After reporting in January that Apple is adding an “Air” option to its iPhone lineup, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman is offering more details about the upcoming slimmer iPhone. The iPhone 17 Air will launch this fall, Gurman says — and like the MacBook Air, it will be thinner than standard models, while combining high-end and low-end … Read more
Chinese search engine Baidu has launched two new AI models — Ernie 4.5, the latest version of the company’s foundational model first released two years ago, as well as a new reasoning model, Ernie X1. According to Reuters, Baidu claims that Ernie X1’s performance is “on par with DeepSeek R1 at only half the price,”, … Read more
Amazon Echo users will no longer have the option to process their Alexa requests locally, which means all of their voice recordings will be sent to the company’s cloud. Ars Technica reports that on Friday, Amazon sent an email to customers who have “Do Not Send Voice Recordings” enabled on their Echo smart speakers and … Read more
In this week’s episode of the StrictlyVC Download podcast, veteran VC Aileen Lee was direct about a major consequence of the recent boom-and-bust cycle: many companies stuck in limbo aren’t just struggling to regain their footing after raising too much money at unsustainable valuations; they’ve also lost the champions who once backed them. Lee was … Read more
Joby Aviation is partnering with Virgin Atlantic to launch electric air taxis in the U.K., marking the seventh country in which the startup hopes to one day commercialize. Joby, which went public in 2021 via special purpose acquisition merger, did not provide a timeline for when it plans to launch its partnership with Virgin in … Read more
Social network Bluesky recently published a proposal on GitHub outlining new options it could give users to indicate whether they want their posts and data to be scraped for things like generative AI training and public archiving. CEO Jay Graber discussed the proposal earlier this week, while on-stage at South by Southwest, but it attracted … Read more
As businesses race to replace humans with AI “agents,” coding assistant Cursor may have given us a peek at the attitude bots could bring to work, too. Cursor reportedly told a user going by the name “janswist” that he should write the code himself instead of relying on Cursor to do it for him. “I … Read more
After Employer.com acquired bankrupt accounting startup Bench in a fire-sale late last year, CEO Jesse Tinsley pledged on LinkedIn and elsewhere to honor past customer payments. “We’re honoring all prepaid Bench services even though we will not have the revenue from that directly ourselves,” Tinsley said in an interview with founder and investor Julian Weisser. … Read more
On Thursday, House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) sent letters to 16 American technology firms, including Google and OpenAI, asking for past communications with the Biden administration that might suggest the former president “coerced or colluded” with companies to “censor lawful speech” in AI products. The Trump administration’s top technology advisers previously signaled it would pick … Read more
We’ve all experienced that moment of frustration when the GPS glitches and you miss an exit on the highway. The team at Tern AI, which is building a low-cost GPS alternative, says that’s because the current technology is limited by its reliance on satellite positioning. Tern AI says it has figured out how to locate … Read more
