What's happening in AI

Already rich, already successful, why the last wave of tech winners is grinding again

They're rolling up their sleeves again, seemingly out of fear of missing AI's defining moment and, presumably, the irresistible allure of making even more money -- potentially a lot more.

Uber’s product chief on hotels, robotaxis, and why the company doesn’t want to be “everything for everyone”

Uber Chief Product Officer Sachin Kansal walks TechCrunch through the company's financial-services ambitions, its increasingly complicated relationship with Waymo, its new AV Labs data operation, and how AI is starting to show up in ways ri

Video-generation startup PixVerse raises $439M, valuation soars past $2B

With the cash, the company aims to expand its world model offering and reach customers across geographies.

Hermes agent maker Nous Research in talks for new funding at $1.5B valuation

The company is raising at least $75 million, led by Robot Ventures, with significant participation from USV and other prominent investors.

Satya Nadella has issued a shocking warning to companies using AI

Of all the debates raging about the potential downsides of AI, there is one worry causing the most hand-wringing among AI enthusiasts in Silicon Valley — that the giant AI labs that sell proprietary models are somehow acting like Trojan hor

Siri AI is already changing how I use my iPhone

Siri AI in iOS 27. iOS 27 escaped the developer world today with the launch of the first public beta. I've been testing the new operating system since early June, looking for quirks and seeing if it can live up to the hype Apple promised in

The wildest allegations in Apple’s trade secrets lawsuit against OpenAI

Apple’s trade secrets lawsuit against OpenAI contains allegations that range from employees joking about unauthorized access to Apple’s systems to claims that job candidates were asked to bring Apple hardware to interviews. Here are the com

What Anthropic’s latest AI discovery does—and doesn’t—show

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Anthropic—currently the world’s most valuable AI company, with a nearly $1 trillion valuation—has a re

Sam Altman’s space data center trash talk is what most experts already believe

Responding to Musk accusing him of being a scammer, Altman said, "homeboy you're the one sellling [sic] public market investors on short-term space datacenters."

The 6 wildest claims in Apple’s lawsuit against OpenAI

When Apple employees interviewed for jobs at OpenAI, the AI startup's hardware head allegedly asked them to show up with something unusual: components they were working on and unreleased product samples. That's according to a blockbuster la

Should AI help you get away with killing your spouse?

What does a world of total user-aligned AI actually look like?

Waze is getting a bunch of new AI-powered features

Waze is getting an AI makeover. Google is integrating its flagship AI assistant, Gemini, into the driving app with the goal of letting users personalize their trips a little more. Of the four new updates, only two are being described as inv

Lorde says Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses are ‘not sexy’

Lorde performing at the 2026 Governors Ball. | Photo: Siegfried Anthony/Billboard via Getty Images Lorde was performing at the Mad Cool Festival in Madrid on Thursday and took some time during her set to speak out against AI glasses. While

Apple’s failed self-driving car program left a legacy of powerful AI chips

Apple's self-driving car program never really got off the ground, but it may have been what made the company's chips the powerful AI performers they are. Early in the development of the self-driving platform, Apple realized that it would ne

The fight against AI data centers is just beginning

A yard sign opposing a planned data center is displayed along Route 54 in Mount Carmel Township Northumberland County. | Image: Getty Images This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. Fo

Meta turns off the Instagram feature that let users make AI deepfakes of public accounts

Following significant backlash, Meta is turning off the feature it announced this week that let users generate AI images based on content from public Instagram accounts just by tagging them. The feature, as originally set up, meant that con

Apple sues OpenAI for allegedly stealing hardware secrets

Apple has sued OpenAI, alleging that engineers stole Apple secrets to advance the AI startup's hardware plans. In its complaint, Apple says it uncovered "a pattern of theft of Apple's trade secrets by OpenAI employees who were formerly at A

Profiling in PyTorch (Part 3): Attention is all you profile

Anthropic found a hidden space where Claude puzzles over concepts

The AI firm Anthropic has developed a technique that has given it the clearest glimpse yet at what’s really going on inside large language models as they answer questions or carry out tasks. What they found ranges from the mundane to the un

Data for Agents

Native-speed vLLM transformers modeling backend

From Hugging Face to Amazon SageMaker Studio in one click

Hugging Face Models on Foundry Managed Compute

The foundational elements of AI architecture that IT leaders need to scale

With the rapid progress of AI capabilities and the move to agentic systems, organizations are expanding their use cases as the technology continues to grow. That constant evolution also introduces risk, leaving IT leaders to wonder which in

Run AI workloads on any cloud, store on Hugging Face: zero-egress storage with SkyPilot

LeRobot v0.6.0: Imagine, Evaluate, Improve

Your family’s $300 stake in OpenAI

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s oft-discussed promise that Americans will share in the wealth AI creates was i

PRX Part 4: Our Data Strategy

Achieving operational excellence with AI

Frameworks like Lean Six Sigma and business process management (BPM) first gained traction because they promised clarity in the chaos—a structured way to bring order to messy, sprawling operations. Lean Six Sigma emphasized statistical rigo

Building the foundation for an autonomous enterprise

Artificial intelligence may have captured the public imagination through chatbots and image generators, but some of its most consequential use cases are unfolding far from consumer-facing tools. In industries where physical infrastructure,

LLMs are stuck in a groupthink groove. This startup is trying to get them out.

Let’s start with a game. Open up your chatbot of choice—Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini—and type “Give me a random number between 1 and 10.” You’re going to get 7. Almost always. Now type “Another” and you’ll get 3 or 4. Type “Another” again and yo

Claude Science is Anthropic’s newest flagship product

At an event for pharmaceutical executives, biotech founders, and researchers on Tuesday, Anthropic announced Claude Science, a major new product intended to support scientific research in the same way that Claude Code supports software engi

Google just redesigned the search box for the first time in 25 years — here’s why it matters more than you think.

For a quarter century, the Google search box has been one of the most recognizable interfaces in computing: a thin white rectangle, a blinking cursor, a few typed words, and a list of blue links. On Tuesday, Google will formally retire that

Railway secures $100 million to challenge AWS with AI-native cloud infrastructure

Railway, a San Francisco-based cloud platform that has quietly amassed two million developers without spending a dollar on marketing, announced Thursday that it raised $100 million in a Series B funding round, as surging demand for artifici

Claude Code costs up to $200 a month. Goose does the same thing for free.

The artificial intelligence coding revolution comes with a catch: it's expensive. Claude Code, Anthropic's terminal-based AI agent that can write, debug, and deploy code autonomously, has captured the imagination of software developers worl

Listen Labs raises $69M after viral billboard hiring stunt to scale AI customer interviews

Alfred Wahlforss was running out of options. His startup, Listen Labs, needed to hire over 100 engineers, but competing against Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million offers seemed impossible. So he spent $5,000 — a fifth of his marketing budget —

Salesforce rolls out new Slackbot AI agent as it battles Microsoft and Google in workplace AI

Salesforce on Tuesday launched an entirely rebuilt version of Slackbot, the company's workplace assistant, transforming it from a simple notification tool into what executives describe as a fully powered AI agent capable of searching enterp

Anthropic launches Cowork, a Claude Desktop agent that works in your files — no coding required

Anthropic released Cowork on Monday, a new AI agent capability that extends the power of its wildly successful Claude Code tool to non-technical users — and according to company insiders, the team built the entire feature in approximately a

Nous Research's NousCoder-14B is an open-source coding model landing right in the Claude Code moment

Nous Research, the open-source artificial intelligence startup backed by crypto venture firm Paradigm, released a new competitive programming model on Monday that it says matches or exceeds several larger proprietary systems — trained in ju