Author: GT

Uber announced Friday yet another autonomous vehicle partnership as it leverages its dominant ride-hail and delivery position while relying on partners to supply the self-driving tech it isn’t building in-house. Today, the lucky startup is Chinese self-driving firm Momenta. The tie-up comes a day after Uber added Ann Arbor, Michigan-based May Mobility to its roster of AV collaborators, which also includes Volkswagen, Waymo, Wayve, WeRide and many others. Uber said it would add Momenta’s robotaxis to the app starting in Europe in early 2026, with safety operators onboard. Momenta CEO Xudong Cao said the partnership “completes the key ecosystem needed…

HANOVER, N.H. (AP) — Sachi Schmidt-Hori has never played Assassin’s Creed Shadows, but facing an onslaught of online harassment from its fans, she quickly developed her own gameplay style: confronting hate with kindness.Schmidt-Hori, an associate professor of Japanese literature and culture at Dartmouth College, worked as a narrative consultant on the latest installment in the popular Ubisoft video game franchise. The game launched March 20, but the vitriol directed at Schmidt-Hori began in May 2024 with the release of a promotional trailer.“Once I realized that I was by myself — nobody was defending me — I just decided to do…

A recently released Google AI model scores worse on certain safety tests than its predecessor, according to the company’s internal benchmarking. In a technical report published this week, Google reveals that its Gemini 2.5 Flash model is more likely to generate text that violates its safety guidelines than Gemini 2.0 Flash. On two metrics, “text-to-text safety” and “image-to-text safety,” Gemini 2.5 Flash regresses 4.1% and 9.6%, respectively. Text-to-text safety measures how frequently a model violates Google’s guidelines given a prompt, while image-to-text safety evaluates how closely the model adheres to these boundaries when prompted using an image. Both tests are…

Huione Group, the Cambodia-based conglomerate that the U.S. Treasury Department wants to cut out of the U.S. financial system, received $98 billion worth of crypto since 2014 through illicit schemes like money laundering, pig butchering and online scams, according to blockchain security firm Elliptic. The company, which has links to the Asian country’s ruling Hun family, runs a Telegram-based marketplace where users can purchase personal data, money laundering services and even electric shackles intended for use on human beings. “Huione Group has come under intense scrutiny this week, with the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) identifying the Cambodia-based…

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! Your usual host Kirsten has passed the reins to me, Rebecca Bellan, for the day, and I want to talk about Aurora Innovation and its last-minute save.  Aurora had been promising to launch the U.S.’ first fully autonomous commercial trucking service in April this year, after pushing back its original 2024 debut. With just (proverbial) minutes to spare, Aurora pulled off the win. Aurora says it has run over 1,200 miles of…

As the Dubai Token2049 conference concludes, one key takeaway is that the narrative around bitcoin (BTC) is swiftly expanding beyond its traditional role as a store of value to a potential DeFi asset competing with Ethereum and Solana. Prominent industry players like Franklin Templeton view this development as a positive step, confident it will enhance bitcoin’s utility without diluting its core appeal as a store of value as purists or maximalists fear. “I don’t think focusing on Bitcoin DeFi will dilute or complicate Bitcoin’s core narrative,” Kevin Farrelly, managing principal of blockchain venture capital at Franklin Templeton and VP of…

Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom says AI companies are trying too hard to “juice engagement” by pestering their users with follow-up questions, instead of providing actually useful insights. Systrom said the tactics represent “a force that’s hurting us,” comparing them to those used by social media companies to expand aggressively.  “You can see some of these companies going down the rabbit hole that all the consumer companies have gone down in trying to juice engagement,” he said at StartupGrind this week. “Every time I ask a question, at the end it asks another little question to see if it can get…

Illustration: da-kuk (Getty Images) MGX, a fund backed by Abu Dhabi, will make a $2 billion investment in the cryptocurrency exchange Binance Holdings Ltd using a digital coin developed by a Trump family firm. President Donald Trump’s son Eric announced on Thursday that the USD1 stablecoin, developed by his family’s World Liberty Financial, will be the official stablecoin backing MGX’s investment in crypto exchange Binance. The deal with the foreign government is expected to generate hundreds of millions of dollars for the Trump family. Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies that aim to maintain a one-to-one value with a less volatile asset like…

In February, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) began soliciting public input pertaining to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) — a move suggesting reform at the agency is imminent. Since then, the SEC, in line with President Trump, has taken a far less adversarial stance towards the cryptocurrency industry, as evidenced by the appointment of crypto-friendly personnel and the abandonment of numerous lawsuits and investigations into crypto companies. But DOGE has the potential to implement further change, and interest in the SEC signals growing pressure towards regulators to reassess their approach to digital assets. In response to the…

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm since its launch in November 2022. What started as a tool to supercharge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved into a behemoth with 300 million weekly active users. 2024 was a big year for OpenAI, from its partnership with Apple for its generative AI offering, Apple Intelligence, the release of GPT-4o with voice capabilities, and the highly-anticipated launch of its text-to-video model Sora. OpenAI also faced its share of internal drama, including the notable exits of high-level execs like co-founder and longtime chief…