Author: GT

We’re seeing reports across social media that users of Elon Musk’s X are getting stuck in endless loops and, in some cases, getting locked out of their X account, following a mandatory two-factor security change that seems to have gone wrong. On October 24, X said in a post that it was asking users who rely on passkeys or hardware security keys (such as YubiKeys) as their method of two-factor authentication to re-enroll using the x.com domain. (Users who use an authenticator app are unaffected.) X said this was part of an effort to retire the older twitter.com domain, which…

BRUSSELS (AP) — European Union regulators said Thursday they’re investigating whether Google is unfairly demoting some content from media publishers in search results under a policy the company says is aimed at combating scammers. Brussels moved forward despite the risk of incurring the wrath of President Donald Trump, who has lashed out at the 27-nation bloc’s digital regulations and vowed to retaliate if American tech companies are penalized.The investigation could result in the latest multibillion-euro fine for the U.S. digital giant from the European Commission, which is the bloc’s highest antitrust enforcer.“We are concerned that Google’s policies do not allow…

Deepwatch, a cybersecurity firm that makes an AI-powered detection and response platform, laid off dozens of employees on Wednesday, citing AI as one of the reasons. John DiLullo, CEO at Deepwatch, told TechCrunch in an email that the company “is aligning our organization to accelerate our significant investments in AI and automation.” A current Deepwatch employee, who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak with the press, told TechCrunch that the layoffs affected between 60 and 80 staffers, out of a workforce of around 250 employees. A post on Linkedin by a person who said…

When former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo spoke at TechCrunch Disrupt, someone from the audience asked him if HBO’s hit satire “Silicon Valley” would be revived. Costolo, who was a writer for the show, essentially answered no (at timestamp 38:17). While the writers talk about that regularly, he said, they don’t pursue it because today’s actual Silicon Valley is so bizarre, it can’t be parodied.   The latest case in point is a new company called Clad Labs that launched out of Y Combinator this week. Clad’s product is so outside-the-box that people thought it was an April Fools’ joke in November. …

Baidu’s latest ERNIE model, a super-efficient multimodal AI, is beating GPT and Gemini on key benchmarks and targets enterprise data often ignored by text-focused models.For many businesses, valuable insights are locked in engineering schematics, factory-floor video feeds, medical scans, and logistics dashboards. Baidu’s new model, ERNIE-4.5-VL-28B-A3B-Thinking, is designed to fill this gap.What’s interesting to enterprise architects is not just its multimodal capability, but its architecture. It’s described as a “lightweight” model, activating only three billion parameters during operation. This approach targets the high inference costs that often stall AI-scaling projects. Baidu is betting on efficiency as a path to adoption,…

Airbnb is piloting a service with Instacart that will allow guests to order groceries directly through the Airbnb app before and during their stay, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Wednesday. “We are regularly testing new product updates, categories and initiatives, in order to provide the best possible experience for our community,” an Airbnb spokesperson said in an email. “As part of that, following the launch of Airbnb Services earlier this year, we will pilot groceries with Instacart in select markets across the U.S. beginning in January.” The new kitchen stocking service will be available to select hosts with qualifying listings…

Anthropic on Wednesday said it had signed an ambitious new data center partnership with U.K.-based neocloud provider Fluidstack, committing $50 billion to building facilities across the U.S. to meet its growing compute needs. The data centers will be located in Texas and New York, and come online throughout 2026. The company described the sites as “custom built for Anthropic with a focus on maximizing efficiency for our workloads.” “We’re getting closer to AI that can accelerate scientific discovery and help solve complex problems in ways that weren’t possible before,” Anthropic’s CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei (pictured above) said in a…

Sixteen years ago, engineers working on the Google self-driving project conducted their first autonomous vehicle tests on the freeway that connects Silicon Valley to San Francisco. The company would eventually become Waymo, autonomous vehicle testing would expand — fanning out to other cities. Eventually, the company launched commercial robotaxi services in Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Other cities soon followed. But freeways, despite some of that early testing, would remain out of reach. Until today. Waymo said Wednesday it will begin offering robotaxi rides that use freeways across San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles, a critical expansion for the…

ZANZIBAR, Tanzania (AP) — When darkness came, so did the smoke.Hamna Silima Nyange, like half of the 2 million people in Tanzania’s semi-autonomous archipelago of Zanzibar, did not have a house connected to the electricity grid. After sunset, she would turn to smoky oil lamps that provided the only light for her eight children to study.”The light was too weak,” Nyange said. “And the smoke from the lamp hurt my eyes.”Then one day a neighbor, Tatu Omary Hamad, installed solar panels and bulbs that lit her home with help from the strong sunlight along the Indian Ocean coast.“Today we have…

WisdomAI, the new AI data analytics startup from Rubrik co-founder Soham Mazumdar, has landed a fresh $50 million Series A led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from new investor NVentures (Nvidia’s venture capital arm).   This round comes roughly six months after the startup announced a seed round of $23 million led by Coatue.  WisdomAI offers AI-driven data analytics that can answer business questions from structured, unstructured, and even “dirty” data, meaning data that hasn’t been cleaned of typos or errors. A business user simply asks questions in natural language, such as, “How many customers do I have in my pipeline and…