AI & Tech

AMD released Instella-MoE-16B-A3B, a fully open Mixture-of-Experts language model trained from scratch on Instinct MI300X and MI325X GPUs. The model holds 16B total parameters but activates only 2.8B per token. AMD is publishing weights from every training stage, along with data mixtures, training configs, and inference code. Two systems-level choices carry the release: Gated Multi-head…

Despite a lawsuit from xAI, a Minnesota ban on apps that allow users to “nudify” images can move forward, according to NBC News. U.S. District Judge Donovan Frank’s ruling focused as much on the timing of xAI’s lawsuit as on the substance of the law itself. Frank wrote that xAI filed its request for a…

The smartphone industry’s next battleground may not be the phone itself, but how consumers get it. As premium devices become more expensive, Apple, Samsung, and others are betting that leasing, subscriptions, and guaranteed buyback programs can make upgrading more attractive. This week, Apple launched Apple Upgrade in the U.S. in partnership with Klarna, allowing consumers…

It’s summer. You are sweaty. There’s some unprecedented heat wave that’s even worse than the last unprecedented heat wave. You are uncomfortable. You’re getting sweatier by the second. What do you do? This predicament — one that’s becoming more and more common — just flat out sucks. But if you have a handheld mini fan…

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman seemed excited to share what he called a “cool use case” on Friday, posting that parents could “connect your family calendars and explain your kids’ interests” to the company’s new product ChatGPT Work, then “every morning for the drive to school, have it make a podcast that talks about one kid’s…

Screen-time apps aren’t effective for many people because, in the end, they depend on your willpower. They remind you to stop scrolling or let you set timers, but such notifications can be easy to ignore.  Autonomous Key takes a different approach to this issue simply by being a physical device. It’s an NFC key that…

Uber has partnered with — and in some cases made direct investments in — more than 30 autonomous vehicle companies over the past two years. And it’s taking a global approach. Here, TechCrunch tracks every one of those moves in one place. But first, a bit of history.  Uber was, at one time, developing and testing…

Doomscrolling can be addictive. It’s common to end up on the couch for hours, mindlessly scrolling through feeds, which inevitably messes up your posture and, in the end, just ends up making you feel bad about yourself. Your eyes definitely don’t like it, either. Fortunately, there are several apps that encourage you to get up…

Supabase has open sourced Supabase Evals, its benchmark and framework for testing how well AI agents build using Supabase. It runs coding agents including Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode against real tasks, such as building a schema, debugging a failed Edge Function, or fixing a broken RLS policy, then scores the result. It powers the…