A set of parents and their children in Illinois and California filed a lawsuit last week in federal court in Chicago alleging that Meta illegally used their Facebook and Instagram photos to build NameTag, an unreleased face-recognition system for its smart glasses, and to train generative AI models including Emu and Muse Image. The proposed…
Cerberus, WeGlobal AI, and LOOQ took the top three spots at the regional final of Road to TechCrunch Startup Battlefield 2026 and will represent Central Eurasia in Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 in San Francisco on October 13-15, before 10,000+ tech leaders attending. The three emerged from a field of 22 finalists, chosen…
Matt Mullenweg has posted a message to Automattic’s Slack, claiming he is back in control as CEO of the WordPress.com parent company, according to a screenshot of the message seen by TechCrunch, which was confirmed by multiple employee sources. The post arrives only days after Automattic’s board voted to oust Mullenweg as CEO for unknown…
Nscale, the buzzy U.K.-based AI data center startup, has appointed former OpenAI, Meta and Instacart executive Fidji Simo to its board. Simo joins high-profile tech executives Sheryl Sandberg, Susan Decker and Nick Clegg on Nscale’s board ahead of the startup’s anticipated IPO this fall. Formerly CEO of AGI Deployment at OpenAI, essentially the No. 2…
At its annual Roblox Developer Conference (RDC), the company behind the popular gaming platform announced several new features, including new game-creation tools, expanded NPC (non-player character) capabilities, and the ability to make games available across platforms, including the web. The company is also launching a dedicated Roblox Card and Roblox Wallet for creators. In addition,…
How do you interpret the resignation of that Anthropic engineer, who’s saying the companies are reckless and gambling with our lives? On the one hand, you seem to agree that the companies are being reckless; on the other hand, you’ve made clear that you think the “AI will cause the end of civilization” debate is…
Hardware crypto wallet maker Trezor is warning customers for the second time in as many months that one of the companies it relies on was hacked, exposing the data of Trezor’s customers to hackers. In a blog post this week, the hardware wallet maker said a cyberattack on Brevo, a marketing tech company that Trezor…
Training an LLM to call tools reliably requires datasets that pair user queries with correct tool-use chains. Producing that data at scale has been slow and expensive. A team of researchers from Google, the University of Tokyo, RIKEN AIP, and Tohoku University introduce ToolGrad. The research work inverts the usual pipeline: build a verified tool…
Earlier this yr, Rishub Jain left his place as a man-made intelligence researcher at Google DeepMind after a revelation. As he labored on new fashions, he got here to imagine that he and everybody else on AI’s frontier have been ceding management. By utilizing AI’s coding abilities to speed up work on the following technology…
Pocket FM, an Indian audio storytelling platform, has doubled its annualized revenue run rate to $500 million over the past year as it increasingly turns to artificial intelligence to produce its content. AI now powers 93% of Pocket FM’s overall catalog and is used to produce 99% of its new content, co-founder and CEO Rohan…
