Reed Jobs is easy to like. He’s motormouthed, self-deprecating, prone to video-game analogies, and clearly loves his work. He doesn’t particularly want to discuss the fact that he is Steve Jobs’s son, but he’s not uptight about it, either. When our producer, Maggie, asked if he was on a MacBook for our video call Thursday morning, he didn’t miss a beat: “Are you kidding?” What he’d much rather talk about is Yosemite, the oncology-focused venture firm he launched in 2023 to, in part, build biotech companies from scratch, out of early academic research, using a mix of philanthropy and outside…

Waymo has created a new computer model designed to more accurately answer a fundamental question: how does its autonomous driving software stack up against humans? The Alphabet-owned robotaxi company, which developed the computer model of human driving capabilities in conjunction with TU Delft, published a research paper about it in Nature Communications on Wednesday. Waymo said it expects the new model to be more accurate than the previous version it has used over the past several years. The new model was built using a framework called active inference — the theory that a driver is constantly imagining possible futures and…

As was widely reported, Oracle axed an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 people via email on March 31. One of the employees cut that day told TechCrunch about the experience: “I had, like, this weird feeling in my stomach. I went to go sign into the VPN, and the VPN was like, ‘this user doesn’t exist anymore.’ Then I called my friend, and I was like, ‘Hey, can you see me in Slack?’ And she said, ‘No, your account’s been deactivated.’” The person soon received an email stating their role was terminated immediately. The severance offer arrived a few days later. But…

Indian startup Rocket is betting that the next big opportunity is the part before vibe coding: having AI help people decide what to build. It has launched a platform that produces consulting-style product strategies. The startup, based in Surat, India, on Tuesday launched its platform, Rocket 1.0, which connects research, product building, and competitive intelligence in a single workflow. The platform generates detailed product strategy documents — including pricing, unit economics, and go-to-market recommendations. As AI-powered coding tools proliferate — from platforms like Cursor, Replit, and Lovable to features such as Claude Code and Codex — writing code has become…

Dario Amodei said Thursday that Anthropic plans to challenge the Department of Defense’s decision to label the AI firm a supply-chain risk in court, a designation he has called “legally unsound.” The statement comes a few hours after the DOD officially designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk following a weeks-long dispute over how much control the military should have over AI systems. A supply-chain risk designation can bar a company from working with the Pentagon and its contractors. Amodei drew a firm line that Anthropic’s AI will not be used for mass surveillance of Americans or for fully autonomous weapons, but…

Digital meeting notetakers like Read AI, Fireflies.ai, Fathom, and Granola help record and transcribe online meetings. But for in-person or more versatile options, many people prefer physical recording devices These physical notetakers transcribe audio and give users summaries and action items of meetings using AI. Some of these devices are wearable—pins or pendants with dedicated mics for recording—while others are credit-card sized with dedicated mobile apps to transcribe and extract insights using AI. A few even offer live translation. Below is a non-exhaustive list of physical AI notetakers and transcription tools. Plaud Note/Plaud Note Pro This credit card-sized notetaker has…

TikTok, which is under new ownership in the U.S., said Sunday that it has restored service after outages last week that marred user experiences. The social network has over 220 million users in the U.S. The company blamed last week’s snowstorm, which caused an outage at an Oracle-operated data center responsible for TikTok operations. “We have successfully restored TikTok back to normal after a significant outage caused by winter weather took down a primary U.S. data center site operated by Oracle. The winter storm led to a power outage which caused network and storage issues at the site and impacted…

How many of the companies with recent layoffs are truly adapting their workforces to the efficiencies and challenges of artificial intelligence? And how many of them were just using AI as an excuse to cover other problems? That’s the question posed by a New York Times article on the trend of “AI-washing,” where companies will cite AI as the reason for layoffs that might actually be caused by other factors, like over-hiring during the pandemic. AI was the stated reason for more than 50,000 layoffs in 2025, with Amazon and Pinterest among the tech companies who blamed the technology for…

Elon Musk’s reported merging of SpaceX, xAI, and Tesla harkens back to the heyday of General Electric — or maybe the robber barons of the Gilded Age. Source link

For years, Tether’s CEO avoided the United States, watching from offshore as regulators circled and prosecutors investigated. Those days are over. Source link