Microsoft said Saturday that clients of its Azure cloud platform might experience increased latency after multiple undersea cables were cut in the Red Sea, as reported in Bloomberg. In a status update, the company said traffic going through the Middle East or ending in Asia or Europe had been affected. It did not say who … Read more
Hyundai’s electric air taxi startup Supernal has paused work on its aircraft program after a rocky few months that saw staff cuts and the departure of its CEO and CTO, two people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The shakeup comes at a time when Supernal has barely gotten off the ground — literally. The … Read more
Tesla has proposed a massive new $1 trillion compensation package for its CEO Elon Musk, and many of the benchmarks he needs to hit are simply watered-down versions of promises he’s spent years making about the company. That’s not the picture Tesla’s board of directors paints in the company’s annual proxy statement, where they revealed … Read more
Technologists and policymakers are reckoning with a generation-defining problem on the internet: while it can be a revolutionary force for unprecedented education and connection across the globe, it can also pose dangers to children when they have completely unfettered access. There is no simple way, however, to monitor children’s internet access without surveilling adults, paving … Read more
On Friday, a startup called Fable announced an ambitious, if head-scratching, plan to recreate the lost 43 minutes of Orson Welles’ classic film “The Magnificent Ambersons.” Why is a startup that bills itself as the “Netflix of AI,” and that recently raised money from Amazon’s Alexa Fund, talking about remaking a movie that was first … Read more
The European Commission announced this week that it’s fining Google €2.95 billion (just under $3.5 billion). The commission found that Google had violated European Union antitrust rules by favoring its own advertising services. Specifically, the commission said Google “abused” its “dominant positions” by favoring its ad exchange AdX in both its publisher ad server and … Read more
Dot, an AI companion app that aimed to be a friend and confidante, is shutting down, the company announced on Friday. On a message published on its website, the startup behind Dot, New Computer, said that the product will remain operational until October 5, giving users time to download their data. Launched in 2024 by … Read more
Snapchat is launching a new Lens that lets users create and edit images using a text-to-image AI generator, the company told TechCrunch exclusively. The new “Imagine Lens” is available to Snapchat+ Platinum and Lens+ subscribers. Imagine Lens allows users to create, edit, and recreate Snaps by entering their own prompts. They can then share the … Read more
Rivian is laying off around 150 workers — its second small staff cut in a matter of months — as the company readies itself for the all-important launch of its more-affordable R2 SUV next year. The company confirmed to TechCrunch that the new cuts were mostly to its “commercial” team, which deals with sales and … Read more
Investors are clearly bullish about former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor’s AI agent startup Sierra. Sierra, which helps enterprises build customer service AI agents, announced it raised a $350 million funding round on Thursday. The round, led by earlier investor Greenoaks Capital, values the startup at $10 billion, according to a company blog post that confirmed … Read more
