Author: GT

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — Tanzania ‘s presidential election teetered toward chaos on Wednesday as protests erupted, the military was deployed, internet service was cut and a curfew was announced in the commercial capital, Dar es Salaam.Critics of President Samia Suluhu Hassan, who seeks a second term, and the Chama Cha Mapinduzi party that’s ruled since independence in 1961 went into the streets to protest the harassment of opposition leaders, asserting that it had limited the election choices.The U.S. Embassy issued a security alert citing “country-wide” protests in the east African nation.Tanzania’s inspector general of police, Camillus Wambura, announced the curfew…

Uber said Wednesday that the San Francisco Bay Area will be the first market for its specially built autonomous taxi, which is expected to launch in late 2026.The San Francisco ride-hailing company said in July it was developing a robotaxi with the electric car company Lucid and the self-driving technology company Nuro Inc. The vehicle is exclusive to Uber but is based on the Lucid Gravity SUV.Uber said Lucid recently delivered test vehicles to Nuro and said it plans to have 100 test vehicles on the road in the coming months.Within six years, Uber plans to deploy 20,000 or more…

AI startup company, Counterintuitive, has set out to build “reasoning-native computing,” enabling machines to understand rather than simply mimic. Such a breakthrough has the potential to shift AI from pattern recognition to genuine comprehension, paving the way for systems that can think and make decisions – in other words, to be more “human-like.”Counterintuitive Chairman, Gerard Rego, spoke of what the company terms the ‘twin trap’ problem facing AI, stating the company’s first goal is to solve two key problems that limit current AI systems that prevent even the largest AI systems from being stable, efficient, and genuinely intelligent.The first trap…

Cfoto | Future Publishing | Getty ImagesCharacter.AI on Wednesday announced that it will soon shut off the ability for minors to have free-ranging chats, including romantic and therapeutic conversations, with the startup’s artificial intelligence chatbots.The Silicon Valley startup, which allows users to create and interact with character-based chatbots, announced the move as part of an effort to make its app safer and more age-appropriate for those under 18.Last year, 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III, committed suicide after forming sexual relationships with chatbots on Character.AI’s app. Many AI developers, including OpenAI and Facebook-parent Meta, have come under scrutiny after users have committed suicide…

Astro Teller, CEO of X, Alphabet’s “moonshot factory,” where the company incubates the nearly impossible, shared a look into what makes a moonshot and detailed the company’s “fail fast” mantra at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 conference on Monday. There’s still plenty of time to get a ticket, and with two days left, we’re offering a 50% discount. Notable companies that started out as moonshots from X’s moonshot factory include Waymo and Wing. Teller noted that X has a “2% hit rate,” which means that most of the things the company tries don’t work out, and that’s okay. He said X…

At TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, Sequoia managing partner Roelof Botha argued that the venture industry isn’t an asset class and that throwing more money into Silicon Valley doesn’t lead to better companies. “Investing in venture is a return-free risk,” Botha said during an interview on TechCrunch Disrupt’s main stage on Monday. “Anybody who’s studied the capital asset pricing model understands the joke of that. The reason I came up with this is, if you look at the history of venture capital, it’s an asset that’s uncorrelated with other asset classes.” “And so the thinking for many allocators was you should allocate…

BEIJING, China (AP) — The Chinese government has blanketed the country with the world’s largest network of surveillance cameras. Some cameras swivel, ensuring sweeping views of public squares. Others scan license plates of passing cars, allowing police to track vehicles in real-time. At night, cameras light up across China’s cities, shining lights down alleys and corners. Over the past few decades, the Chinese government has rolled out a series of high-tech surveillance projects aimed at bringing the entire country under watch, including “Sky Net” and the “Golden Shield”. A worker naps near a security camera along a deserted beach near…

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks to members of the media as he arrives at a lodge for the Allen & Co. Sun Valley Conference on July 8, 2025 in Sun Valley, Idaho.Kevin Dietsch | Getty Images News | Getty ImagesOpenAI on Wednesday announced two reasoning models that developers can use to classify a range of online safety harms on their platforms. The artificial intelligence models are called gpt-oss-safeguard-120b and gpt-oss-safeguard-20b, and their names reflect their sizes. They are fine-tuned, or adapted, versions of OpenAI’s gpt-oss models, which the company announced in August. OpenAI is introducing them as so-called open-weight models, which means…

OpenAI is offering its ChatGPT Go plan available free of charge for one year to users in India who sign up during a limited promotional period starting November 4, as the company looks to expand in one of its top markets. On Tuesday, OpenAI announced the promotion but did not specify how long the offer would remain available. Existing ChatGPT Go subscribers in India will also be eligible for the free 12-month plan, the company said. Priced at less than $5 per month, ChatGPT Go launched in India in August as OpenAI’s most affordable paid subscription plan. The service later…

U.S. lawmakers have tried four times since September last year to close what they called a glaring loophole: China is getting around export bans on the sale of powerful American AI chips by renting them through U.S. cloud services instead.But the proposals prompted a flurry of activity from more than 100 lobbyists from tech companies and their trade associations trying to weigh in, according to disclosure reports.The result: All four times, the proposal failed, including just last month. As leaders Donald Trump and Xi Jinping prepare for a long-heralded meeting Thursday, the sale of U.S. technology to China is among…