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• Reid Hoffman’s Manas AI raises $24.6M, a fraction of other AI drug discovery startups 2025-01-28
  LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Siddhartha Mukherjee, cancer researcher and author of the book “The Emperor of All Maladies,” have co-founded an AI-powered drug discovery startup, Manas AI. The company, which will initially focus on breast cancer, prostate cancer, and lymphoma, has raised $24.6 million in seed funding from Hoffman, General Catalyst, and Greylock. Manas […]
  Marina Temkin
• Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger is already using DeepSeek instead of OpenAI at his startup, Gloo 2025-01-28
  The tech industry's reaction to AI model DeepSeek R1 has been wild. Pat Gelsinger, for instance, is elated and thinks it will make AI better for everyone. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
  Julie Bort
• SonicWall says hackers are exploiting a new zero-day bug to breach customer networks 2025-01-27
  SonicWall said the bug is "confirmed as being actively exploited in the wild" by malicious hackers. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
  Zack Whittaker
• Quartz has been quietly publishing AI-generated news articles 2025-01-27
  Quartz, the international business news outlet, has been quietly aggregating reporting from other outlets, including TechCrunch, in order to publish AI-generated articles under the byline “Quartz Intelligence Newsroom.”   Quartz started publishing simple AI-generated earnings reports months ago, but beginning last week, the outlet moved on to short articles. One of the 18 AI-generated articles published […]
  Rebecca Bellan
• How to switch off Apple Intelligence on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac 2025-01-27
  Here's a step-by-step guide on how to turn off and disable Apple Intelligence from your devices. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
  Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai
• DeepSeek claims its ‘reasoning’ model beats OpenAI’s o1 on certain benchmarks 2025-01-27
  Chinese AI lab DeepSeek has released an open version of DeepSeek-R1, its so-called reasoning model, that it claims performs as well as OpenAI’s o1 on certain AI benchmarks. R1 is available from the AI dev platform Hugging Face under an MIT license, meaning it can be used commercially without restrictions. According to DeepSeek, R1 beats […]
  Kyle Wiggers
• Nvidia drops $600B off its market cap amid the rise of DeepSeek 2025-01-27
  DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup, became the talk of the proverbial AI town when it released its R1 model on Friday. R1’s functionality and accuracy compared to its U.S. counterparts, despite using fewer resources and less compute power, seems like a win for the overall AI industry. But it isn’t necessarily good news for everyone. […]
  Rebecca Szkutak
• Alibaba’s Qwen team releases AI models that can control PCs and phones 2025-01-27
  Chinese AI lab DeepSeek might be getting the bulk of the tech industry’s attention this week. But one of its top domestic rivals, Alibaba, isn’t sitting idly by. Alibaba’s Qwen team on Monday released a new family of AI models, Qwen2.5-VL, that can perform a number of text and image analysis tasks. The models can […]
  Kyle Wiggers
• Cornell’s robot jellyfish and worm are powered by a hydraulic fluid battery 2025-01-27
  Researchers at Cornell University on Monday showcased a pair of bio-inspired robotics running on a hydraulic fluid-powered battery. The redox flow battery (RFB) also mimics biological functions, as it releases electrolytic fluids, which dissolve to create energy through chemical reaction. The first two robots on display are a modular worm and a jellyfish, designed by […]
  Brian Heater
• Hackers are targeting machine identities. Token Security just raised $20M to stop them. 2025-01-27
  The number of machine identities is booming thanks to the growth of cloud and AI — and it’s posing real security problems by giving hackers way more entry points than ever before. For example, a 2023 hack of authentication app Okta was caused by exploiting a service account while in 2024, Microsoft disclosed a major […]
  Charles Rollet
• Smartwatch pioneer and Kickstarter darling Pebble is returning in a new form 2025-01-27
  Four years after launching the (then) most lucrative crowdfunding campaign in Kickstarter’s history, smartwatch maker Pebble abruptly closed in 2016, filing for insolvency before being sold off to rival Fitbit. The fitness-tracking giant went on to build much of its Ionic smartwatch with help from former Pebblers, along with Pebble’s pioneering software stack. It could […]
  Brian Heater
• DeepSeek displaces ChatGPT as the App Store’s top app 2025-01-27
  The mobile app for DeepSeek, a Chinese AI lab, skyrocketed to the No. 1 spot in app stores around the globe this weekend, topping the U.S.-based AI chatbot, ChatGPT. On iOS, DeepSeek is currently the No. 1 free app in the U.S. App Store and 51 other countries, according to mobile app analytics firm Appfigures. […]
  Maxwell Zeff
• How DeepSeek’s efficient AI could stall the nuclear renaissance 2025-01-27
  The startups and power producers that are betting big on new nuclear are vulnerable to an energy efficient AI model. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
  Tim De Chant
• OpenAI-backed 1X acquires Kind Humanoid 2025-01-27
  1X has acquired Kind Humanoid, the Norwegian robotics startup told TechCrunch on Monday. The deal marks a small but key consolidation for a humanoid robotics industry on the brink of a major moment in 2025. TechCrunch spoke with Kind Humanoid in October, when the then-three-person startup announced that it had enlisted famed designer Yves Béhar […]
  Brian Heater
• Bluesky adds video to user profiles 2025-01-27
  Social network Bluesky is doubling down on video. After it added a new TikTok-like custom video feed last week in the wake of the U.S. ban on the popular video app (now on pause), the company on Monday announced it’s adding a new video tab to Bluesky user profiles. The tab will allow people to […]
  Sarah Perez
• AI startup DeepSeek pauses signups amid cyber incident 2025-01-27
  DeepSeek, the Chinese AI startup that made waves in the AI world last week when it released its open source R1 model, is pausing new user signups. The company has temporarily paused new user registrations this morning, according to CNBC reporting, due to a cyberattack. Existing users can still access their accounts with no issue. […]
  Rebecca Szkutak
• Viral AI company DeepSeek releases new image model family 2025-01-27
  DeepSeek, the viral AI company, has released a new set of multimodal AI models that it claims can outperform OpenAI’s DALL-E 3. The models, which are available for download from the AI dev platform Hugging Face, are part of a new model family that DeepSeek is calling Janus-Pro. They range in size from 1 billion […]
  Kyle Wiggers
• Grok 3 seemingly went live for some users 2025-01-27
  The next flagship AI model from Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, might be nearing release. Over the weekend, several users on X, including reverse engineer Alexey Shabanov, reported gaining access to Grok 3, the successor to xAI’s current model, Grok 2, via X’s Grok chatbot app. Before their access was revoked, the users say that […]
  Kyle Wiggers
• Meta AI can now use your Facebook and Instagram data to personalize its responses 2025-01-27
  Meta says that it is rolling out improvements to Meta AI, its cross-platform chatbot, including the ability to have the bot “remember” details from conversations. In a post on Meta’s official blog, the company said that, in chats with Meta AI on Facebook, Messenger, and WhatsApp for iOS and Android in the U.S. and Canada, users […]
  Kyle Wiggers
• TechCrunch Disrupt 2025: 5 Days left to claim your 2 for 1 Passes at the lowest rate of the year 2025-01-27
  The clock is ticking for one of our Super Early Bird sales! You have just 5 days left to lock in your 2 for 1 Passes at the lowest rates of the year for TechCrunch Disrupt 2025. Save up to $1,400 on two of the same individual ticket type. This limited-time offer ends this Friday, […]
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