Author: Jason

Last week, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok experienced a “bug” that made it tell users about the “white genocide” conspiracy theory in South Africa, even when prompted with questions that had nothing to do with the topic… and soon after, Grok expressed skepticism over the Holocaust death toll, which it chalked up to a “programming… Read more

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! For those U.S.-based readers out there, enjoy the long Memorial Day weekend, and if you’re on the road, expect it to be crowded. AAA projects 45.1 million… Read more

OpenAI is updating the AI model powering Operator, its AI agent that can autonomously browse the web and use certain software within a cloud-hosted virtual machine to fulfill users’ requests. Soon, Operator will use a model based on o3, one of the latest in OpenAI’s o series of “reasoning” models. Previously, Operator relied on a custom… Read more

Google I/O didn’t stop startups from taking their chances and announcing some big deals this week. Read more

One of Microsoft’s latest AI models can accurately predict air quality, hurricanes, typhoons, and other weather-related phenomena, the company claims. In a paper published in the journal Nature and an accompanying blog post this week, Microsoft detailed Aurora, which the tech giant says can forecast atmospheric events with greater precision and speed than traditional meteorological… Read more

Discord is entering its second decade as a company and seeking to go public. Along the way, it’s changed the way that online communities interact, turning groups that may have previously existed as forums or message boards into multi-channel instant message servers. Now, everything finds a home on Discord, whether it’s an AI platform like… Read more

The deal could be interesting if it went through, as Digg could leverage Pocket’s existing user base to fuel interest in its relaunch. Read more

As generative AI becomes faster, cheaper, and more convincing, the ethical stakes are no longer theoretical. What happens when the tools to deceive become widely accessible? And how do we build systems that are powerful — but safe enough to trust? At TechCrunch Sessions: AI, taking place June 5 at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, Artemis… Read more

For over 24 hours, many X users, including this reporter, have been experiencing issues with the site’s basic functionality. Some messages won’t load, timelines won’t update, and certain posts can’t be seen without a webpage refresh (or several). The trouble started Thursday afternoon, according to Downdetector, a crowdsourced platform for flagging web outages. Beginning at… Read more

In the startup world, access to cutting-edge tools isn’t the biggest obstacle — it’s knowing how to wield them with precision. At TechCrunch Sessions: AI, taking place on June 5 at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, we’re digging into the frameworks and decisions that determine whether an AI startup can scale — or stall. We’re excited… Read more