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A broad coalition drawn from across the ranks of Europe’s tech industry is calling for “radical action” from European Union lawmakers to shrink reliance on foreign-owned digital infrastructure and services to bolster the bloc’s economic prospects, resilience, and security in increasingly fraught geopolitical times. In an open letter to European Commission president, Ursula von der… Read more

After reporting in January that Apple is adding an “Air” option to its iPhone lineup, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman is offering more details about the upcoming slimmer iPhone. The iPhone 17 Air will launch this fall, Gurman says — and like the MacBook Air, it will be thinner than standard models, while combining high-end and low-end… Read more

Meta won a legal victory this week against Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former employee who recently published a memoir of her time at the company titled “Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism.” An arbitrator ruled that Wynn-Williams, who worked at Facebook (now Meta) from 2011 to 2017, may have violated the… Read more

Users on social media have discovered a controversial use case for Google’s new Gemini AI model: removing watermarks from images, including from images published by Getty Images and other well-known stock media outfits. Last week, Google expanded access to its Gemini 2.0 Flash model’s image generation feature, which lets the model natively generate and edit… Read more

Chinese search engine Baidu has launched two new AI models — Ernie 4.5, the latest version of the company’s foundational model first released two years ago, as well as a new reasoning model, Ernie X1. According to Reuters, Baidu claims that Ernie X1’s performance is “on par with DeepSeek R1 at only half the price,”,… Read more

Cal AI has generated over 5 million downloads in 8 months, it says. Founders Zach Yadegari and Henry Langmack are just 18. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. Read more

In this week’s episode of the StrictlyVC Download podcast, veteran VC Aileen Lee was direct about a major consequence of the recent boom-and-bust cycle: many companies stuck in limbo aren’t just struggling to regain their footing after raising too much money at unsustainable valuations; they’ve also lost the champions who once backed them. Lee was… Read more

Joby Aviation is partnering with Virgin Atlantic to launch electric air taxis in the U.K., marking the seventh country in which the startup hopes to one day commercialize. Joby, which went public in 2021 via special purpose acquisition merger, did not provide a timeline for when it plans to launch its partnership with Virgin in… Read more

Amazon Echo users will no longer have the option to process their Alexa requests locally, which means all of their voice recordings will be sent to the company’s cloud. Ars Technica reports that on Friday, Amazon sent an email to customers who have “Do Not Send Voice Recordings” enabled on their Echo smart speakers and… Read more

Social network Bluesky recently published a proposal on GitHub outlining new options it could give users to indicate whether they want their posts and data to be scraped for things like generative AI training and public archiving. CEO Jay Graber discussed the proposal earlier this week, while on-stage at South by Southwest, but it attracted… Read more