Author: TechCrunch News

The CEO of Colossal, a startup that aims to use genetic editing techniques to bring back extinct species, including the wooly mammoth, assured audiences at SXSW that the company has no plans to create a real-life Jurassic Park — lest there was any doubt. “Modern conservation isn’t working […] and we’re gonna need a ‘de-extinction’…

Manus, an “agentic” AI platform that launched in preview last week, is generating more hype than a Taylor Swift concert. The head of product at Hugging Face called Manus “the most impressive AI tool I’ve ever tried.” AI policy researcher Dean Ball described Manus as the “most sophisticated computer using AI.” The official Discord server…

Faced with an aging population and labor shortages, Japanese businesses are increasingly relying on service robots to supplement their workforce, according to Bloomberg. Research firm Fuji Keizai projects the country’s service robot market to nearly triple by 2030, to ¥400 billion ($2.7 billion). Potentially driving that growth: the Recruit Works Institute projects that the country…

Last year was a monumental year for the AI industry in the U.S. and beyond. There were 49 startups that raised funding rounds worth $100 million or more in 2024, per our count at TechCrunch. Three companies raised more than one “mega-round” last year, and seven companies raised rounds at $1 billion or larger…

Google has quietly updated the webpage for its Responsible AI and Human Centered Technology (RAI-HCT) team, the team charged with conducting research into AI safety, fairness, and explainability, to scrub mentions of “diversity” and “equity.” A previous version of the page used language such as “marginalized communities,” “diverse,” “underrepresented groups,” and “equity” to describe the…

Welcome back to Week in Review. This week we’re looking at OpenAI potentially charging $20,000 a month for a specialized AI agent, the unexpected return of early-internet darling Digg, a company genetically engineering mice to have mammoth-like fur, and more! Let’s do this. OpenAI could charge up to $20,000 per month for specialized AI “agents.”…

Signal President Meredith Whittaker warned Friday that agentic AI could come with a risk to user privacy. Speaking onstage at the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, the advocate for secure communications referred to the use of AI agents as “putting your brain in a jar,” and cautioned that this new paradigm of computing — where…

TechCrunch will be on the ground at SXSW 2025 — the annual tech, music, comedy, and film conference that kicked off Friday in Austin — in search of the zeitgeist of this AI-centric era. Yup, we’re one sentence in and AI has already made its entrance…

Investor interest in AI coding assistants is exploding. Anysphere, the developer of AI-powered coding assistant Cursor, is in talks with venture capitalists to raise capital at a valuation of nearly $10 billion, Bloomberg reported. The round, if it transpires, would come about three months after Anysphere completed its previous fundraise of $100 million at a…

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