Author: Jason
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Anthropic appears to be using Brave to power web search for its Claude chatbot
Earlier this week, Anthropic rolled out a web search feature for its AI-powered chatbot platform, Claude, bringing the bot in line with many of its rivals. It wasn’t immediately clear which search index might be powering the feature — one possibility was that Anthropic had developed its own. But evidence suggests it’s Brave Search, the… Read more
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TechCrunch Mobility: Inside Waymo’s deal with SFO, Elon’s moment of truth, and BYD’s breakthrough
Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! Before we jump into the news, just a quick bit of housekeeping. I’m putting “This week’s wheels” on hiatus for a few weeks as I get into… Read more
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Startups Weekly: Wiz’s bet paid off in an M&A-rich week
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. It’s rare to report on an 11-figure startup acquisition, let alone multiple high-value deals in a single week. And there are more subtle signs that things are… Read more
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Wayve CEO shares his key ingredients for scaling autonomous driving tech
Wayve co-founder and CEO Alex Kendall sees promise in bringing his autonomous vehicle startup’s tech to market. That is, if Wayve sticks to its strategy of ensuring its automated driving software is cheap to run, hardware agnostic, and can be applied to advanced driver assistance systems, robotaxis, and even robotics. The strategy, which Kendall laid… Read more
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Microsoft is exploring a way to credit contributors to AI training data
Microsoft is launching a research project to estimate the influence of specific training examples on the text, images, and other types of media that generative AI models create. That’s per a job listing dating back to December that was recently recirculated on LinkedIn. According to the listing, which seeks a research intern, the project will… Read more
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Meta spotted testing AI-generated comments on Instagram
In recent years, Meta has introduced many AI features and capabilities to its apps, even going so far as experimenting with AI-generated characters complete with unique profiles and personalities, before scraping them after they were deemed creepy and unnecessary. In yet another move that may not be received well among users, Meta wants to use… Read more
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1X will test humanoid robots in ‘a few hundred’ homes in 2025
Norwegian robotics startup 1X plans to start early tests of its humanoid robot, Neo Gamma, in “a few hundred to a few thousand” homes by the end of 2025, according to the company’s CEO, Bernt Børnich. “Neo Gamma is going into homes this year,” Børnich told TechCrunch in an interview at Nvidia GTC 2025. “We… Read more
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Commercial services platform BuildOps becomes a unicorn, raises $127M
Commercial services tech hasn’t historically been considered “sexy,” but the need for innovation in the space is enormous. That need has translated into a large fundraise for a company focused on streamlining commercial contracting processes. On Friday, BuildOps, which develops software for commercial services contractors, announced that it has raised $127 million in a Series… Read more
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Russian zero-day seller is offering up to $4 million for Telegram exploits
Two sources in the zero-day industry say Operation Zero’s prices for exploits against the popular messaging app Telegram will depend on different factors. Read more
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Google claims news is worthless to its ad business after test involving 1% of search results in eight EU markets
Google has reported the results of an experiment it ran which removed news from search results for 1% of users for 2.5 months in eight* markets in Europe — claiming the results show that news is essentially worthless to Google’s ad business. The search giant conducted the test because European copyright law requires it to… Read more