Neptune is one of the newest short-form video apps on the block seeking to compete with major players like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts. The app, currently in beta, has attracted attention from hundreds of thousands of users, with 970 testers participating and 400,000 people on the waitlist, per the company. Neptune announced Monday […]
Tech Crunch
Hertz says customers’ personal data and driver’s licenses stolen in data breach
The car rental giant attributed the breach to Cleo, whose customers had data stolen by a ransomware gang in 2024.
OpenAI’s new GPT-4.1 AI models focus on coding
OpenAI on Monday launched a new family of models called GPT-4.1 . Yes, “4.1” — as if the company’s nomenclature wasn’t confusing enough already. There’s GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and GPT-4.1 nano, all of which OpenAI says “excel” at coding and instruction following. Available through OpenAI’s API but not ChatGPT, the multimodal models have a 1-million-token […]
Google’s newest AI model is designed to help study dolphin ‘speech’
Google’s AI research lab, Google DeepMind, says that it has created an AI model that can help decipher dolphin vocalizations, supporting research efforts to better understand how dolphins communicate. The model, called DolphinGemma, was trained using data from the Wild Dolphin Project (WDP), a nonprofit that studies Atlantic spotted dolphins and their behaviors. Built on […]
Blue Origin’s all-female crew, including Katy Perry, successfully launched
Jeff Bezos’ space company, Blue Origin, successfully launched its New Shepard rocket at around 9:30 a.m. ET on Monday, as it seeks to challenge Elon Musk’s SpaceX in the space tourism industry. What stands out most about this mission is that it featured the first all-female space crew since 1963, when Soviet astronaut Valentina Tereshkova […]
Chipolo’s newest AirTag competitor works with both Apple and Google’s finding networks
Chipolo, the maker of AirTag-like devices, on Monday introduced the latest version of its product. Now, instead of offering models that only work with either Apple or Google’s lost-item finding technology, the new Chipolo POP devices work with both companies’ finding networks out of the box. By combining these different functionalities into one device, Chipolo […]
Hugging Face buys a humanoid robotics startup
AI dev platform Hugging Face has acquired Pollen Robotics, a robotics startup based in France, for an undisclosed amount. Wired reports that Hugging Face plans to sell Pollen’s humanoid robot, Reachy 2, and let developers download and suggest improvements to its code. Pollen Robotics, which aims to bring affordable humanoid robots to the home, was […]
Autonomous trucking startup Kodiak Robotics to go public via SPAC
Self-driving truck startup Kodiak Robotics plans to go public via a merger with special purpose acquisition company Ares Acquisition Corporation II. The transaction values Kodiak, which has raised around $243 million to date, at about $2.5 billion pre-money. New and existing Kodiak institutional investors, like Soros Fund Management, ARK Investments, and Ares, have funded or […]
Nvidia says it plans to manufacture some AI chips in the U.S.
Nvidia says it has commissioned more than a million square feet of manufacturing space to build and test AI chips in Arizona and Texas as part of an effort to move a portion of production to the U.S. The chipmaker says that Nvidia Blackwell chips have started production at TSMC’s chip plants in Phoenix, Arizona, […]
Conifer locks down $20M seed round for its ‘drop-in’ electric hub motor
A handful of engineers who worked at Lucid Motors and on Apple’s electric car project have launched a new startup that puts a fresh spin on electric hub motors. The new startup, called Conifer, has developed its motor to be free of rare earth elements by using more abundant ferrite magnets, which the company says […]