December 23, 2024

The Download: trustworthy humanoid robots, and Anduril’s latest project

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. Will we ever trust robots? The world might seem to be on the brink of a humanoid-robot heyday. New breakthroughs in artificial intelligence promise the type of capable, general-purpose robots previously seen only…

Faddom raises $12M to help companies map IT infrastructure wherever it lives

February 21, 2024

When IT was responsible for servers onsite, understanding what you owned and where it lived was not a big problem. For most, it was physical machines in a closet or server room, but as infrastructure became virtualized and moved to the cloud, figuring out the lay of your infrastructure land became more difficult. Faddom, an […]

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

Google DeepMind forms a new org focused on AI safety

February 21, 2024

If you ask Gemini, Google’s flagship GenAI model, to write deceptive content about the upcoming U.S. presidential election, it will, given the right prompt. Ask about a future Super Bowl game and it’ll invent a play-by-play. Or ask about the Titan submersible implosion and it’ll serve up disinformation, complete with convincing-looking but untrue citations. It’s […]

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

Microservices orchestration platform Orkes raises $20M Series A

February 21, 2024

Back in 2016, Netflix open-sourced Conductor, its microservices orchestration platform, but last December, it announced that it would discontinue maintaining it. Thankfully, for the many companies that rely on it, the creators of Conductor had previously left the company to launch Orkes, a startup that provides an enterprise-grade microservices platform based on the open-source project. […]

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

WhatsApp adds formatting support for lists, block quotes, and inline code

February 21, 2024

WhatsApp said today it is rolling out a number of new formatting options on the app, including bulleted lists, numbered lists, block quotes, and inline code. The company said these formatting features are available to users across platforms on iOS, Android, web, and Mac. Apart from being used fully in one-on-one and group communications, these […]

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

China’s Moonshot AI zooms to $2.5B valuation, raising $1B for an LLM focused on long context

February 21, 2024

The race to build the next big large language model is on, and now a contender out of China has reportedly banked a major round of funding to catapult it to the front of the pack. Moonshot AI, an artificial intelligence startup founded less than a year ago building LLMs that can handle long inputs […]

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

Apple launches a new app for tracking sports scores, stats

February 21, 2024

Apple today is continuing its investment in sports and subscriptions business with the launch of a new app for iPhone users, Apple Sports. The app will offer sports fans access to real-time scores, stats, and other information about their favorite teams and leagues, while introducing competition to other sports score aggregators on the App Store. […]

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

Apple readies iMessage for when quantum computers could break encryption

February 21, 2024

Apple announced today it is upgrading iMessage’s security layer to post-quantum cryptography, starting in iOS and iPadOS 17.4, macOS 14.4, and watchOS 10.4. The technology giant said that in the coming years, quantum computers will be able to break today’s cryptography standards. That’s why Apple said it is changing how end-to-end encryption works with iMessage […]

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