Pocket Casts, the podcast app acquired by Automattic in 2021, is now making its web player free. The company says the move offers an alternative to the big platforms’ closed ecosystems, where algorithmic-driven content is prioritized and podcasts are kept behind paywalls. Podcasts were built on open technology — the open, decentralized standard RSS, which
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has fired more than a hundred employees working for the U.S. government’s cybersecurity agency CISA, including “red team” staffers, two people affected by the layoffs told TechCrunch. The people, who asked not to be named, said affected employees were axed immediately when their network access was revoked with
Watch out, fiction writers. OpenAI may have you in its crosshairs. In a post on X on Tuesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that the company has trained a “new model” that’s “really good” at creative writing. He posted a lengthy sample from the model given the prompt “Please write a metafictional literary short story
Apple released patches for a bug that it says “may have been exploited in an extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals,” citing a report. The zero-day bug was found in WebKit, the browser engine powering Safari and other apps, and allowed hackers to break out of WebKit’s protective sandbox with “maliciously crafted web content,”
There’s a power crunch looming as AI and cloud providers ramp up data center construction. But a new report suggests that a solution lies beneath their foundations. Advanced geothermal power could supply nearly two-thirds of new data center demand by 2030, according to an analysis by the Rhodium Group. The additions would quadruple the amount
The intersection of robotics and AI continues to attract attention from investors and Big Tech alike. The latest indicator? Dexterity, a startup specializing in industrial robots with “human-like” finesse, has raised $95 million at a post-money valuation of $1.65 billion, per Bloomberg. The investment, which includes backing from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sumitomo Corp., highlights
Flower Labs, a Y Combinator-backed startup, on Tuesday launched a preview of its distributed cloud platform for serving AI models, called Flower Intelligence. Mozilla is already using it to power the upcoming Assist summarization add-on for its Thunderbird email client. What makes Flower Intelligence unique, Flower Labs said in a post on X, is that
Last year, Hugging Face, the AI dev platform, launched LeRobot, a collection of open AI models, datasets, and tools to help build real-world robotics systems. On Tuesday, Hugging Face teamed up with AI startup Yaak to expand LeRobot with a training set for robots and cars that can navigate environments, like city streets, autonomously. The
Speaking at the SXSW conference in Austin, tech investor and entrepreneur Mark Cuban shared his thoughts on how AI technology can help small businesses outperform their competition. In short, he told the crowd that AI was not the answer, in and of itself; it’s meant to serve as an aid that can help entrepreneurs by
On Tuesday, OpenAI released new tools designed to help developers and enterprises build AI agents — automated systems that can independently accomplish tasks — using the company’s own AI models and frameworks. The tools are part of OpenAI’s new Responses API, which lets businesses develop custom AI agents that can perform web searches, scan through
