Author: TechCrunch News

In Brief Posted: 6:17 PM PST · March 3, 2025 Image Credits:Pete Marovich/Bloomberg The Trump Administration has fired a number of National Science Foundation employees who had been handpicked for their expertise in AI, threatening the agency’s ability to sustain key AI research, Bloomberg reported. One of the affected departments inside NSF, called the Directorate…

Thought Pokémon was a tough benchmark for AI? One group of researchers argues that Super Mario Bros. is even tougher. Hao AI Lab, a research org at the University of California San Diego, on Friday threw AI into live Super Mario Bros. games. Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 performed the best, followed by Claude 3.5. Google’s Gemini…

Aviron’s home fitness equipment operates on a simple principle: People hate working out. But many of those same people love playing video games. Perhaps the only thing standing between them and a more active lifestyle is some healthy competition and well-timed distraction. It’s the same gamification concept that made Nintendo’s Wii and VR games like…

President Donald Trump is throwing his support behind the creation of a federal reserve of cryptocurrency assets — he initially highlighted XRP, Solana, and Cardano for inclusion, then later said Bitcoin and Ethereum would “obviously” be included too. In January, Trump issued an executive order calling for the formation of a working group that would…

There are three inevitabilities in life: death, taxes, and tech platforms making design changes that are universally disliked. The latest victim to this phenomenon is the Apple Mail app, which got a major redesign in iOS 18. This update is also rolling out on iPads and MacBooks…

Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Ben Horowitz has donated a fleet of Tesla Cybertrucks to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police, the department has confirmed to TechCrunch. The Cybertruck fleet is the latest entry in a list of gifts Horowitz has given to the Las Vegas police — a relationship TechCrunch revealed in detail late last year…

Researchers have developed small robots that can work together as a collective that changes shape and even shifts between solid and “fluid-like” states — a concept that should be familiar to anyone still haunted by nightmares of the T-1000 robotic assassin from “Terminator 2.” A team led by Matthew Devlin of UC Santa Barbara described…

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek recently declared that its AI models could be very profitable — with some asterisks. In a post on X, DeepSeek boasted that its online services have a “cost profit margin” of 545%. However, that margin is calculated based on “theoretical income.” It discussed these numbers in more detail at the end…

Longevity is a hot trend in Silicon Valley these days, driven by rising interest — especially among the wealthy — in preventing disease through regular testing. A new player, Biograph, has just emerged from stealth, and it’s co-founded by one of the biggest names in longevity science: Dr. Peter Attia. Attia is a Canadian-American physician…

OpenAI intends to eventually integrate its AI video generation tool, Sora, directly into its popular consumer chatbot app, ChatGPT, company leaders said during a Friday office hours session on Discord. Today, Sora is only available through a dedicated web app OpenAI launched in December, which lets users access the AI video model of the same…