India’s labor ministry is pushing the country’s booming quick-commerce sector to prioritize the wellness and safety of its gig workers. The country’s minister of labor and employment, Mansukh Mandaviya, met with executives from Zomato’s BlinkIt, Swiggy’s Instamart, and Zepto to ask them to drop their marketing language, which promises deliveries within 10 minutes, and discuss ways to improve safety and working conditions for delivery personnel, Bloomberg reported, citing anonymous sources. While the instant delivery model has faltered elsewhere, it’s taken off in India at an unprecedented rate in the past few years as consumers in urban cities got used to…

Apple is launching a new Creator Studio subscription bundle that offers access to six creative apps as well as premium content in iWork apps, the company announced on Tuesday. The bundle costs $12.99 per month or $129 per year and includes access to Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, and Pixelmator Pro on Mac and iPad, as well as Motion, Compressor, and MainStage on Mac. It also includes premium content for Keynote, Pages, and Numbers. Later, the bundle will include Freeform for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. College students and educators can subscribe for $2.99 per month or $29.99 per year. Apple…

Usage of voice AI in sales, marketing, customer support, and consumer applications has shot up in the last few years. As a result, model providers have seen increased business, along with investor interest. On the back of this demand, today, Deepgram said that it has raised $130 million in a Series C round led by AVP at a $1.3 billion dollar valuation. The round also saw existing investors such as Alkeon, In-Q-Tel, Madrona, Tiger, Wing, and Y Combinator put in more money. Plus, new investors like Alumni Ventures, Columbia University, Princeville Capital, Twilio, and SAP joined the round. The company has…

Slackbot, the automated assistant baked into the Salesforce-owned corporate messaging platform Slack, is entering a new era as an AI agent. And Salesforce CTO Parker Harris hopes it will be as viral as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The cloud software giant rolled out the new version of Slackbot on Tuesday. This new AI agent version of Slackbot, which is generally available for Business+ and Enterprise+ customers, can find information, draft emails, and schedule meetings, among other things, all within the Slack platform, according to the company. It can also connect to, and interact with, other enterprise products like Microsoft Teams and Google…

Artificial intelligence is moving quickly into drug discovery as pharmaceutical and biotech companies look for ways to cut years off R&D timelines and increase the chances of success amid rising cost. More than 200 startups are now competing to weave AI directly into research workflows, attracting growing interest from investors. Converge Bio is the latest company to ride that shift, securing new capital as competition in the AI-driven drug discovery space heats up. The Boston- and Tel Aviv–based startup, which helps pharma and biotech companies develop drugs faster using generative AI trained on molecular data, has raised a $25 million…

As two major streaming platforms — Warner Bros. and Netflix — prepare for a merger, concerns continue to be voiced about the implications of the deal, which represents more consolidation in the media business. On Monday, Paramount CEO David Ellison announced that the company has filed a lawsuit against Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) in Delaware, demanding greater financial disclosure regarding Netflix’s $82.7 billion acquisition.  In a letter to shareholders, Ellison disclosed that the lawsuit has been filed in the Delaware Chancery Court, requesting that WBD provide essential information that it allegedly has failed to share. Ellison argues that shareholders need…

It’s official. Apple has chosen to work with Google, a longtime partner, to power AI features like Siri.  “After careful evaluation, we determined that Google’s technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models and we’re excited about the innovative new experiences it will unlock for our users,” Apple and Google said in a statement. The partnership confirms previous reporting on a deal with Google. Neither Apple nor Google have confirmed the price tag, but previous reports indicate Apple could be paying Google around $1 billion for access to its AI technology. The deal also comes after Apple spent…

Amazon offered a bit more insight into how it sees its AI platform competing in the real world at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week. Namely, Amazon plans to leverage the extensive footprint its devices already have in the home as well as consumers’ existing familiarity with its Alexa brand. “Ninety-seven percent of devices we ever shipped can support Alexa+,” noted Amazon Alexa and Echo VP Daniel Rausch in an interview at CES. He said the latest figures Amazon has on hand indicate the company has sold more than 600 million devices, and the “vast majority” will…

Ever since Ronald Reagan was president, the Environmental Protection Agency has assigned a value to human life. If you think too long about it, it’s a bit crass, but the upshot was to provide some cost-benefit analysis of pollution controls. Lowering pollution can prolong human life, so if the health benefits of reducing pollution outweighed the costs, then there was an economic argument to be made in favor of those reductions.  Every administration since has assigned some value to human life when determining how to regulate air pollution. The Trump administration is planning to throw decades of accepted practice out…

Pebble’s founder, Eric Migicovsky, is doing things differently with his reboot of the Pebble smartwatch brand and an AI ring. The team is small, inventory isn’t being manufactured before it’s sold, and there’s no outside funding. Most importantly, he says, the new company, Core Devices, is “not a startup.” “We’ve structured this entire business around being a sustainable, profitable, and hopefully, long-running enterprise, but not a startup,” Migicovsky told TechCrunch on the sidelines of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week. Image Credits:Pebble “Startups are good for the world,” he clarified. “You need to have money in order…