Apple CEO Tim Cook signaled to investors the company is still open to acquisitions and partnerships to move things forward on the AI front. The comments were made this week during the company’s Q4 2025 earnings call. The exec also offered a brief update about Apple’s next-generation, AI-powered Siri, saying …
Read More »Perplexity strikes multi-year licensing deal with Getty Images
AI search startup Perplexity has signed a multi-year licensing deal with Getty Images, which gives it permission to display images from Getty across its AI-powered search and discovery tools. The deal marks a notable shift for the company, which has been hit by allegations of content scraping and plagiarism, and …
Read More »Government hackers breached telecom giant Ribbon for months before getting caught
U.S. telecommunications giant Ribbon has confirmed that government-backed hackers had access to its network for almost a year before getting caught, according to a public filing. The telco giant said in a 10-Q disclosure last week with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that a suspected “nation-state actor had gained …
Read More »AI researchers ’embodied’ an LLM into a robot – and it started channeling Robin Williams
The AI researchers at Andon Labs — the people who gave Anthropic Claude an office vending machine to run and hilarity ensued — have published the results of a new AI experiment. This time they programmed a vacuum robot with various state-of-the-art LLMs as a way to see how ready …
Read More »Rising energy prices put AI and data centers in the crosshairs
As tech companies tout their plans for massive new data centers, consumers are increasingly worried the AI-driven gold rush will ultimately drive up the price they pay for electricity, according to a new survey. The report, commissioned by solar installer Sunrun, found that 80% of consumers are worried about the …
Read More »Elon Musk wants you to know that Sam Altman got a refund for his Tesla Roadster
Elon Musk and Sam Altman are still taking swipes at each other on Musk’s social media platform X. While both men were founders at OpenAI, where Altman is CEO, they have subsequently sparred across social media, court filings, and corporate blog posts.The latest exchange began when Altman posted what he …
Read More »Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong trolls the prediction markets
On Thursday, at the end of Coinbase’s third quarter earnings call, CEO Brian Armstrong admitted that he was “a little bit distracted,” because he’d been “tracking the prediction market about what Coinbase will say on their next earnings call.” “And I just want to add here the words Bitcoin, Ethereum, …
Read More »AWS exceeds Wall Street’s expectations as demand for cloud infra remains high
Amazon’s cloud infrastructure service, Amazon Web Services (AWS), is on track to record its strongest year of growth in three years, fueled by the AI industry’s unprecedented demand for computing power. AWS is growing 20% year-over-year and ended the third quarter with $33.1 billion in sales through the first nine …
Read More »Hackers threaten to leak data after breaching University of Pennsylvania to send mass emails
On Friday morning, University of Pennsylvania alumni, students, staff, and community affiliates received several emails from hackers purporting to represent the university’s Graduate School of Education (GSE). “We have terrible security practices and are completely unmeritocratic,” read the email. “We love breaking federal rules like FERPA (all your data will …
Read More »Tattd gave four TechCrunch writers tattoos at Startup Battlefield
On Tuesday morning at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, our senior producer Maggie Nye rolled up her jacket sleeve to show me her new tattoo: a classic, pixelated cursor arrow. TechCrunch’s Becca Szkutak got a matching cursor, while Theresa Loconsolo got a smiling moon. I guessed that at some point during all …
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