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Received yesterday — 11 June 2025

Snap plans to sell lightweight, consumer AR glasses in 2026

10 June 2025 at 17:10
Snap is back with a new pair of AR smart glasses, and for the first time in years, it’s ready to sell them to consumers. The company plans to sell these new glasses, called Specs, to consumers starting in 2026, CEO Evan Spiegel announced on Tuesday during the Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, California. […]
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Windsurf says Anthropic is limiting its direct access to Claude AI models

4 June 2025 at 00:48
Windsurf, the popular vibe coding startup that’s reportedly being acquired by OpenAI, says Anthropic significantly reduced its first-party access to its Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude 3.5 Sonnet AI models. Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan said in a post on X Tuesday that Anthropic gave Windsurf little notice for this change, and the startup now has […]

Yoshua Bengio launches LawZero, a nonprofit AI safety lab

3 June 2025 at 17:33
Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio is launching a nonprofit AI safety lab called LawZero to build safer AI systems, he told the Financial Times on Monday. LawZero raised $30 million in philanthropic contributions from Skype founding engineer Jaan Tallinn, former Google chief Eric Schmidt, Open Philanthropy, and the Future of Life Institute, among others. The […]

Jony Ive to lead OpenAI’s design work following $6.5B acquisition of his company

21 May 2025 at 17:59
OpenAI is acquiring io, the device startup that CEO Sam Altman and famed Apple designer Jony Ive have quietly been working on for two years, in an all-equity deal that values that startup at $6.5 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal. As part of the unusual deal announced Wednesday, Ive and his design firm, […]

OpenAI launches Codex, an AI coding agent, in ChatGPT

16 May 2025 at 15:00
OpenAI announced on Friday it’s launching a research preview of Codex, the company’s most capable AI coding agent yet. Codex is powered by codex-1, a version of the company’s o3 AI reasoning model optimized for software engineering tasks. OpenAI says codex-1 produces “cleaner” code than o3, adheres more precisely to instructions, and will iteratively run […]

Vibe-coding startup Windsurf launches in-house AI models

15 May 2025 at 22:05
On Thursday, Windsurf, a startup that develops popular AI tools for software engineers, announced the launch of its first family of AI software engineering models, or SWE-1 for short. The startup says it trained its new family of AI models — SWE-1, SWE-1-lite, and SWE-1-mini — to be optimized for the “entire software engineering process,” […]

The near joy of biking with Ray-Ban Meta glasses

10 May 2025 at 15:00
For years, weekend bike rides have been sacred escapes for me. Every pedal stroke helps melt away the stressors that piled up throughout the week, and I’ve collected a few gadgets that make these rides better. However, I’ve learned the hard way that bringing along too much gear takes away from the ride itself, forcing […]

Meta taps former Google DeepMind director to lead its AI research lab

8 May 2025 at 18:39
Meta has chosen Robert Fergus to lead its Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) lab, according to Bloomberg. Fergus had been working at Google DeepMind as a research director for roughly five years, per his LinkedIn. Prior to Google, he worked as a researcher scientist at Meta. Meta’s FAIR, which has been around since 2013, has faced […]

OpenAI upgrades ChatGPT search with shopping features

28 April 2025 at 19:03
OpenAI is updating ChatGPT search, its web search tool in ChatGPT, to give users an improved online shopping experience, the company announced Monday. When ChatGPT users search for products, the chatbot will now offer a few recommendations, present images and reviews for those items, and include direct links to web pages where users can buy […]

Anthropic CEO wants to open the black box of AI models by 2027

24 April 2025 at 23:28
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay Thursday highlighting how little researchers understand about the inner workings of the world’s leading AI models. To address that, Amodei set an ambitious goal for Anthropic to reliably detect most AI model problems by 2027. Amodei acknowledges the challenge ahead. In “The Urgency of Interpretability,” the CEO says Anthropic has […]

Google Gemini has 350M monthly users, reveals court hearing

23 April 2025 at 15:52
Gemini, Google’s AI chatbot, had 350 million monthly active users around the globe as of March, according to internal data revealed in Google’s ongoing antitrust suit. The Information first reported the stat. Usage of Google’s AI offerings has exploded in the last year. Gemini had just 9 million daily active users in October 2024, but […]

Amazon’s Starlink competitor runs into production delays

23 April 2025 at 15:01
Amazon’s Project Kuiper, the company’s initiative to launch a fleet of satellites into low-Earth orbit and beam internet connection to users, is struggling to ramp up production, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday. The competitor to Elon Musk’s Starlink has completed only a few dozen satellites, according to the report. The venture reportedly needs to quadruple its […]

Threads is testing a feature that lets you follow the same creators you follow on X

9 April 2025 at 21:04
Meta is starting to test a new feature in Threads that lets users follow the same creators they follow on X, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. “We’re currently testing a way for you to find and follow creators from other platforms on Threads, making it easier to connect with the people and conversations that matter […]

Ilya Sutskever taps Google Cloud to power his AI startup’s research

9 April 2025 at 18:55
OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever’s new AI startup, Safe Superintelligence (SSI), is using Google Cloud’s TPU chips to power its AI research, part of a new partnership the companies announced on Wednesday in a press release. Google Cloud says SSI is using TPUs to “accelerate its research and development efforts toward building […]

Anthropic rolls out a $200-per-month Claude subscription

9 April 2025 at 17:00
Anthropic announced on Wednesday that it’s launching a new, very expensive subscription plan for its AI chatbot Claude: Max. An answer to OpenAI’s $200-a-month ChatGPT Pro tier, Max comes with higher usage limits than Anthropic’s $20-per-month Claude Pro subscription, as well as priority access to the company’s newest AI models and features. A bit confusingly, […]

Kalshi CEO: ‘State law doesn’t really apply’ to us

9 April 2025 at 16:57
Last week, prediction market startup Kalshi sued New Jersey and Nevada after they tried to shut down its recently launched sports trading operation. In the lawsuit, Kalshi claimed that, since they’re a federally regulated platform, state gaming commissions don’t have the authority to set rules for them. “We’re not necessarily very concerned [because] we are […]

SF Mayor Lurie to tech CEOs: ‘How can we get you back?’

5 April 2025 at 15:00
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie wants to bring his city back to its glory days. And he’s convinced tech leaders — who often pitch utopian ideals of their own — can help him deliver. “I’m a mayor that is picking up the phone and calling CEOs,” said Lurie during TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC event on Thursday night. […]

Amazon’s new AI agent will shop third-party sites for you

4 April 2025 at 00:35
Amazon is starting to test a new AI shopping agent, a feature it calls “Buy for Me,” with a subset users, the company announced in a blog post Thursday. If Amazon doesn’t sell something that users are searching for, the Buy for Me feature will display products to users that other websites are selling. Then, […]
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