Author: TechCrunch News

To give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved — and overdue — time in the spotlight, TechCrunch is launching a series of interviews focusing on remarkable women who’ve contributed to the AI revolution. We’ll publish several pieces throughout the year as the AI boom continues, highlighting key work that often goes unrecognized. Read more…

Last Monday, I discovered Walter the Producer, a Boston-based indie musician. His music isn’t on any of the playlists I follow, and he has less than 150,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. If I hadn’t searched for his song on Shazam while I was 2,000 miles away from home in a brewery in Phoenix, I probably…

Few categories are as ripe for automation-fueled disruption as construction. The industry is valued at around $2 trillion a year, in the U.S. alone. Much of that work is strenuous, repetitive and sometimes dangerous — precisely the sorts of problems industrial robotics are built to solve. The other thing construction brings is a wide range…

Welcome, folks, to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter covering noteworthy happenings in the tech industry. This week, OpenAI stunned the blogosphere with the release of Sora, a new AI model that can generate videos in impressively high fidelity. We’ve seen video generators before. But what makes Sora unique is its understanding of time…

The global video game industry makes more money each year than movies and music combined. But that doesn’t mean the sector was immune to the macroeconomic impacts of the last few years. Gaming companies have held sizable layoffs, and venture funding to the category hit a five-year low in 2023. But VCs are optimistic that…

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. I’m having one of those weeks where I’m just constantly, very slowly shaking my head at people. As I sat down to read all the stories…

There have been many attempts at open source AI-powered voice assistants (see Rhasspy, Mycroft and Jasper, to name a few) — all established with the goal of creating privacy-preserving, offline experiences that don’t compromise on functionality. But development’s proven to be extraordinarily slow. That’s because, in addition to all the usual challenges attendant with open…

Few joys in this cold world can match cracking open a new comic on a lazy Sunday morning. Nothing to do, nowhere to be — just you, a mug of coffee and some sequential art. Not much has fundamentally changed about the American comic book since publishers began collecting newspaper strips as bound volumes in…

I’ve long argued that VCs getting excited about climate change is scary and that the goal of a startup is to stop existing. But I haven’t been particularly successful at outlining what startup founders can actually do to build a more sustainable company in a world hurtling toward a climate crisis. Enter Amit Paul and…

Meta is in hot water after announcing plans to remove politics from its recommendations across Instagram and Threads, its new Twitter-like app for text-based posts. That leaves a window of opportunity for the startup Bluesky, whose CEO Jay Graber recently explained that Meta’s decision is emblematic of the types of problems that could emerge when…