Author: GT

Spotify has acquired the community-run database tracking sampled music, WhoSampled, the company announced Wednesday. The streaming service had also shared the news as part of its Wednesday blog post about new song credits features. Deal terms were not disclosed, but Spotify confirmed to TechCrunch the acquisition is for both the WhoSampled team and database. (The company had only a handful of employees, per data on PitchBook and LinkedIn, which both confirm around 10 staffers.) Launched in 2008, London-based WhoSampled offers an extensive database of songs, samples, covers, remixes, artists, and more. According to its website, it’s now tracking more than…

MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — Technology giant Meta on Thursday began sending thousands of young Australians a two-week warning to downland their digital histories and delete their accounts from Facebook, Instagram and Threads before a world-first social media ban on accounts of children younger than 16 takes effect.The Australian government announced two weeks ago that the three Meta platforms plus Snapchat, TikTok, X and YouTube must take reasonable steps to exclude Australian account holders younger than 16, beginning Dec. 10.California-based Meta on Thursday became the first of the targeted tech companies to outline how it will comply with the law. Meta…

Enterprise AI deployment has been facing a fundamental tension: organisations need sophisticated language models but baulk at the infrastructure costs and energy consumption of frontier systems. NTT Inc.’s recent launch of tsuzumi 2, a lightweight large language model (LLM) running on a single GPU, demonstrates how businesses are resolving this constraint—with early deployments showing performance matching larger models at a fraction of the operational cost.The business case is straightforward. Traditional large language models require dozens or hundreds of GPUs, creating electricity consumption and operational cost barriers that make AI deployment impractical for many organisations. (GPU Cost Comparison)For enterprises operating in markets with constrained power…

Waymo driverless vehicles charge at a Waymo charging station in Santa Monica, California, U.S., May 30, 2025. Daniel Cole | ReutersAlphabet’s Waymo on Thursday announced that it will soon begin manually driving its robotaxi vehicles in Minneapolis, Tampa and New Orleans. The Google sister company will start operating test drives in that trio of towns with human drivers in hopes of launching its driverless robotaxi service there as soon as next year, the company said. If Waymo does begin operating in those markets next year, that would bring the robotaxi company’s list of 2026 planned expansions to 15 cities. On…

From electronic health records and blood tests to the stream of data from wearable devices, the amount of health information people generate is accelerating rapidly. Yet, many users struggle to connect this trove of data in a meaningful way and actually use it to improve their health. Function Health, which offers a regular lab testing service to help people track their health, wants to change that by consolidating health data and making it usable for its customers by connecting that data to an AI model. To further that effort, the company recently raised $298 million in a Series B round…

LONDON (AP) — Warner Music Group resolved its copyright battle with Udio and signed a deal to work with the AI music startup on a new song creation service that will allow users to remix tunes by established artists. It’s the second agreement between a major record label and Udio, a chatbot-style song generation tool. The deals underline how AI is shaking up the music industry. AI-generated music has been flooding streaming services amid the rise of song generators that instantly spit out new tunes based on prompts typed in by users without any musical knowledge. The synthetic music boom…

January Ventures co-founder Jennifer Neundorfer stopped by the Equity podcast during TechCrunch Disrupt to chat about fundraising in this very AI-driven market.   Founders and investors alike are obsessed with AI, and even Neundorfer said her firm is looking at ways to use AI to make their work more efficient, such as helping to do due diligence on the market and competition. As for companies being built, she has a preference for the founders looking to create something entirely new.   “Where I tend to get excited is when I see someone who is using AI to do something that isn’t 10x better. It’s…

We’re all chasing talent. It’s become as crucial to success as building amazing products, and a lot of businesses are feeling the squeeze. The problem is that demand for people with AI skills is skyrocketing, but the supply isn’t keeping up. The OECD points this out – lots of us need AI expertise, but very few job postings actually require it.But there’s a promising trend emerging, and it’s happening in Europe. On the continent and in the UK, some things are happening in AI education – experiments that use AI to change how people learn. These are glimpses into the…

When Anthony Sardain began developing Cavela in 2023, an AI startup that helps brands automate supplier sourcing, he did not foresee that new tariffs would drive customers to become increasingly wary of manufacturing products in China. “You don’t just walk into Vietnam and build up a supply chain,” Sardain told TechCrunch. “A lot of brands find one supplier, and they hang on for the rest of their life, because they really don’t want to lose it.” That’s especially true for small and midsize companies that lack dedicated, global sourcing departments. Sardain claims that Cavela solves this problem through its AI…

They’re cute, even cuddly, and promise learning and companionship — but artificial intelligence toys are not safe for kids, according to children’s and consumer advocacy groups urging parents not to buy them during the holiday season. These toys, marketed to kids as young as 2 years old, are generally powered by AI models that have already been shown to harm children and teenagers, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, according to an advisory published Thursday by the children’s advocacy group Fairplay and signed by more than 150 organizations and individual experts such as child psychiatrists and educators. “The serious harms that AI…