Author: GT

Market disruption and shockwaves through Silicon Valley marked Chinese startup DeepSeek’s launch, challenging some of the fundamental assumptions of how artificial intelligence companies had operated and scaled.In less than a couple of years, the Beijing-based newcomer has accomplished what many thought impossible: creating AI models that compete with industry giants while spending only a fraction of their competitors’ budgets teaching models and inferring responses.The impact at the time of the public launch was immediate and measurable. According to the South China Morning Post, major tech stocks, including Nvidia, Microsoft, and Meta, experienced significant declines as investors grappled with the implications…

Igor Babuschkin, a co-founder of Elon Musk’s xAI startup, announced his departure from the company on Wednesday in a post on X. Babuschkin led engineering teams at xAI and helped build the startup into one of Silicon Valley’s leading AI model developers just a few years after it was founded. “Today was my last day at xAI, the company that I helped start with Elon Musk in 2023,” Babuschkin wrote in the post. “I still remember the day I first met Elon, we talked for hours about AI and what the future might hold. We both felt that a new…

Iraq was plunged into a nationwide blackout earlier this week, as a temperature surge to 122 degrees Fahrenheit (50° Celcius) — and subsequent spiking demand for electricity — pushed the country’s faltering power grid to the breaking point. For a country that has seen as much conflict and instability as Iraq, this could come as unsurprising – except for the fact that the nation is OPEC’s second-largest oil producer and has the world’s fifth-largest proven oil reserves. Scores of international energy companies have facilities in the Middle Eastern country, and billions of dollars have been invested in its power sector.…

Airbnb has launched a new feature called “Reserve Now, Pay Later” that lets users in the U.S. reserve a property without paying up front, potentially allowing people to cancel their bookings with less hassle if their plans change. The feature is applicable to properties that have a “flexible” or “moderate” cancellation policy. Flexible policies let users cancel their reservation up to 24 hours before they check in, while moderate policies allow for no-fee cancellations until five days before check-in. Users will need to pay the full amount for their booking before the listing’s free cancellation period ends. Airbnb will send…

DeepSeek’s plan to train its new AI model, R2, on Huawei’s Ascend chips has failed and forced a retreat to Nvidia while delaying launch.For months, the narrative pushed by Beijing has been one of unstoppable technological progress and a march towards self-sufficiency. However, reality has a habit of biting back. The recent troubles of Chinese AI darling DeepSeek is a textbook example of where ambition meets the hard wall of technical limitations.After the successful launch of its R1 model in January, DeepSeek found itself under pressure from China to champion the national cause. According to three people speaking to the…

Apple announced on Thursday it’s introducing a redesigned Blood Oxygen feature for some Watch Series 8, Series 10, and Apple Watch Ultra. With this move, Apple is bringing back blood oxygen monitoring by tweaking the feature to get around the International Trade Commission’s (ITC) import ban. Blood oxygen data will be measured and calculated on the user’s paired iPhone, and results can be viewed in the Respiratory section of the Health app. This means users won’t be able to view the data on their Apple Watch, as they’ll need to do so on their iPhone. Apple says the update announced…

Alibaba is moving into the smart glasses market with a device powered by its own AI models, part of a wider $52.4 billion furthering of AI and cloud computing. The Quark AI Glasses marks the company’s first step into the wearables category and is due to launch in China by the end of 2025.The glasses will run on Alibaba’s Qwen large language model and its AI assistant, Quark. Quark is already available as an app in China, but this will be the first time the company is pairing it with hardware to reach more users.The Hangzhou-based firm has been one…

There aren’t many founders who can say they’ve steered the same company from scrappy startup to publicly traded platform while keeping their edge — but co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie isn’t most founders. At TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, happening October 27–29 at Moscone West in San Francisco, Levie joins us live on the Disrupt Stage to share how he’s kept Box innovating and relevant through two decades of tech cycles. He’ll unpack what reinvention really looks like inside a public company, what AI is changing (and not changing) in enterprise software, and why staying sharp means questioning everything — even your…

Investors once saw Canadian AI startup Cohere as a promising contender to challenge OpenAI and Anthropic in the race to build frontier AI models, with its backers pouring roughly $1 billion behind CEO Aidan Gomez, who co-authored a seminal paper on LLMs when he was a 20-year-old Google intern. But Cohere’s AI models have fallen behind the state-of-the-art, and its business hasn’t scaled like its competitors. Now, the company is bringing in a veteran research leader to revamp its AI efforts: Cohere has hired Joelle Pineau, Meta’s former VP of AI research who previously oversaw the tech giant’s fundamental AI…

MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — A senior lawyer in Australia has apologized to a judge for filing submissions in a murder case that included fake quotes and nonexistent case judgments generated by artificial intelligence.The blunder in the Supreme Court of Victoria state is another in a litany of mishaps AI has caused in justice systems around the world.Defense lawyer Rishi Nathwani, who holds the prestigious legal title of King’s Counsel, took “full responsibility” for filing incorrect information in submissions in the case of a teenager charged with murder, according to court documents seen by The Associated Press on Friday.“We are deeply…