Google said that it is adding Venmo as a payment option today on Google Play for purchases including games, apps, add-ons, and other digital content. The company said that users can use Venmo’s wallet or other linked payment methods, such as bank accounts and cards, to pay for subscriptions or tip creators within different content-based…
I was recently digging through my Instagram settings, trying to disable Meta’s now-defunct feature that allowed anyone to create AI deepfakes of me without consent. Anger bubbled up inside as I tapped through the Kafkaesque opt-out process. Rather than throwing my phone across the room, I blurted to my partner that we should leave San…
When Tim Millard obtained an e mail about interviewing for a media relations job in January, six months into his job hunt, he assumed he’d converse to a human. When he was as an alternative instructed to report himself answering a collection of questions on digicam, he felt a well-known pang of resignation—one which had…
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…
Programming with Claude Code will quickly require even much less human oversight, as Anthropic says it’s making auto mode the default for Professional, Max, and Staff accounts, beginning on August 14. The corporate first unveiled a check model of auto mode in March, pitching it as a approach to steadiness velocity and management. As Anthropic…
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…
