Waymo robotaxis are no longer available on Uber’s ride-hail app in Phoenix, Arizona, ending a nearly three-year partnership in the city, both companies confirmed to TechCrunch on Monday. Uber said it is readying the launch of a separate autonomous vehicle partnership in the city, but did not name the partner. Waymo told TechCrunch that the…
Just eight months after launching its commercial service, AI leaderboard provider Arena, which originated as a research project at UC Berkeley in 2023, has reached $100 million in annualized run-rate revenue. Arena is best known for its popular crowdsourced AI model performance leaderboard, generated from over 10 million user evaluations. Its consumer website lets a…
Music streaming service TIDAL is the latest to take aim at AI-generated music with the introduction of a new policy that will prevent fully AI-generated music from making money on its platform. In addition, TIDAL will use automated tools to remove AI-generated music that attempts to impersonate an artist or a group, the company said….
Launch company Rocket Lab is buying satellite operator Iridium, putting it in a position to become a more full-fledged space services company, and continuing a wave of consolidation in the industry. The deal, which hasn’t yet closed, will see Rocket Lab acquire Iridium’s stock for $54 per share, valuing the satellite company at $8 billion….
Jay Li doesn’t recommend getting sued by Tesla if you’re trying to get a startup off the ground. But he does think his company, Proception, might be better off for having endured the experience. “I think it’s kind of like a resilience test, or pressure test,” he told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview. “People say…
Unlike AI gadgets like Rabbit or Humane, companies building dedicated gadgets for recording and transcribing meetings have actually seen some traction. The market is huge — though a bit constrained, as smartphones work fine for such tasks when paired with note-taking apps — and startups like Plaud, Mobvoi, Anker, Viaim, and Vibe have jumped in…
EverMind has released EverOS, an open-source memory runtime for AI agents. It ships under an Apache 2.0 license. It targets a problem agent builders hit early: large language models are stateless. The conversation ends, and the context is gone. EverOS proposes a different substrate. Instead of locking memory inside a vector database, it writes memory…
Humanoid robots might be able to run, dance, and occasionally kick people, but to become truly human, they’re going to need to learn how to do all sorts of menial chores at work. Flexion Robotics, a Swiss startup founded by ex-Nvidia robotics researchers, thinks it has the solution. The company has developed a way to…
Streaming advertisements could be getting rather a lot quieter this week. A California regulation banning streaming companies from exhibiting advertisements “louder than the video content material” that they accompany is about to take impact on Wednesday, July 1. (Present laws already imposes comparable quantity restrictions on broadcast and cable TV commercials.) Ars Technica notes that…
Has Silicon Valley been building the wrong things? Despite its self help-y title, writer/designer/academic Ian Bogost’s forthcoming book “The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life” asks some pointed questions about how technology has transformed our experience of the physical world. Using Bogost’s popular article in the Atlantic about the decline of stick…
