Author: GT

A government report has found that surging investment has driven UK AI sector growth to outpace the wider economy by 150 times since 2022.The UK’s AI sector is clearly in the throes of a boom, with revenues shattering previous records to hit £23.9 billion in the last year. The engine room of this growth is a thriving and rapidly expanding community of over 5,800 AI companies—a 58 percent increase since 2023 alone.This isn’t just about big tech, either. The surge is being driven from the ground up by exciting startups. Small and medium-sized businesses make up over 90 percent of…

Funding season is about to restart in Europe after the summer lull, and if all goes well, it will be counting new unicorns in dozens — plural. While mega-rounds are less common than they were in 2021, this hasn’t prevented 12 European startups from raising rounds at valuations of more than $1 billion during the first half of 2025. As the usual caveat goes, past performance is not indicative of future results, but this bodes well for the rest of the year. Either way, this is also a good indication of the sectors that are hot among investors, from biotech…

LOS ANGELES (AP) — On a recent sunny morning in a channel at the Port of Los Angeles, seven blue steel structures that look like small boats are lowered into the ocean one by one. Attached to an unused wharf on a site that once housed oil tanks, they gently bob up and down with the waves to generate renewable power. Nearby, a sea lion peeks from the water and pelicans and sea gulls soar overhead. This is the nation’s first onshore wave energy site, and on Tuesday, Eco Wave Power will officially unveil the pilot installation and begin operating.…

InDrive, known for its bidding-based ride-hailing model across Asia and Latin America, is rolling out a “super-app” strategy aimed at frontier markets — expanding beyond cabs to deliver daily essentials to its users. Beginning with grocery deliveries in Kazakhstan, InDrive plans to expand into multiple verticals over the next 12 months across its top markets, including Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, Pakistan, Peru, and Mexico. The shift comes on the heels of more than 360 million app downloads and 6.5 billion transactions globally, cementing its position as the world’s second most-downloaded ride-hailing app, behind Uber, since 2022. “If customers use you more…

The Sizewell A and B nuclear power stations, operated by Electricite de France SA (EDF), in Sizewell, UK, on Friday, Jan. 26, 2024. Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty ImagesBloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty ImagesLONDON — Surging power demand has reignited interest in nuclear energy, but vast capital requirements and an uncertain political and regulatory climate raise questions about the sector’s fiscal capacity.Tech giants are pumping money into nuclear energy investments, looking to power energy-intensive data centers and realize their AI ambitions.AI and data centers are the “canary in the coal mine,” World Nuclear Association Director General Sama Bilbao y León…

KATHMANDU, Nepal (AP) — Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets of Nepal’s capital Monday to vent their anger against a decision by authorities to block most social media platforms including Facebook, X and YouTube, saying that the companies had failed to register and submit to government oversight. Protesters pushed through barbed wires and forced riot police to retreat as they surrounded the Parliament building. Police fired tear gas and water cannon but were outnumbered and sought safety inside the Parliament complex. The situation remained tense and the government announced a curfew for Monday around Parliament, the government…

Ride-hailing giant Uber and Chinese autonomous vehicle startup Momenta plan to start testing robotaxis in Munich, Germany starting in 2026 – the first continental European city either company has announced publicly – with plans to expand to other markets. The partnership was first unveiled in May 2025, when Uber said Momenta-powered vehicles would launch on its platform in Europe in 2026, initially with human safety operators onboard to monitor the vehicles and take control if needed. Momenta, founded in 2016, is one of China’s earliest autonomous vehicle (AV) companies. The Beijing-based startup has been testing self-driving cars in China since…

How can startups and developers actually monetize their AI products? A startup called Koah, which recently raised $5 million in seed funding, is betting that ads will be a big part of the answer. If you spend any time online, there’s a good chance you’ve seen plenty of ugly, AI-generated ads — but few to none when interacting with AI chatbots themselves. Koah co-founder and CEO Nic Baird argued that will inevitably change. “Once these things get outside San Francisco, there’s only one way to make [them profitable] on a global scale,” Baird told TechCrunch over Zoom. “It’s happened time…

A new research paper from OpenAI asks why large language models like GPT-5 and chatbots like ChatGPT still hallucinate, and whether anything can be done to reduce those hallucinations. In a blog post summarizing the paper, OpenAI defines hallucinations as “plausible but false statements generated by language models,” and it acknowledges that despite improvements, hallucinations “remain a fundamental challenge for all large language models” — one that will never be completely eliminated. To illustrate the point, researchers say that when they asked “a widely used chatbot” about the title of Adam Tauman Kalai’s Ph.D. dissertation, they got three different answers,…

Hyundai’s electric air taxi startup Supernal has paused work on its aircraft program after a rocky few months that saw staff cuts and the departure of its CEO and CTO, two people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The shakeup comes at a time when Supernal has barely gotten off the ground — literally. The first test flight of its technology demonstrator happened earlier this year. And though Supernal has performed subsequent tests, the company was still working toward its first untethered test flight before the pause. The company had planned to launch a commercial service in 2028. Supernal announced…