Crafting a perfect prompt for AI chatbots is often a challenge — so much so that startups are creating roles for prompt engineers. Consumer-facing AI apps are increasingly adding features like suggestion buttons or autogenerated recommendations to nudge customers to use the chatbot more frequently and show them about what the app can do. Hero,…
Mirova, the French climate-focused investment firm backed by Kering and other corporate heavyweights, has invested $30.5 million (€26.4 million) in Indian climate tech startup Varaha. This investment will help to expand the startup’s regenerative farming program, supporting hundreds of thousands of smallholder farmers in northern India. The deal marks Mirova’s first carbon investment in India,…
Apple released iOS 26.2 beta 1 last week, introducing several updates, such as the option to customize the Liquid Glass appearance of the iPhone’s Lock Screen clock, the ability to set alarms within the Reminders app, and live translation features for users in the EU, among other improvements. The public release of iOS 26.2 is…
We’re seeing reports across social media that users of Elon Musk’s X are getting stuck in endless loops and, in some cases, getting locked out of their X account, following a mandatory two-factor security change that seems to have gone wrong. On October 24, X said in a post that it was asking users who…
As generative AI content starts to fill our social apps, a project to bring back Vine’s six-second looping videos is launching with Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s backing. On Thursday, a new app called diVine will give access to more than 100,000 archived Vine videos, restored from an older backup that was created before Vine’s shutdown….
When former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo spoke at TechCrunch Disrupt, someone from the audience asked him if HBO’s hit satire Silicon Valley would be revived. Costolo, who was a writer for the show, essentially answered no (at timestamp 38:17). While the writers talk about that regularly, he said, they don’t pursue it because today’s actual…
ElevenLabs struck a deal with actors Michael Caine and Matthew McConaughey to AI-generate their voices, the company announced this week. Hollywood and AI have an up-and-down relationship, with its guardrails — or lack thereof — serving among the main concerns that led to the Hollywood strikes a few years ago. Since then, some artists have…
Deepwatch, a cybersecurity firm that makes an AI-powered detection and response platform, laid off dozens of employees on Wednesday, citing AI as one of the reasons. John DiLullo, CEO at Deepwatch told TechCrunch in an email that the company “is aligning our organization to accelerate our significant investments in AI and automation.” A current Deepwatch…
A German court ruled that OpenAI’s ChatGPT violated the nation’s copyright laws by training its language models on licensed musical work without permission, multiple news outlets, including The Guardian reported. The decision came from a lawsuit that GEMA, the society that handles music rights in Germany, filed last November against OpenAI. The company was ordered to pay an undisclosed amount of damages to GEMA, but said it disagreed…
YouTube TV’s parent company, Google, has been locked in a standoff with Disney for nearly two weeks. The dispute began when the two companies failed to reach an agreement on a streaming deal. This means that for 12 days and counting, 10 million YouTube TV subscribers like myself have not been able to access Disney-owned…
