Microsoft has announced the launch of its latest chip, the Maia 200, which the company describes as a silicon workhorse designed for scaling AI inference. The 200, which follows the company’s Maia 100 released in 2023, has been technically outfitted to run powerful AI models at faster speeds and with more efficiency, the company has said. Maia comes equipped with over 100 billion transistors, delivering over 10 petaflops in 4-bit precision and approximately 5 petaflops of 8-bit performance—a substantial increase over its predecessor. Inference refers to the computing process of running a model, in contrast with the compute required to…

The clock is officially ticking. In just 5 days, the lowest ticket prices for TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 — plus the exclusive 50% off +1 pass for the first 500 registrations — will be gone. And with more than half of those first 500 already claimed, this window is closing fast. If Disrupt has been on your must-attend list, this is your moment to lock in the best deal and bring a +1 for half the price. Register now to save up to $680 on your pass and get a second ticket at 50% off. This offer ends January 30, or the moment the first 500 tickets are claimed. Whichever comes first. Image Credits:Slava Blazer Photography…

British startup Synthesia, whose AI platform helps companies create interactive training videos, has raised a $200 million Series E round of funding that brings its valuation to $4 billion — up from $2.1 billion just a year ago. Unlike some other AI startups that are still a long way from turning a profit, Synthesia has found a lucrative business in transforming corporate training thanks to AI-generated avatars. With enterprise clients including Bosch, Merck, and SAP, the London-based company crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in April 2025. This milestone explains why Synthesia’s venture backers are literally doubling down.…

In recent months, some of the major players in science fiction and popular culture have been taking firmer stances against generative AI. Separate decisions by San Diego Comic-Con and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) illustrate the depth of AI opposition within some creative communities — though they’re certainly not the only ones, with music distribution platform Bandcamp also recently banning generative AI. Back in December, when SFWA announced that it was updating its rules for the Nebula Awards. Works written entirely by large language models would not be eligible, while authors who used LLMs “at any point…

AI chatbots are getting better at answering questions, summarizing documents, and solving mathematical equations, but they still largely behave like helpful assistants for one user at a time. They’re not designed to manage the messier work of real collaboration: coordinating people with competing priorities, tracking long-running decisions, and keeping teams aligned over time.  Humans&, a new startup founded by alumni of Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, xAI, and Google DeepMind, thinks closing that gap is the next major frontier for foundation models. The company this week raised a $480 million seed round to build a “central nervous system” for the human-plus-AI economy.…

Sunny Sethi, founder of HEN Technologies, doesn’t sound like someone who’s disrupted an industry that has remained largely unchanged since the 1960s. His company builds fire nozzles — specifically, nozzles that it says increase suppression rates by up to 300% while conserving 67% of water. But Sethi is matter-of-fact about this achievement, more focused on what’s next than what’s already been done. And what’s next sounds a lot bigger than fire nozzles. His path to firefighting doesn’t follow a tidy narrative. After nabbing his PhD at the University of Akron, where he researched surfaces and adhesion, he founded ADAP Nanotech,…

Information from the conservative-leaning, AI-generated encyclopedia developed by Elon Musk’s xAI is beginning to appear in answers from ChatGPT. xAI launched Grokipedia in October, after Musk had been complaining that Wikipedia was biased against conservatives. Reporters soon noted that while many articles seemed to be copied directly from Wikipedia, Grokipedia also claimed that pornography contributed to the AIDS crisis, offered “ideological justifications” for slavery, and used denigrating terms for transgender people. All that might be expected for an encyclopedia associated with a chatbot that described itself as “Mecha Hitler” and was used to flood X with sexualized deepfakes. However, its…

If your Gmail account didn’t seem to be working properly Saturday, you were not alone. But Google says the issue has been be resolved. The official status dashboard for Google Workspace suggests that problems began at around 5am Pacific on Saturday morning, with users experiencing both “misclassification of emails in their inbox and additional spam warnings.” For me, that meant my Primary inbox was filled with messages that would normally appear in the Promotions, Social, or Updates inboxes, and that spam warnings were appearing in emails from known senders. Other users complained on social media that “all the spam is…

Vimeo was hit by a massive round of layoffs this past week, according to a report by Business Insider. Staffers posting on various social media sites that the layoffs impacted most of the company, including the entire video team. Vimeo is a video-hosting platform, so that sounds bad. The layoffs are the latest restructuring by Bending Spoons, the Milan-based tech conglomerate that acquired Vimeo for $1.38 billion in an all-cash deal that closed in the latter half of 2025. While Bending Spoons may be unknown to many, it’s quietly become one of the tech industry’s most prolific buyers, now owning…

We’re about to get our first real look at the results of the recently announced AI partnership between Apple and Google, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. Gurman reports that Apple is planning to announce a new version of Siri in the second half of February. Using Google’s Gemini AI models, this Siri update will reportedly be the first to live up to the promises Apple made in June 2024, with the ability to complete tasks by accessing user’s personal data and on-screen content. And that’s ahead of an even bigger upgrade that Apple plans to announce in June, at its…