Author: GT

What happens when technology takes the wheel in our love lives? From dating apps and AI-powered matchmaking to full-on digital companionship, artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming a third party in our most personal relationships. But is it truly helping us find deeper connection — or just reshaping romance into an algorithmic illusion? Only on the AI Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, happening October 27-29 in San Francisco’s Moscone West, we’re bringing together three powerhouse voices to unpack the future of love, trust, and tech. Eugenia Kuyda, founder of Replika, the world’s leading AI companion platform with over 35 million users.…

Elon Musk’s xAI has reached an agreement with the U.S. government’s purchasing arm to sell its AI chatbot Grok to the federal government for under a dollar, pitting it against OpenAI and Anthropic.  Under the agreement between xAI and the General Services Administration (GSA), federal agencies will be charged 42 cents to use xAI’s chatbot Grok for a year and a half. OpenAI and Anthropic are offering their enterprise and government versions of ChatGPT and Claude, respectively, for $1 for a year.   The steep discount for federal agencies includes access to xAI engineers to help integrate the technology. The…

OpenAI released a new benchmark on Thursday that tests how its AI models perform compared to human professionals across a wide range of industries and jobs. The test, GDPval, is an early attempt at understanding how close OpenAI’s systems are to outperforming humans at economically valuable work — a key part of the company’s founding mission to develop artificial general intelligence, or AGI. OpenAI says its found that its GPT-5 model and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.1 “are already approaching the quality of work produced by industry experts.” That’s not to say that OpenAI’s models are going to start replacing humans…

When LGBTQ+ youth do not feel safe or accepted in their daily lives, they turn to the internet to seek community. Two new studies, conducted by The Trevor Project and Hopelab/Born This Way Foundation, each found that young LGBTQ+ people report greater rates of depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation or attempts when they do not have access to safe online communities. “The majority of LGBTQ+ young people agreed that they go online to connect with others because it is difficult to do so in their daily lives, with 38% somewhat agreeing and 36% strongly agreeing,” according to The Trevor Project’s…

Amazon has agreed to pay $2.5 billion to settle a lawsuit from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over allegations that it duped users into paying for Prime subscriptions and made it hard to cancel memberships. The company will be required to pay a $1 billion civil penalty and provide $1.5 billion in refunds to an estimated 35 million consumers harmed by the company’s “deceptive Prime enrollment practices,” the FTC says. Amazon is also required to stop its “unlawful enrollment and cancellation practices.” The suit, filed in June 2023 under the Biden administration, claimed that Amazon created confusing and deceptive user…

WASHINGTON (AP) — Microsoft said Thursday it had disabled services to a unit within the Israeli military after a company review had determined its artificial intelligence and cloud computing products were being used to help carry out mass surveillance of Palestinians.The action comes after The Associated Press and The Guardian published reports earlier this year revealing how the Israeli Ministry of Defense had been using Microsoft’s Azure platform to aid in the war in Gaza and occupation of the West Bank. Brad Smith, Microsoft’s vice chair and president, wrote in a blog post that the company was taking steps to…

British oil and gasoline company BP (British Petroleum) signage is being pictured in Warsaw, Poland, on July 29, 2024.Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty ImagesFive months ago, British energy major BP was firmly in the spotlight as a prime takeover candidate. Now, not so much.Shares of the London-listed oil giant have climbed more than 32% since early April, outperforming many of its U.S. and European rivals.The improving sentiment can be attributed to a range of factors, including BP’s fundamental strategic reset, a leadership shake-up, progress on its cost-cutting program and a string of recent oil discoveries.It marks a stark contrast to…

Food supply chains are notoriously messy. Orders arrive through different channels, staff spend hours manually entering them into clunky enterprise software systems, and compliance often depends on spreadsheets. For decades, software vendors have tried, with mixed success, to modernize the workflows behind the global movement of perishable goods. Now, a Y Combinator startup called Burnt thinks AI agents — software that can automatically handle tasks typically done by humans — can succeed where traditional enterprise software hasn’t in the trillion-dollar U.S. food market. The company, which automates back-office supply chain tasks with AI, has raised $3.8 million in seed funding…

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A federal judge on Thursday approved a $1.5 billion settlement between artificial intelligence company Anthropic and authors who allege nearly half a million books had been illegally pirated to train chatbots.U.S. District Judge William Alsup issued the preliminary approval in San Francisco federal court Thursday after the two sides worked to address his concerns about the settlement, which will pay authors and publishers about $3,000 for each of the books covered by the agreement. It does not apply to future works. “This is a fair settlement,” Alsup said, though he added that distributing it to all…

Dario Amodei, co-founder and chief executive officer of Anthropic, at the World Economic Forum in 2025.Stefan Wermuth | Bloomberg | Getty ImagesA federal judge on Thursday preliminarily approved Anthropic’s offer to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class action lawsuit with a group of authors, in what will be the largest publicly reported copyright recovery in history.The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, was brought last year by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson. It alleged that Anthropic illegally downloaded books from pirated databases like Library Genesis and Pirate Library…