Technology

This artificial leaf makes hydrocarbons out of carbon dioxide

March 12, 2025
For many years, researchers have been working to build devices that can mimic photosynthesis—the process by which plants use sunlight and carbon dioxide to make their fuel. These artificial leaves use sunlight to separate water into oxygen and hydrogen, which could then be used to fuel cars or generate electricity. Now a research team has…

Everyone in AI is talking about Manus. We put it to the test.

March 11, 2025
Since general AI agent Manus was launched last week, it has spread online like wildfire. And not just in China either, where it was developed by Wuhan-based startup Butterfly Effect. It’s made  its way into the global conversation, with influential voices in tech, including Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and Hugging Face product lead Victor Mustar,…

Podcast app Pocket Casts makes its web player free

March 11, 2025

Pocket Casts, the podcast app acquired by Automattic in 2021, is now making its web player free. The company says the move offers an alternative to the big platforms’ closed ecosystems, where algorithmic-driven content is prioritized and podcasts are kept behind paywalls. Podcasts were built on open technology — the open, decentralized standard RSS, which […]

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Mark Cuban says AI is ‘never the answer,’ it’s a ‘tool’

March 11, 2025

Speaking at the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, tech investor and entrepreneur Mark Cuban shared his thoughts on how AI technology can help small businesses outperform their competition. In short, he told the crowd that AI was not the answer, in and of itself, but is meant to serve as an aid that can help […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Waabi says its virtual robotrucks are realistic enough to prove the real ones are safe

March 11, 2025
Canadian robotruck startup Waabi says its super-realistic virtual simulation is now accurate enough to prove the safety of its driverless big rigs without having to run them for miles on real roads.  The company uses a digital twin of its real-world robotrucks, loaded up with real sensor data, and measures how the twin’s performance compares…

The Download: making AI fairer, and why everyone’s talking about AGI

March 11, 2025
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Two new measures show where AI models fail on fairness What’s new: A new pair of AI benchmarks could help developers reduce bias in AI models, potentially making them fairer and less likely…

AGI is suddenly a dinner table topic

March 11, 2025
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. The concept of artificial general intelligence—an ultra-powerful AI system we don’t have yet—can be thought of as a balloon, repeatedly inflated with hype during peaks of optimism (or fear) about its potential…

These two new AI benchmarks could help make models less biased

March 11, 2025
A new pair of AI benchmarks could help developers reduce bias in AI models, potentially making them fairer and less likely to cause harm. The research, from a team based at Stanford, was posted to the arXiv preprint server in early February. The researchers were inspired to look into the problem of bias after witnessing…

Supercharge your brand visibility with an exhibit table at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025

March 10, 2025

From October 27-29, TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 will bring together over 10,000 startup pioneers, VC leaders, and tech enthusiasts at Moscone West in San Francisco—the epicenter of innovation set to reshape the future of technology. What’s in it for your startup? A golden opportunity to put your innovation in front of an eager audience for all […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The Download: supercharging the power grid, and a new Chinese AI agent

March 10, 2025
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The cheapest way to supercharge America’s power grid —Brian Deese is an innovation fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and served as director of the White House National Economic Council from 2021…