After Tesla shareholders approved a new compensation package that could be worth $1 trillion, CEO Elon Musk appears to be celebrating with a normal weekend on his social media platform X. In an early Saturday morning post with the surely coincidental timestamp of 4:20am EST, Musk posted a video generated by Grok Imagine, the new…
Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility, your hub for all things “future of transportation.” To get this in your inbox, sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! Did you hear? Elon Musk got his $1 trillion pay package. Of course you did, because coverage of that highly anticipated vote is everywhere, including here at…
While Apple’s iPhone already supports texting, calling emergency services, and contacting roadside assistance via satellite connectivity, the company has many more satellite-powered features in the works, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. In-development features reportedly include an API allowing app makers to support satellite connections in their own apps, a version of Apple Maps that allows…
How can speech editing become as direct and controllable as simply rewriting a line of text? StepFun AI has open sourced Step-Audio-EditX, a 3B parameter LLM based audio model that turns expressive speech editing into a token level text like operation, instead of a waveform level signal processing task. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.03601 Why developers care about controllable…
In this tutorial, we explore how to build an Agentic Voice AI Assistant capable of understanding, reasoning, and responding through natural speech in real time. We begin by setting up a self-contained voice intelligence pipeline that integrates speech recognition, intent detection, multi-step reasoning, and text-to-speech synthesis. Along the way, we design an agent that listens…
A rough week for tech stocks might signal a loss of investor confidence in artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal reports that the Nasdaq Composite Index was down 3% — making this its worst week since President Donald Trump announced his sweeping tariff plan in April. Tech companies that have otherwise performed well this year…
How can we build AI systems that keep learning new information over time without forgetting what they learned before or retraining from scratch? Google Researchers has introduced Nested Learning, a machine learning approach that treats a model as a collection of smaller nested optimization problems, instead of a single network trained by one outer loop….
If you watched all the way to the end of the new Apple TV show “Pluribus,” you may have noticed an unusual disclaimer in the credits: “This show was made by humans.” That terse message — placed right below a note that “animal wranglers were on set to ensure animal safety” — could potentially provide…
A recent letter from OpenAI reveals more details about how the company is hoping the federal government can support the company’s ambitious plans for data center construction. The letter — from OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane and addressed to the White House’s director of science and technology policy Michael Kratsios — argued that…
Startups have never been able to offer the same sizable salaries as big tech companies. Now with companies like Meta and OpenAI willing to pay million-dollar salaries amid the AI race — the compensation divide has grown even larger. Early-stage startups are not doomed though. If they develop a compensation strategy that is generous, fair,…
