Meta has been quietly stashing dormant face recognition code on more than 50 million phones, WIRED reported this week, tucked inside the companion app that pairs with its Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses. If activated, the feature—known internally as NameTag—would let wearers identify people in front of them by matching captured faces against a biometric…
Supabase, the open supply database of alternative for the vibe-coding world, has raised a $500 million Collection F at a $10 billion pre-money valuation, the corporate introduced Friday. That’s about $10.5 billion after the funding. The newly minted decacorn has been doubling its valuation each few months for a few years now, as vibe-coding instruments…
NVIDIA’s Nemotron Speech team has released Nemotron 3.5 ASR. It is a 600M-parameter streaming Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) model. A single checkpoint transcribes 40 language-locales in real time. Punctuation and capitalization are built in natively. The model ships as open weights on Hugging Face. The license is OpenMDW-1.1. The architecture is a Cache-Aware FastConformer-RNNT. What…
Lectric eBikes, a Phoenix, Arizona-based company known for its practical and affordable XP series electric bikes, has launched three new brands so far this year — a Juiced Bikes relaunch, a new Juiced Powersports brand, and now a premium adventure brand called Monarc — an expansion strategy that runs counter to the wave of bankruptcies…
Hidden among the architectural landmarks of General Motors’ sprawling Warren Tech Center outside Detroit is a new cornerstone of the automaker’s $900 million bet on its electric future. The nondescript 500,000-square-foot pair of off-white boxes, which house GM’s new Battery Cell Development Center, might not look like much. But locked inside is the key to…
SpaceX has lined up one other compute deal forward of its historic IPO, this time with Google. The corporate introduced the deal in a regulatory filing on Friday. Underneath the phrases of the deal, Google can pay SpaceX $920 million monthly from October 2026 via June 2029 for entry to “roughly 110,000 NVIDIA GPUs, CPUs,…
Founders, your window to enter Startup Battlefield 200 closes in just three short days. Applications for Startup Battlefield 200 officially close on June 8, 11:59 p.m. PT. Do not wait any longer. Secure your shot at competing on the Disrupt Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 this October at San Francisco’s Moscone West. Thousands of startups have already stepped forward. If you’re building a company…
AI-first development is changing how software gets built. A new approach called “vibe coding” sits at the center of that shift. Developers describe what they want in plain language. An AI agent turns that description into working software. The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy. It captures a move away from line-by-line coding toward natural-language…
mock_server_code = r”’ from fastapi import FastAPI, Request import time app = FastAPI() STATE = {“calls”: 0} @app.post(“/v1/chat/completions”) async def chat_completions(request: Request): payload = await request.json() STATE[“calls”] += 1 model_name = payload.get(“model”, “mock-fara-7b”) if STATE[“calls”] == 1: content = ( “I will open a stable public test page so the browser-control loop can be demonstrated.\n”…
After a very profitable decade on Microsoft’s board, Reid Hoffman is stepping down, the company announced Thursday. Hoffman joined the board after Microsoft bought his company LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in 2016. Hoffman was on Microsoft’s board when it invested its first $1 billion into OpenAI in 2019. Hoffman was one of OpenAI’s original investors…
