April 2025

Bezos-backed EV startup Slate Auto’s pickup truck spotted in the wild

April 10, 2025
Just one day after TechCrunch revealed that Jeff Bezos is backing a secretive EV startup called Slate Auto, an early version of the company’s low-cost electric pickup truck was spotted in the wild. Reddit user u/discostranger09 posted a photo to the r/whatisthiscar subreddit on Wednesday of a small, dark gray two-seater pickup truck on a […]

The US Secretary of Education referred to AI as ‘A1,’ like the steak sauce

April 10, 2025
U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon attended the ASU+GSV Summit this week, where experts in education and technology gathered to discuss how AI will impact learning. While speaking on a panel about AI in the workforce, McMahon repeatedly referred to AI as “A1,” like the steak sauce. “You know, AI development — I mean, how […]

Netflix’s latest season of ‘Black Mirror’ comes with a mobile game

April 10, 2025
Season 7 of “Black Mirror” premiered on Thursday, introducing a new mobile game connected to one of its episodes. The game, titled “Thronglets,” from Netflix’s own Night School Studio, serves as a companion to the episode called “Plaything.” Players interact with virtual yellow pets and strive to keep them alive. If players are successful in […]

Jobandtalent raises $103M on a down-round $1.5B valuation as it looks to AI to recruit temps

April 10, 2025
Jobandtalent, an AI-based “workforce as a service” marketplace that connects people with companies looking for hourly workers, announced it has raised €92 million ($103 million).  The Series F — which includes participation from Atomico, BlackRock, DN Capital, Hercules, Infravia, Kibo, and Kinnevik — values the Madrid, Spain-based company at €1.3 billion ($1.5 billion) post-money.  On the surface, […]

LiveKit’s tools power real-time communications, including OpenAI’s Voice Mode

April 10, 2025
A challenge for many tech companies is delivering high-bandwidth, multimodal data — for example, simultaneous audio and video — to users in real time without interruptions. Some firms build solutions in-house, but these often require a lot of upkeep and maintenance. To ease the burden, Russ d’Sa and David Zhao created LiveKit, an open-source software […]

Canva is getting AI image generation, interactive coding, spreadsheets and more

April 10, 2025
Although there has been significant pushback from artists regarding the proliferation of AI design tools and the content used to train generative models, the companies making the software for creative work are nevertheless building AI into their toolkits. It’s a signal of just how quickly AI has gained importance — regardless of what their customers […]