Author: Art Ryan

As publishers fret about decreased traffic from Google, the search giant has begun rolling out AI summaries in Discover, the main news feed inside Google’s search app on iOS and Android. Now, instead of seeing a headline from a major publication, users will see multiple news publishers’ logos in the top-left corner, followed by an AI-generated summary that cites those sources. The app warns that these summaries are generated with AI, “which can make mistakes.” The feature is not yet appearing for all news stories within the Google app. In tests, TechCrunch was able to view the AI summaries firsthand across…

The Pentagon has opened the military AI floodgates and handed out contracts worth up to $800 million to four of the biggest names: Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Elon Musk’s xAI. Each company gets a shot at $200 million worth of work. Dr Doug Matty, Chief Digital and AI Officer, said: “The adoption of AI is transforming the Department’s ability to support our warfighters and maintain strategic advantage over our adversaries. “Leveraging commercially available solutions into an integrated capabilities approach will accelerate the use of advanced AI as part of our joint mission essential tasks in our warfighting domain as well…

As AI systems become more capable, speech is fast becoming the default way we communicate with machines. French AI startup Mistral has jumped into the audio race with its first open model, aiming to challenge the dominance of walled-off corporate systems with open-weight alternatives. On Tuesday, Mistral announced the release of Voxtral, its first family of audio models aimed at businesses. The company is pitching Voxtral as the first open model that’s capable of deploying “truly usable speech intelligence in production.” In other words, no longer will developers have to choose between a cheap, open system that fumbles transcriptions and doesn’t really…

Dubai is set to open a restaurant called WOOHOO, where the kitchen is guided by an AI chef. It’s the first in the world to do this. The restaurant will be near the Burj Khalifa, one of the most famous landmarks. Here’s the catch: humans still cook the food. But everything else, from what’s on the menu to the music and even the way servers act, will be created by Chef Aiman, an AI developed by UMAI. Meet Chef Aiman: Chef Aiman is not your usual kitchen helper. It’s an AI designed to work alongside human chefs. Its job is…

US technology giant Nvidia says it will soon resume sales of its high-end artificial intelligence (AI) chips to China. The US government has assured the firm that it will grant the licenses needed to restart exports to the world’s second largest economy, the company said in a blog post. The move reverses a ban on sales of Nvidia’s H20 chips to Beijing, which was imposed by US President Donald Trump’s administration in April over concerns that they could be used by the Chinese military. The chips have been a key focus of export controls aimed at keeping the cutting-edge technology out…

The U.S. Department of Defense on Monday said it’s granting contract awards of up to $200 million for artificial intelligence development at Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and xAI. The DoD’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office said the awards will help the agency accelerate its adoption of “advanced AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges.” The companies will work to develop AI agents across several mission areas at the agency. “The adoption of AI is transforming the Department’s ability to support our warfighters and maintain strategic advantage over our adversaries,” Doug Matty, the DoD’s chief digital and AI officer, said in a release. Elon…

Amazon’s cloud unit said Monday that it has released a preview of Kiro, a program developers can use to write code with help from artificial intelligence. In a post on X, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said Kiro “has a chance to transform how developers build software.” The introduction comes days after Google said it is hiring staffers of AI coding software startup Windsurf as part of a $2.4 billion technology licensing deal. Google said it plans to make its Gemini AI models more useful to software developers. Amazon and Google are jumping deeper into so-called vibe coding, the process of directing computers to create software with minimal…

Cognition, the startup behind the viral AI coding agent Devin, announced in a blog post on Monday that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire AI coding startup Windsurf. The announcement comes just days after Google hired away Windsurf’s CEO Varun Mohan, co-founder Douglas Chen, and research leaders in a $2.4 billion reverse-acquihire that left much of the startup’s 250-person team behind. Google’s deal occurred just hours after OpenAI’s $3 billion offer to acquire Windsurf expired, clearing the way for the AI coding startup to explore other options. The frenzy around Windsurf represents a new peak in the wild race to develop AI coding tools —…

U.S. President Donald Trump will announce $70 billion in artificial-intelligence and energy investments on Tuesday, according to a White House official and a person familiar with the initiatives. Trump will reveal details of these new initiatives at an event near Pittsburgh, where he will be joined by Republican Senator David McCormick, who is hosting the first Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit at Carnegie Mellon University. McCormick’s office did not respond on Monday to requests for details of the announcements. The investments come from various industries that include new data centers and power grid upgrades and expansions, according to the White House official. Axios was the first…

Malaysia is taking on a bigger role in helping the U.S. prevent advanced AI chips from ending up in China. The Malaysian Ministry of Investment, Trade and Industry announced new restrictions on exporting AI chips of U.S. origin out of its country on Monday. Individuals and companies are now required to notify Malaysian authorities at least 30 days in advance when they are exporting or transshipping U.S. AI chips, effective immediately. “Malaysia stands firm against any attempt to circumvent export controls or engage in illicit trade activities by any individual or company, who will face strict legal action if found…

Amazon’s Prime Day, which leads to an overall boost to U.S. e-commerce thanks to competitive sales, saw a significant increase in retail traffic driven by generative AI products, including chatbots and browsers. According to a post-Prime Day analysis by Adobe Analytics, GenAI traffic to U.S. retail sites increased by 3,300% year-over-year — which was more than the firm had originally forecast. Adobe’s e-commerce division provided an analysis of the U.S. retail landscape encompassing over 1 trillion visits to U.S. retail websites, including 100 million SKUs across 18 product categories. During the Amazon Prime Day event (July 8-11), U.S. retailers saw $24.1…

Spanish startup Murphy has raised $15 million for its AI-powered debt collection offering. The company says its pre-seed/seed funding round, announced Monday (July 14), will allow Murphy to scale its product, expand its teams and expand internationally. “Debt servicing has historically been a slow, fragmented, and highly analogue industry, relying on costly call centers and generic engagement methods that leave vast amounts of recoverable debt untouched or written off,” Murphy said in a news release provided to PYMNTS. The company says it reimagines this process with the combination of artificial intelligence (AI) voice agents, “omnichannel outreach” and behavioral personalization. The goal here…

Meta has reportedly acquired voice technology/artificial intelligence (AI) startup PlayAI. The “entire PlayAI team” is due to join Meta this week, Bloomberg News reported late Friday (July 11), citing an internal memo. The company confirmed the acquisition but declined to comment further, the report added. These new employees will report to Johan Schalkwyk, who joined Meta recently from another voice AI startup, Sesame AI, Bloomberg reported. The news follows an earlier report from the news outlet that the companies were in talks about an acquisition. PlayAI’s “work in creating natural voices, along with a platform for easy voice creation, is a great match for our work and road map, across AI Characters, Meta AI, Wearables and audio content creation,” the memo…

Every company’s marketing department has thousands of photos that teams must sort through to find matches for advertising campaigns. Doing so manually would typically take days or even weeks. Philips, a Dutch health technology company, faced the same issue. So it built a solution using Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform to narrow down 200,000 images into the best 8,000 on-brand images in just hours. The initiative addressed a long-standing challenge: the need to maintain visual consistency across a wide product portfolio and global digital presence. The volume and variety of content created over time had become difficult to organize and maintain using…

  Meta will invest in “hundreds of billions of dollars” in artificial intelligence with the world’s first supercluster online next year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Monday. Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads, is significantly boosting its expenditures on AI. “For our superintelligence effort, I’m focused on building the most elite and talent-dense team in the industry,” Zuckerberg posted on Facebook. “We’re also going to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into computing to build superintellitence. We have the capital from our business to do it.” In April, Meta raised its 2025 capital expenditure forecast to between $64 billion and $72 billion, primarily…

Scientists have harnessed the power of artificial intelligence to develop a groundbreaking material that can cool buildings without using electricity, offering a promising solution to reduce energy consumption and lower utility costs. Smarter Cooling With AI Researchers from the University of Maryland and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) used an AI-driven design approach to create a novel material that reflects heat while allowing infrared radiation to escape — effectively keeping interiors cooler. By feeding AI models with data on the thermal, optical, and structural properties of thousands of potential compounds, the team identified a new combination of…

Tesla is set to roll out its much-anticipated Grok AI in-car assistant this month, bringing advanced artificial intelligence capabilities to its electric vehicles and redefining the driving experience. Grok AI Comes to Tesla Vehicles Grok AI, developed by xAI — Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence venture — is designed to enhance driver interaction with Tesla cars by offering a conversational, context-aware assistant that integrates seamlessly with the vehicle’s systems. The assistant can answer questions, adjust settings, recommend routes, explain vehicle features, and even entertain passengers with real-time information, humor, or personalized suggestions. Tesla first previewed Grok AI earlier this year, with…

Today, we’re announcing our intention to sign the EU’s Code of Practice for General Purpose AI—subject to the current version being formally approved by the AI Board during its upcoming adequacy assessment. The Code is a framework for AI developers to comply with the EU AI Act—for more information about the AI Act and its obligations, see our primer here⁠. In parallel, and in response to the tremendous appetite from European governments and businesses that want to seize the potential of AI, we are kicking off the ‘OpenAI for Countries European Rollout’ to get on with the job of building Europe’s AI…

Ask ChatGPT whether artificial intelligence is contributing to Britain’s cooling jobs market and the chatbot acknowledges its own role – but adds a caveat: “Yes, AI is contributing to job losses in the UK, but its impact is nuanced and varies by industry, skill level, and job function.” There are concerns that AI could be one culprit behind the slowdown, as the ascendant technology destroys workers’ jobs. The telecoms company BT has said advances in AI could lead it to cut more jobs, having already outlined plans to shed up to 55,000 workers two years ago – including as a result of investment in digital automation. Amazon has…

Researchers have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) system that enables a four-legged robot to adapt its gait to different, unfamiliar terrain, just like a real animal, in what is believed to be a world first. The work has been published in Nature Machine Intelligence. The pioneering technology allows the robot to change the way it moves autonomously, rather than having to be told when and how to alter its stride like the current generation of robots. This advance is seen as a major step toward potentially using legged robots in hazardous settings where humans might be put at risk, such as…