Scrunch AI is helping companies stand out in AI search

March 4, 2025

As more people turn to AI chatbots like ChatGPT to look things up on the internet, the way companies approach their online presence has to change. Scrunch AI wants to help enterprises better prepare for a world in which more AI bots and agents visit their website than humans do. Scrunch AI says its platform […]

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The Download: woolly mice, and data centers in space

March 4, 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. De-extinction scientists say these gene-edited ‘woolly mice’ are a step towards woolly mammoths They’re small, fluffy and kind of cute, but these mice represent a milestone in de-extinction efforts, according to their creators.…

LlamaIndex launches a cloud service for building unstructed data agents

March 4, 2025

Agents are the next big thing in AI. Some define these “agents” differently from others, but the general idea is, they’re AI-powered tools that can perform tasks autonomously. The agent hype has reached a fever pitch, but one startup was relatively early to the game: LlamaIndex. Founded by former Uber research scientists, Jerry Liu and […]

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Hotel management platform Mews books $75M round led by Tiger Global

March 4, 2025

Despite clouds of uncertainty looming over the economy and geopolitics, people still want to travel. To meet that demand, Mews, an Amsterdam-founded ‘unicorn’ building an SaaS platform for hotel management, has raised a fresh $75 million. The funding is coming at a crossroad in the travel industry. On one hand are positive signals. Analysts at […]

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Uber users in Austin are getting matched with Waymo robotaxis

March 4, 2025

Uber users in Austin now have a choice between a Waymo robotaxi and a human driver. The two companies officially launched Tuesday the “Waymo on Uber” robotaxi service in Austin as part of a partnership that has deepened in recent months. The launch comes just days before SXSW, the annual tech, music, film, and comedy […]

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Mistral urges telcos to get into the hyperscaler game

March 4, 2025

Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch brought a sales pitch to Mobile World Congress on Tuesday, urging delegates at the world’s biggest telecoms confab in Barcelona to invest in building data center infrastructure and “becoming hyperscalers” to boost the regional AI ecosystem. “We would welcome more domestic effort in making more data centers,” he said during an on-stage […]

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Mach Industries, founded by 21-year-old Ethan Thornton, lands US Army contract, builds weapons factory

March 4, 2025

Sequoia-backed Mach Industries, the defense tech founded by 21-year-old Ethan Thornton, landed a contract with the U.S. Army and has plans for its first factory, Thornton told TechCrunch. The factory will be 115,000 square feet in Huntington Beach, California, where Mach’s headquarters is located, CEO Thorton said. While that sounds like an expensive zip code […]

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Inside the Wild West of AI companionship

March 4, 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. Last week, I made a troubling discovery about an AI companion site called Botify AI: It was hosting sexually charged conversations with underage celebrity bots. These bots took on characters meant to…

At RightsCon in Taipei, activists reckon with a US retreat from promoting digital rights 

March 4, 2025
Last week, I joined over 3,200 digital rights activists, tech policymakers, and researchers and a smattering of tech company representatives in Taipei at RightsCon, the world’s largest digital rights conference.  Human rights conferences can be sobering, to say the least. They highlight the David vs. Goliath situation of small civil society organizations fighting to center…