Yelp said on Tuesday that it’s working on deploying AI-powered “voice agents” to help service providers and restaurants handle calls, answer basic questions, and accomplish tasks like adding a customer to a restaurant waitlist. Yelp says its agents don’t require a complicated setup or API integrations, and can draw from existing metadata along with data […]
Governments like China and North Korea, along with spyware makers, used the most recorded zero-days in 2024.
Storied Silicon Valley VC firm Andreessen Horowitz is backing a fledgling U.K. startup that’s setting out to “redefine” how AI is used to match companies with talent. Dex, as the startup is called, targets candidates and companies with various AI-powered recruitment smarts, including matchmaking and coaching, with a view toward improving retention in the long […]
Veterans of the European startup scene, who’ve launched multiple consumer apps in the past, are partly coming out of stealth Tuesday with a new app. On the face of it, Grouphug will simply generate memes from the archive of a group WhatsApp chat. However, that masks a wider play. Grouphug is led by Felix Petersen, […]
Blink and you’ll miss it: A startup out of Finland is taking a new look at the market for prescription eyewear. Tapping into innovations in eye-tracking and liquid crystal lens technology, IXI is building low-power glasses that will invisibly and automatically adjust to account for a wearer’s presbyopia (far-sightedness). Four years into its life, Helsinki-based […]
In a bid to broaden its user base in India, Reddit has updated its machine translation feature to support the automatic translation of posts and comments into Hindi. “With this expansion, authentic, more people-powered content is now accessible in one of India’s most spoken languages,” the company wrote in an update to a blog post. […]
Supporting super-early stage entrepreneurs in Europe seems to be suddenly in vogue. Back in March, “Project Europe” was launched to great fanfare by podcaster and VC Harry Stebbings with a small $10 million fund to back founders aged only 25 and under, riffing on the ‘Peter Thiel Fellowship’ model of old. Now a new fund […]
A bug in OpenAI’s ChatGPT allowed the chatbot to generate graphic erotica for accounts where a user registered as a minor, under the age of 18, TechCrunch’s testing revealed, and OpenAI confirmed. In some cases, the chatbot even encouraged these users to ask for raunchier, more explicit content. OpenAI told TechCrunch its policies don’t allow […]
HR tech giant Deel says it has formally accepted to be served legal documents in its ongoing court battle with rival Rippling in Ireland. This ends weeks of suspense after Rippling’s bailiffs couldn’t find Deel’s execs to serve them – only for Deel’s CEO and top lawyer to turn up in Dubai. Deel CEO Alex […]
Chinese tech company Alibaba on Monday released Qwen 3, a family of AI models the company claims matches and in some cases outperforms the best models available from Google and OpenAI. Most of the models are — or soon will be — available for download under an “open” license from AI dev platform Hugging Face […]