July 4, 2025

Inside India’s scramble for AI independence

In Bengaluru, India, Adithya Kolavi felt a mix of excitement and validation as he watched DeepSeek unleash its disruptive language model on the world earlier this year. The Chinese technology rivaled the best of the West in terms of benchmarks, but it had been built with far less capital in far less time.  “I thought:…

Technology

Meta launches new program to improve speech and translation AI

February 7, 2025

Meta is launching a new program in partnership with UNESCO to collect speech recordings and transcriptions the company said will help the development of future openly available AI. The program, the Language Technology Partner Program, is seeking collaborators who can contribute more than 10 hours of speech recordings with transcriptions, large amounts of written text, […]

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India to launch new domain name for banks to fight digital fraud

February 7, 2025

India’s central bank is introducing an exclusive “.bank.in” domain for banks from April 2025 as part of efforts to combat rising digital payment frauds and bolster trust in online banking services. The Institute for Development and Research in Banking Technology (IDRBT) will serve as the exclusive registrar for the new domain, the Reserve Bank of […]

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Superlogic raises $13.7M at a $200M valuation to help consumers use reward points toward cool ‘experiences’

February 6, 2025

Superlogic, a startup that helps give consumers a way to apply rewards points toward experiences, has raised $13.7 million at a $200 million valuation, the company tells TechCrunch exclusively. Lin Dai, CEO and co-founder of Miami-based Superlogic, said his company’s technology is designed to “enhance the value of rewards points” by giving consumers a broader […]

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

The Download: AI companion dangers, and supersonic planes

February 6, 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. An AI chatbot told a user how to kill himself—but the company doesn’t want to “censor” it For the past five months, Al Nowatzki has been talking to an AI girlfriend, “Erin,” on…

Reframing digital transformation through the lens of generative AI

February 6, 2025
Enterprise adoption of generative AI technologies has undergone explosive growth in the last two years and counting. Powerful solutions underpinned by this new generation of large language models (LLMs) have been used to accelerate research, automate content creation, and replace clunky chatbots with AI assistants and more sophisticated AI agents that closely mimic human interaction.…

What a return to supersonic flight could mean for climate change

February 6, 2025
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. As I’ve admitted in this newsletter before, I love few things more than getting on an airplane. I know, it’s a bold statement from a climate reporter because of all the associated…

XOi raises $230M, acquires Specifx to expand its tech for field service technicians

February 5, 2025

Field service engineers may not be the first group of customers that come to mind when you think about lucrative opportunities in B2B technology. But that same blind spot speaks of the opportunity in the space for those who are stepping up and targeting “the job site.” One of the players in that space, XOi  […]

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Supersonic planes are inching toward takeoff. That could be a problem.

February 5, 2025
Boom Supersonic broke the sound barrier in a test flight of its XB-1 jet last week, marking an early step in a potential return for supersonic commercial flight. The small aircraft reached a top speed of Mach 1.122 (roughly 750 miles per hour) in a flight over southern California and exceeded the speed of sound…