Tech

Google is rolling out new AI-powered features to book and plan travel in Search, the company announced on Monday. The tech giant is expanding availability for its AI-powered “Flight Deals” tool, adding the ability for users to organize travel plans with its “Canvas” tool in AI Mode, and launching agentic booking capabilities to more people. Google first launched Flight Deals …

DoorDash disclosed a data breach that exposed the personal information of an unspecified number of users, which included names, email addresses, phone numbers, and physical addresses. Despite the fact that hackers stole phone numbers and physical addresses, DoorDash said that “no sensitive information was accessed by the unauthorized third party and we have no indication the data has been misused …

If you pay attention to what the biggest tech companies are saying about AI demand, you’ll notice a common thread: they’re running short of compute capacity. That means the large language models underpinning AI products today need even more data centers to be trained and for inferencing, and therefore, they need more power. Against that backdrop, energy efficiency has suddenly …

Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos seems to be getting his hands dirty once again: the billionaire is partly backing a new AI startup called Project Prometheus that has raised $6.2 billion in funding, and will take on duties as co-chief executive of the new venture, the New York Times reported, citing several sources familiar with the project. Bezos will share the …

Three years ago, Luminal co-founder Joe Fioti was working on chip design at Intel when he came to a realization. While he was working on making the best chips he could, the more important bottleneck was in software. “You can make the best hardware on earth, but if it’s hard for developers to use, they’re just not going to use …

On Monday, a new Model Context Protocol security startup called Runlayer launched out of stealth with $11 million in seed funding from Khosla Ventures’ Keith Rabois and Felicis.  It was created by third-time founder Andrew Berman (previous companies: baby-monitor maker Nanit and an AI video conferencing tool, Vowel, that sold to Zapier in 2024). In the four months since Runlayer …

A Russian telecom company that develops technology to allow phone and internet companies to conduct web surveillance and censorship was hacked, had its website defaced, and had data stolen from its servers, TechCrunch has learned. Founded in Russia, Protei makes telecommunications systems for phone and internet providers across dozens of countries, including Bahrain, Italy, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Pakistan and much of …

South Korea’s major defense giants have amassed roughly $69 billion in order backlogs as of late 2024, according to media reports. Seoul is also accelerating investment in advanced weapons systems and expanding its defense ties, particularly with Europe. With the new EU-South Korea Security and Defence Partnership in 2024 and growing exports of vehicles and artillery, the country has become …

As U.S. giants like Google, OpenAI and Anthropic race to develop the large language models that underpin their AI products, startups such as Sakana AI, Mistral AI, DeepSeek and AI21 Labs are carving out their own niche with specialized models designed for specific regions, industries, or unique features. In pursuit of that goal, Tokyo-based Sakana AI has closed a ¥20 …

In case OpenAI’s structure couldn’t get any weirder—a nonprofit in charge of a for-profit that’s become a public benefit corporation—it now has two CEOs. There’s Sam Altman, chief executive of the whole company, who manages research and compute. And as of this summer, there’s Fidji Simo, the former CEO of Instacart, who manages everything else. Simo hasn’t been seen much …