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…

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. To get this in your inbox, sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! A quick bit of breaking news that hit just as we were about to send this newsletter out. The National Transportation Safety Board has opened an investigation into Waymo after its robotaxis have been spotted illegally passing stopped school buses numerous times in at least two states. Read the full story here. Now onto our regular programming … Tesla made a couple of moves this week…