‘Should Not Travel to the Airport Under Any Circumstances’: Fire Closes Heathrow Airport Causing Travel Chaos Globally
Travelers should avoid Heathrow Airport on Friday — and disruptions could last for days.
The Download: talking dirty with DeepSeek, and the risks and rewards of calorie restriction
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. It’s pretty easy to get DeepSeek to talk dirty AI companions like Replika are designed to engage in intimate exchanges, but people use general-purpose chatbots for sex talk too, despite their stricter content…
Wayve CEO shares his key ingredients for scaling autonomous driving tech
Wayve co-founder and CEO Alex Kendall sees promise in bringing his autonomous vehicle startup’s tech to market. That is, if Wayve sticks to its strategy of ensuring its automated driving software is cheap to run, hardware agnostic, and can be applied to advanced driver assistance systems, robotaxis, and even robotics. The strategy, which Kendall laid […]
Microsoft is exploring a way to credit contributors to AI training data
Microsoft is launching a research project to estimate the influence of specific training examples on the text, images, and other types of media that generative AI models create. That’s per a job listing dating back to December that was recently recirculated on LinkedIn. According to the listing, which seeks a research intern, the project will […]
Meta spotted testing AI-generated comments on Instagram
In recent years, Meta has introduced many AI features and capabilities to its apps, even going so far as experimenting with AI-generated characters complete with unique profiles and personalities, before scraping them after they were deemed creepy and unnecessary. In yet another move that may not be received well among users, Meta wants to use […]
1X will test humanoid robots in ‘a few hundred’ homes in 2025
Norwegian robotics startup 1X plans to start early tests of its humanoid robot, Neo Gamma, in “a few hundred to a few thousand” homes by the end of 2025, according to the company’s CEO, Bernt Børnich. “Neo Gamma is going into homes this year,” Børnich told TechCrunch in an interview at Nvidia GTC 2025. “We […]
Commercial services platform BuildOps becomes a unicorn, raises $127M
Commercial services tech hasn’t historically been considered “sexy,” but the need for innovation in the space is enormous. That need has translated into a large fundraise for a company focused on streamlining commercial contracting processes. On Friday, BuildOps, which develops software for commercial services contractors, announced that it has raised $127 million in a Series […]
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Russian zero-day seller is offering up to $4 million for Telegram exploits
Two sources in the zero-day industry say Operation Zero’s prices for exploits against the popular messaging app Telegram will depend on different factors.
The Download: saving the “doomsday glacier,” and Europe’s hopes for its rockets
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. Inside a new quest to save the “doomsday glacier” The Thwaites glacier is a fortress larger than Florida, a wall of ice that reaches nearly 4,000 feet above the bedrock of West Antarctica,…
Google claims news is worthless to its ad business after test involving 1% of search results in eight EU markets
Google has reported the results of an experiment it ran which removed news from search results for 1% of users for 2.5 months in eight* markets in Europe — claiming the results show that news is essentially worthless to Google’s ad business. The search giant conducted the test because European copyright law requires it to […]