Category: Tech Crunch

On Monday, Microsoft reportedly terminated the roles of two software engineers, Ibtihal Aboussad and Vaniya Agrawal, who protested the company’s reported dealings with the Israeli military during Microsoft’s Copilot and 50th anniversary event last week. According to an internal message viewed by CNBC, Microsoft wrote that Aboussad could have raised concerns “confidentially with your manager,...

Retaining top AI talent is tough amid cutthroat competition between Google, OpenAI, and other heavyweights. Google’s AI division, DeepMind, has resorted to using “aggressive” noncompete agreements for some AI staff in the U.K. that bar them from working for competitors for up to a year, Business Insider reports. Some are paid during this time, in...

IBM is releasing the latest version of its mainframe hardware that includes new updates meant to accelerate AI adoption. The hardware and consulting company on Monday announced IBM z17, the latest version of its mainframe computer hardware. This fully encrypted mainframe is powered by an IBM Telum II processor and is designed for more than...

Peter Diamandis, a futurist with degrees from both MIT and Harvard, has spent much of the past two decades evangelizing a vision of an “abundant future” driven by exponential technologies that will lengthen our lives. The serial entrepreneur and founder of organizations like the XPRIZE Foundation and Singularity University has also cultivated close ties with...

The British Broadcasting Corporation has filed a complaint with a UK antitrust regulator complaining that aggregators like Apple News and Google News minimize credit for the stories they feature. Apple Insider reports that the BBC is asking the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority to require Apple and Google to more prominently credit news sources. And...

How did Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg get added to a Signal group chat with Trump administration officials discussing their plans for an airstrike in Yemen? The simplest explanation: National Security Adviser Mike Waltz had Goldberg saved as a contact in his phone and accidentally added him. Indeed, when Waltz first claimed that Goldberg’s phone number...

Microsoft has released a browser-based, playable level of the classic video game Quake II. This functions as a tech demo for the gaming capabilities of Microsoft’s Copilot AI platform — though by the company’s own admission, the experience isn’t quite the same as playing a well-made game. You can try it out for yourself, using...

One of the new flagship AI models Meta released on Saturday, Maverick, ranks second on LM Arena, a test that has human raters compare the outputs of models and choose which they prefer. But it seems the version of Maverick that Meta deployed to LM Arena differs from the version that’s widely available to developers....

Welcome back to Week in Review! Tons of stuff for you today, including Nintendo’s Switch 2; capacity issues at OpenAI; a story that deserves the Hollywood treatment; and much, much more. Let’s go! It’s finally (almost) here: After almost 10 years, Nintendo finally released its Switch successor, the Switch 2. According to TechCrunch’s Amanda Silberling,...

The big screen adaptation of video game mega-franchise Minecraft brought in $58 million on Friday, putting it on-track for a $135 million opening weekend domestically — or potentially even more. That would give “A Minecraft Movie” the biggest opening of the year, beating out “Captain America: Brave New World” (which earned $88.8 million during its...