February 13, 2026

ALS stole this musician’s voice. AI let him sing again.

There are tears in the audience as Patrick Darling’s song begins to play. It’s a heartfelt song written for his great-grandfather, whom he never got the chance to meet. But this performance is emotional for another reason: It’s Darling’s first time on stage with his bandmates since he lost the ability to sing two years…

The Download: poisoning generative AI, and heat-storing batteries

October 24, 2023
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. This new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI What’s happening: A new tool lets artists make invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online…

Heat-storing batteries are scaling up to solve one of climate’s dirtiest problems

October 24, 2023
Today Antora Energy, a California-based thermal-battery startup, unveiled its plan to build its first large-scale manufacturing facility in San Jose. The announcement is a big step forward for thermal batteries (also known as heat batteries), an industry seeking to become a major player in the energy storage sector. Antora’s batteries store renewable energy as heat,…

Aleph is building a platform to reconcile disparate financial data

October 24, 2023

As cloud-based software becomes the norm for many functions inside of modern businesses, data silos are growing into an outsize problem. This is particularly true in the financial industry, where vendors are often faced with reconciling data from a diverse range of sources. According to a 2022 survey from InterSystems — which, it should be […]

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WorkMagic wants to automate all the marketing tasks for Shopify sellers

October 24, 2023

There’s no shortage of startups trying to automate marketing tasks by using generative AI. For WorkMagic, the target users are the millions of small-scale Shopify sellers who it believes can benefit immensely from cost savings in their marketing efforts. Founded in June, WorkMagic offers a full-stack platform that handles everything from image and copy generation […]

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Walmart and Outlier Ventures’ web3 accelerator launches with five startups

October 24, 2023

Walmart’s incubation arm, Store Nº8, and Outlier Ventures have joined forces to launch its web3 accelerator program, Store Nº8 Base Camp. TechCrunch got a first look at its cohort. The 12-week virtual incubator program brought in a flagship group of five companies that specialize in web3 marketing, advertising and improving payment technology, among other themes. […]

© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

D-ID’s newest app uses AI to make videos from photographs

October 24, 2023

D-ID, the Tel Aviv-based startup best known as the tech behind those viral videos of animated family photos, is bringing its AI video technology to a new mobile app, launching today. Originally available as a web platform, D-ID’s Creative Reality Studio allows users to upload a still image and script and then turn that into […]

© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

How this Turing Award–winning researcher became a legendary academic advisor

October 24, 2023
Every academic field has its superstars. But a rare few achieve superstardom not just by demonstrating individual excellence but also by consistently producing future superstars. A notable example of such a legendary doctoral advisor is the Princeton physicist John Archibald Wheeler. A dissertation was once written about his mentorship, and he advised Richard Feynman, Kip…

Death to captchas

October 24, 2023
Earlier this year, HBO Max users hoping to sign in to the service had to pass an audio challenge in which they listened to a bunch of tunes and had to select the one with a repeating pattern. When I signed in to LinkedIn recently, it asked me to prove I’m human with an unusual…