The plus-one passes at 50% off are almost sold out. Now the clock is really ticking. In just 3 days, the best deal at the lowest ticket prices for TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 disappear. With demand already surging and early inventory moving fast, this is the final window to lock in record-low pricing and secure a plus-one for half the price while limited passes remain. If Disrupt has been on your must-attend list, now is the time to save up to $680 on your pass and bring a plus-one at 50% off. This pricing ends January 30, 11:59 p.m. PT, or the moment the remaining plus-one passes sell out. No extensions. No exceptions. Register…

Amazon said today that it is cutting 16,000 jobs across the company. This reduction comes after the e-commerce company laid off 14,000 people in October. In a letter to employees, Senior VP of people experience and technology, Beth Galetti, said that these layoffs were made for “reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy.” She noted that the reason for the second round of massive layoffs within three months was that several teams in the company hadn’t finished their restructuring. Galetti didn’t outright deny that there might be more job slashes in the company, but said that the company is not…

A trip in a Waymo robotaxi still costs more, on average, than a comparable ride in a human-driven Uber or a Lyft. But that gap is narrowing, according to new data published Tuesday by Obi, a company that aggregates real-time pricing and pickup times across multiple ride-hailing services. Two factors, working together, are behind the change. Waymo has lowered its pricing, at least in the San Francisco Bay Area where the data was pulled, while traditional ride-hailing rides on the Uber and Lyft networks have risen, according to Obi. The new data was collected between November 27 and January 1,…

Autonomous vehicle startup Waabi has raised $1 billion and struck a partnership with Uber to deploy self-driving cars on the ride-hailing platform — the company’s first expansion beyond autonomous trucking. The funding consists of an oversubscribed $750 million Series C round co-led by Khosla Ventures and G2 Venture Partners and roughly $250 million in milestone-based capital from Uber to support the deployment of 25,000 or more Waabi Driver-powered robotaxis exclusively on its platform. The companies did not provide a timeline for such a large-scale deployment.   The partnership represents a bet that the startup’s AI technology can succeed where others have…

Google is expanding its push into AI-powered learning by adding full-length practice tests in Gemini for the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE), India’s nationwide engineering exam used to shortlist candidates for the country’s top technical institutes and taken by millions of students each year. Google said students can take full-length mock exams for the JEE within Gemini, which will offer questions based on vetted content from Indian education firms PhysicsWallah and Careers360. The launch comes after the company recently rolled out similar test-prep tools for the SAT. Once students complete a mock test in Gemini, Google said the chatbot will provide…

Imagine a world where your credit card no longer works, your Amazon account is shut down, and using U.S. tech companies is no longer an option. It’s almost impossible to shop online, wire bank transfers to an overseas family member, or rely on anything that involves the United States, including the U.S. dollar. For one Canadian, this is now her reality. Last year, the Trump administration added Kimberly Prost, a judge on the International Criminal Court, to its economic sanctions list, after she served on an appeals chamber that in 2020 unanimously authorized the ICC’s prosecutor to investigate alleged war…

OpenAI launched on Tuesday a new scientific workspace program called Prism that is available for free to anyone with a ChatGPT account. Designed as an AI-enhanced word processor and research tool for scientific papers, Prism is deeply integrated with GPT-5.2, which can be used to assess claims, revise prose, or search for prior research. Prism isn’t designed to conduct research on its own and without human guidance. Executives believe it will accelerate the work being done by human scientists, and compared Prism to coding interfaces like Cursor and Windsurf. “I think 2026 will be for AI and science what 2025…

Shadowfax stumbled in its market debut, with shares falling as investors weighed concerns about the logistics firm’s heavy reliance on a handful of large e-commerce clients. The company raised about ₹19.07 billion (about $208.24 million) in its initial public offering. The shares fell about 9% from the offer price of ₹124 to ₹112.60 on Wednesday, valuing the Bengaluru-based logistics firm at roughly ₹64.7 billion (about $706.58 million) on debut, roughly matching its last private valuation of close to ₹60 billion (roughly $655.01 million) in early 2025. The offering, priced in a band of ₹118–124 per share, combined a fresh issue…

Google is bringing AI-powered photo editing to more users around the world, making it easier to fix your photos with simple text commands instead of complicated editing tools. The company announced Tuesday that it’s expanding natural language-based editing in Google Photos to additional countries, including Australia, India, and Japan. The feature, which Google first launched for Pixel 10 users in the U.S. last August, lets people describe the changes they want to make to their photos rather than manually adjusting sliders or learning complex editing software. Users in these newly supported countries will now see a “Help me Edit” box…

Google on Tuesday announced its more affordable Google AI Plus plan is now available in all markets where its AI plans are available. This includes the U.S, where it will cost $7.99 per month. The expansion brings the lower-cost plan to 35 new countries and territories, after earlier launches in dozens of global markets, which began with Indonesia last September. The plan includes access to Gemini 3 Pro and Nano Banana Pro in the Gemini app, Flow’s AI filmmaking tools, research and writing assistance in NotebookLM, and more. It also offers 200GB of storage and the ability to share your…