Author: Jason

Last year, police surveillance startup Flock Safety hired the mayor of a California city with over 200,000 residents to promote its products. But the mayor, Ulises Cabrera of Moreno Valley, now claims Flock wrongfully terminated him, partly because he refused to use his position as mayor to benefit Flock, according to a lawsuit Cabrera filed… Read more

Former Google engineer and influential AI researcher François Chollet is co-founding a nonprofit to help develop benchmarks that’ll probe AI for “human-level” intelligence. The nonprofit, the ARC Prize Foundation, will be led by Greg Kamradt, an ex-Salesforce engineering director and founder of the AI product studio Leverage. Kamradt will serve as president and a member… Read more

Watch Duty, an app to track wildfires with live maps and alerts, has become the number one free app in Apple’s App Store as of Wednesday morning. The fire tracking app surpassed the ChatGPT app for the number one spot as devastating fires continue to rage across Southern California. Watch Duty has been around since… Read more

Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko has spoken out about the significant moderation changes announced by Meta on Tuesday, which will see the social networking giant removing fact-checking across its apps in favor of a crowdsourced community notes feature, similar to X’s. The Mastodon founder, whose app competes with X and Meta’s X rival, Instagram Threads, called… Read more

On October 16 and November 20, Elon Musk tweeted videos of himself clearing the highest level of the Diablo IV video game in about 2 minutes.  While Diablo IV has been out since mid-2023, the latest “season,” called The Pit, launched on October 7. Many asked: How did he find the time to do it… Read more

Like anything in life, the secret to becoming Steph Curry or Sabrina Ionescu is practice, practice, and more practice. You practice when it’s too hot, too cold, you’re tired, or you’re sick. Finding a willing one-on-one partner through all of that is, however, another question entirely. The good news is that later this year, you… Read more

Gridware’s sensors listen for sounds that the company’s software has been trained to identify as different hazards to the grid. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. Read more

The Russian ISP blamed the Ukrainian hackers for causing a “complete failure” across its internet infrastructure. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. Read more

Hiya, folks, welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. If you want this in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. The AI news cycle didn’t slow down much this holiday season. Between OpenAI’s 12 days of “shipmas” and DeepSeek’s major model release on Christmas Day, blink and you’d miss some new development. And it’s not slowing… Read more

Triller, a would-be competitor to TikTok, is hoping to capitalize on the potential for a TikTok ban in the U.S. by pitching to creators to move their content from the popular short-form video app to its own. The company has now launched a website, SaveMyTikToks.com, which promises to back up all your TikTok videos by… Read more