FavFeeds: Curating Tech and Marketing Media for Independent Developer

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February 22, 2025 22:55:14

Debates over AI benchmarks — and how they’re reported by AI labs — are spilling out into public view. This week, an OpenAI employee accused Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, of publishing misleading benchmark results for its latest AI model, Grok 3. One of the co-founders of xAI, Igor Babushkin, insisted that the company was […]

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US AI Safety Institute could face big cuts

February 22, 2025 21:22:36

The National Institute of Standards and Technology could fire as many as 500 staffers, according to multiple reports — cuts that further threaten a fledgling AI safety organization. Axios reported this week that the US AI Safety Institute (AISI) and Chips for America, both part of NIST, would be “gutted” by layoffs targeting probationary employees […]

3.

The fallout from HP’s Humane acquisition

February 22, 2025 18:05:00

Welcome back to Week in Review. This week we’re looking at the internal chaos surrounding HP’s $116 million acquisition of AI Pin maker Humane; Mira Murati’s new AI venture coming out of stealth; Duolingo killing its iconic owl mascot with a Cybertruck; and more! Let’s get into it. Humane’s AI pin is dead. The hardware […]

4.

Court filings show Meta staffers discussed using copyrighted content for AI training

February 21, 2025 23:15:38

For years, Meta employees have internally discussed using copyrighted works obtained through legally questionable means to train the company’s AI models, according to court documents unsealed on Thursday. The documents were submitted by plaintiffs in the case Kadrey v. Meta, one of many AI copyright disputes slowly winding through the U.S. court system. The defendant, […]

5.

iOS 18.4 will bring Apple Intelligence-powered ‘Priority Notifications’

February 21, 2025 21:34:27

Apple on Friday released its first developer beta for iOS 18.4, which adds a new “Priority Notifications” feature, powered by Apple Intelligence. The addition aims to help users manage their notifications by prioritizing important alerts and minimizing distractions from less important ones. These priority notifications are displayed in a separate section on the phone’s Lock […]

6.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says market got it wrong about DeepSeek’s impact

February 21, 2025 20:36:00

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said the market got it wrong when it comes to DeepSeek’s technological advancements and its potential to negatively impact the chipmaker’s business. Instead, Huang called DeepSeek’s R1 open source reasoning model “incredibly exciting” while speaking with Alex Bouzari, CEO of DataDirect Networks, in a pre-recorded interview that was released […]

7.

Report: OpenAI plans to shift compute needs from Microsoft to SoftBank

February 21, 2025 20:22:40

OpenAI is forecasting a major shift in the next five years around who it gets most of its computing power from, The Information reported on Friday. By 2030, OpenAI expects to get three-quarters of its data center capacity from Stargate, a project that’s expected to be heavily financed by SoftBank, one of OpenAI’s newest financial […]

8.

Norway’s 1X is building a humanoid robot for the home

February 21, 2025 19:32:11

Norwegian robotics firm 1X unveiled its latest home robot, Neo Gamma, on Friday. The humanoid system will succeed Neo Beta, which debuted in August. Like its predecessors, the Neo Gamma is a prototype designed for testing in the home environment. Images of the robot show it performing a number of household tasks like making coffee, […]

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Sakana walks back claims that its AI can dramatically speed up model training

February 21, 2025 19:19:49

This week, Sakana AI, an Nvidia-backed startup that’s raised hundreds of millions of dollars from VC firms, made a remarkable claim. The company said it had created an AI system, the AI CUDA Engineer, that could effectively speed up the training of certain AI models by a factor of up to 100x. The only problem […]

10.

The Vision Pro is getting Apple Intelligence in April

February 21, 2025 18:07:17

Apple Intelligence is heading to the Vision Pro as part of an upcoming operating system update. Apple confirmed on Friday that its generative AI platform will arrive on the extended reality headset as part of visionOS 2.4. A beta version of the software is currently available for developers. The public version is set for an […]

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AI wearables 1.0: Was Humane’s Ai Pin too ambitious?

February 21, 2025 16:18:46

Humane’s Ai Pin, which promised to replace your smartphone with a sleek wearable device, is officially dead. After a rocky launch, negative reviews, and returns outpacing sales, the startup is shutting down and selling its assets to HP for $116 million — less than half of what it raised. But what’s next for Humane’s tech, […]

12.

Report: AI coding assistants aren’t a panacea

February 21, 2025 16:11:09

As they gain in popularity, AI coding assistants such as GitHub Copilot may appear to be boosting productivity. But in reality, they could be causing overall code quality to decline. That’s the top-line finding from a new report released by software engineering platform GitClear, which analyzed 211 million code lines from 2020 to 2024. According […]

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Apply to Speak at TechCrunch Sessions: AI before the deadline

February 21, 2025 16:00:00

AI Innovators, seize your moment! Have insights that could inspire 1,200 AI founders, investors, and enthusiasts eager to advance the future of AI? Take center stage, influence the AI conversation, and exchange ideas at TechCrunch Sessions: AI on June 5 at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall. We’re gathering top AI visionaries from the startup world to […]

14.

DeepSeek to open source parts of online services code

February 21, 2025 15:36:46

Chinese AI lab DeepSeek plans to open source portions of its online services’ code as part of an “open source week” event next week. DeepSeek will open source five code repositories that have been “documented, deployed and battle-tested in production,” the company said in a post on X on Thursday. Code repositories are storage locations […]

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TechCrunch Disrupt 2025: Lowest prices of the year end in 7 days

February 21, 2025 15:00:00

You read that headline correctly! The best deals for TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 tickets are about to end in just 7 days. Save up to $1,130 on individual passes and up to 30% on group tickets. Don’t wait — these offers end on February 28 at 11:59 p.m. PT. Join us in celebrating 20 years of […]

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OpenAI rolls out its AI agent, Operator, in several countries

February 21, 2025 08:31:32

OpenAI said on Friday that it is rolling out Operator — its AI agent that can perform tasks on behalf of users — for ChatGPT Pro subscribers in Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, the U.K., and more countries. OpenAI said Operator will be available in most places where ChatGPT is available, apart […]

17.

CEO of Clearview AI, a controversial facial recognition startup, has resigned

February 20, 2025 21:17:16

The CEO of controversial facial recognition startup Clearview AI has resigned, he confirms to TechCrunch.

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In India, Apple’s iPhone 16e faces stiff competition from older models

February 20, 2025 18:20:17

Apple has brought the iPhone 16e to offer a more affordable option within the iPhone 16 lineup, targeting emerging markets including India.

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Inside the Humane acquisition: HP offers big raises to some, others immediately laid off

February 20, 2025 17:50:34

Hours after the acquisition was announced, several Humane employees received job offers. Others were not so lucky.

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Figure’s humanoid robot takes voice orders to help around the house

February 20, 2025 16:56:40

Figure founder and CEO Brett Adcock Thursday revealed a new machine learning model for humanoid robots. The news, which arrives two weeks after Adcock announced the Bay Area robotics firm’s decision to step away from an OpenAI collaboration, is centered around Helix, a “generalist” Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model. VLAs are a new phenomenon for robotics, leveraging […]

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