Author: GT

MEXICO CITY (AP) — The videos roll through TikTok in 30-second flashes.Migrants trek in camouflage through dry desert terrain. Dune buggies roar up to the United States-Mexico border barrier. Families with young children pass through gaps in the wall. Helicopters, planes, yachts, tunnels and jet skis stand by for potential customers.Laced with emojis, the videos posted by smugglers offer a simple promise: If you don’t have a visa in the U.S., trust us. We’ll get you over safely.At a time when legal pathways to the U.S. have been slashed and criminal groups are raking in money from migrant smuggling, social…

We move thanks to coordination among many skeletal muscle fibers, all twitching and pulling in sync. While some muscles align in one direction, others form intricate patterns, helping parts of the body move in multiple ways.In recent years, scientists and engineers have looked to muscles as potential actuators for “biohybrid” robots — machines powered by soft, artificially grown muscle fibers. Such bio-bots could squirm and wiggle through spaces where traditional machines cannot. For the most part, however, researchers have only been able to fabricate artificial muscle that pulls in one direction, limiting any robot’s range of motion.Now MIT engineers have…

Users on social media have discovered a controversial use case for Google’s new Gemini AI model: removing watermarks from images, including from images published by Getty Images and other well-known stock media outfits. Last week, Google expanded access to its Gemini 2.0 Flash model’s image generation feature, which lets the model natively generate and edit image content. It’s a powerful capability, by all accounts. But it also appears to have few guardrails. Gemini 2.0 Flash will uncomplainingly create images depicting celebrities and copyrighted characters, and — as alluded to earlier — remove watermarks from existing photos. New skill unlocked: Gemini…

Meta won a legal victory this week against Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former employee who recently published a memoir of her time at the company titled “Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism.” An arbitrator ruled that the company has made a valid argument that Wynn-Williams, who worked at Facebook (now Meta) from 2011 to 2017, may have violated the non-disparagement agreement she signed when leaving the company. The ruling states that Wynn-Williams is temporarily prohibited from promoting — or, “to the extent within [her] control, from further publishing or distributing” — her book until private arbitration…

Joby Aviation is partnering with Virgin Atlantic to launch electric air taxis in the U.K., marking the seventh country in which the startup hopes to one day commercialize. Joby, which went public in 2021 via special purpose acquisition merger, did not provide a timeline for when it plans to launch its partnership with Virgin in the U.K. A spokesperson for the company told TechCrunch it would come sometime after Joby launches in the UAE and the U.S. Joby hopes to begin market testing in Dubai late this year or early next after delivering its first eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and…

In this week’s episode of the StrictlyVC Download podcast, veteran VC Aileen Lee was direct about a major consequence of the recent boom-and-bust cycle: many companies stuck in limbo aren’t just struggling to regain their footing after raising too much money at unsustainable valuations; they’ve also lost the champions who once backed them. Lee was discussing how limited partners hesitate to criticize powerful fund managers, fearing they’ll be shut out from investing in those firms again. But she imagined one thing they’d say if they could speak freely: “Everybody wants to get into X brand name fund, and so they…

In a world filled with “vibe coding,” Zach Yadegari, teen founder of Cal AI, stands in ironic, old-fashioned contrast.  Ironic because Yadegari and his co-founder, Henry Langmack, are both just 18 years old and recently graduated from high school. Yet their story, so far, is a classic. Launched in May, Cal AI has generated over 5 million downloads in eight months, Yadegari says. Better still, he tells TechCrunch that the customer retention rate is over 30% and that the app generated over $2 million in revenue last month.  Although TechCrunch couldn’t validate his download and revenue claims, Cal AI does have…

No company has capitalized on the AI revolution more dramatically than Nvidia. Its revenue, profitability, and cash reserves have skyrocketed since the introduction of ChatGPT over two years ago — and the many competitive generative AI services that have launched since. And its stock price soared.  During that period, the world’s leading high-performance GPU maker has used its ballooning fortunes to significantly increase investments in all sorts of startups but particularly in AI startups. The chip giant ramped up its venture capital activity in 2024, participating in 49 funding rounds for AI companies, a sharp increase from 34 in 2023,…

Frederic J. Brown | Afp | Getty ImagesOwnership of electric vehicles continues to rise in the U.S., with nearly six million battery electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids currently on the road. Even though that’s still a fraction of the overall market and the growth rate of EV sales has slowed, automakers remain invested in the eventual transition away from gasoline, as 2024 sales of traditional internal combustion engine cars fell below 80% for the first time in modern automotive history.Continued EV sales growth shows that at least for a significant portion of auto consumers, range anxiety is no longer an…

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. This week showed more optimism among startups than in other corners of the world, with entrepreneurs feeling confident enough to acquire other companies, raise fresh funding, and even say no to more money. Most interesting startup stories from the week Image Credits:Hinge Health Not quite four weddings and a funeral, but almost. Hinged: Hinge Health, a virtual physical therapy startup that uses technology to help treat chronic musculoskeletal conditions, filed to go…