AI & Tech

ByteDance’s Seed team has introduced SeedRealtime, a native audio-visual full-duplex LLM. The model fuses audio, video and text in a single unified architecture. It interacts in real time over continuous multimodal streams, rather than one turn at a time. Seed positions it as a step toward omni-modal interaction, and claims three breakthroughs: joint audio-visual understanding,…

NVIDIA has released NemotronLabs VoiceChat 11B, an open 11B end-to-end speech-to-speech model for real-time, full-duplex conversation. Instead of chaining ASR, an LLM, and TTS, it performs streaming speech understanding and speech generation in one unified network. That removes the multi-model orchestration and API handoffs a cascaded stack requires, and cuts end-to-end latency: measured smooth turn-taking…

Situational Awareness may have had to sell off the majority of its public portfolio last month, but the AI-focused hedge fund is still making some big bets. This week, the fund invested $400 million into Source Foundry, a startup founded by Stanford researchers aiming to make chip manufacturing faster and cheaper, according to The Wall…

LLM applications fail in ways traditional software does not. The same prompt can produce different outputs. A retrieval step can return the wrong document while every HTTP status reads 200. An agent can loop through fourteen tool calls, burn thousands of tokens, and deliver a confidently wrong answer. Standard application…

Over the past few months, AI agents undergoing cybersecurity evaluations have escaped their boundaries, accessed the internet, and, in some cases, hacked into real-world systems. The incidents have involved models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and most recently, Chinese AI lab Moonshot AI, with testing conducted by several different organizations including a cyber evaluation startup called…

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility, your hub for the future of transportation and now, more than ever, the role AI is playing in it. To get this in your inbox, sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! In just a few days, Amazon-owned Zoox will start charging for robotaxi rides. This might…

In her upcoming book “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State,” Jill Lepore warns that tech companies are increasingly replacing the functions of democratic government. This shift, she said, marks “a return to tyranny and mystification in the form of rule by algorithms, corporations, machines.” On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, I…

Bill Swearingen has spent the past year running largely the same test, over and over again. The goal was to produce a computer-generated pattern that could block the surveillance cameras lining America’s streets from detecting it. Some 31 million tests later, Swearingen says he can now produce patterns on-demand that, when applied to clothing and…

What every U.K. AI startup wants to know these days is, how can I get office space in King’s Cross?   The area is so hot that a VC firm allegedly recently won a deal by promising a founder office space in the neighborhood. “We stop at nothing to win deals [for] and to support”…