Author: arthursheikin@gmail.com

[ad_1] Hello, and welcome to your weekly dose of Big Tech news and insights. These are the moments I feel so lucky to be a journalist in Silicon Valley. AI is rapidly changing so much important stuff, for better or worse. Even just witnessing this from the sidelines is a joy.I had a fancy newsletter ready to go, all about Google’s big I/O conference. Then, OpenAI bought Jony Ive’s AI gadget startup for $6.5 billion. It’s called io. Lowercase. I’m not joking. That’s the name.AgendaWhat you need to know about this OpenAI-io megadeal and what it means for Apple, Google,…

[ad_1] Last week, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok experienced a “bug” that made it tell users about the “white genocide” conspiracy theory in South Africa, even when prompted with questions that had nothing to do with the topic … and soon after, Grok expressed skepticism over the Holocaust death toll, which it chalked up to a “programming error.” But with a degree of mental gymnastics that could put Simone Biles to shame, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has decided that Elon Musk’s robot baby Grok is too far left. Image Credits:Twitter/X (screenshot) “Grok is left leaning and continues to spread fake…

[ad_1] OpenAI just made its biggest acquisition yet, scooping up Jony Ive and Sam Altman’s secretive device startup, io, in a $6.5 billion all-equity deal. Ive, the legendary designer behind the iPhone and other iconic Apple products, will now lead creative and design work at OpenAI through his firm LoveFrom. The goal? To take AI “beyond the screen” and build a new generation of AI-powered consumer devices. Beyond the tech, there’s a clear narrative play here. OpenAI is framing Altman as the Jobs-esque visionary and Ive as the design genius who makes it all real. Social media had a field…

[ad_1] OpenAI is updating the AI model powering Operator, its AI agent that can autonomously browse the web and use certain software within a cloud-hosted virtual machine to fulfill users’ requests. Soon, Operator will use a model based on o3, one of the latest in OpenAI’s o series of “reasoning” models. Previously, Operator relied on a custom version of GPT-4o. By many benchmarks, o3 is a far more advanced model, particularly on tasks involving math and reasoning. “We are replacing the existing GPT‑4o-based model for Operator with a version based on OpenAI o3,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post. “The API…

[ad_1] Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent joins ‘America’s Newsroom’ to discuss a possible 50% tariff on the European Union, a 25% tariff on Apple, possible Senate changes to Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’ and the push to modernize the IRS. A federal judge rejected an emergency lawsuit this week aimed at stopping President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs from taking force, punting the case to the U.S. Court of International Trade for further review.  U.S. District Judge T. Kent Wetherell II rejected a Florida-based stationary company’s emergency motion to stay their challenge to Trump’s tariffs, agreeing that the case should be heard by…

[ad_1] One of Microsoft’s latest AI models can accurately predict air quality, hurricanes, typhoons, and other weather-related phenomena, the company claims. In a paper published in the journal Nature and an accompanying blog post this week, Microsoft detailed Aurora, which the tech giant says can forecast atmospheric events with greater precision and speed than traditional meteorological approaches. Aurora, which has been trained on more than a million hours of data from satellites, radar and weather stations, simulations, and forecasts, can be fine-tuned with additional data to make predictions for particular weather events. AI weather models are nothing new. Google DeepMind…

[ad_1] ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm since its launch in November 2022. What started as a tool to supercharge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved into a behemoth with 300 million weekly active users. 2024 was a big year for OpenAI, from its partnership with Apple for its generative AI offering, Apple Intelligence, the release of GPT-4o with voice capabilities, and the highly-anticipated launch of its text-to-video model Sora. OpenAI also faced its share of internal drama, including the notable exits of high-level execs like co-founder and longtime…

[ad_1] As generative AI becomes faster, cheaper, and more convincing, the ethical stakes are no longer theoretical. What happens when the tools to deceive become widely accessible? And how do we build systems that are powerful — but safe enough to trust? At TechCrunch Sessions: AI, taking place June 5 at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, Artemis Seaford, Head of AI Safety at ElevenLabs, and Ion Stoica, co-founder of Databricks and professor at UC Berkeley, will take the main stage to unpack the ethical challenges of today’s AI. Their conversation will cut to the heart of one of the most urgent…

[ad_1] In the startup world, access to cutting-edge tools isn’t the biggest obstacle — it’s knowing how to wield them with precision. At TechCrunch Sessions: AI, taking place on June 5 at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, we’re digging into the frameworks and decisions that determine whether an AI startup can scale — or stall. We’re excited to welcome one of the most tactical voices in that conversation: Iliana Quinonez, Director of North America Startups Customer Engineering at Google Cloud. Impactful conversations are better shared — get up to $300 off your pass and 50% off a guest ticket. Register now…

[ad_1] Time’s almost up — save big before prices jump in 3 days!  You’ve got until May 25 at 11:59 p.m. PT to save up to $900 on individual tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt 2025. Or double your impact — grab one Early Bird pass and get another for your +1 at 90% off. These deals will be vanishing fast — lock them in now. Step into the future of tech on October 27-29 at Moscone West in San Francisco. Join a global gathering of 10,000+ tech leaders, investors, and innovators for in-depth sessions, expert insights, unmatched networking, and to witness…