windows to offer a better onboarding and content syncing experience for iPhone or iPad users who don’t own a Mac. The new app, available for Windows 10 and 11, has a new setup experience for easier onboarding. It also has a syncing status indicator for different services…