Latest 25 news items

Communications has never been more important to Microsoft. The company is changing, our industry is changing, and the world around us is changing.

For decades, China has faced accusations from the United States and the European Union of stealing their technology. From robotics and advanced semiconductors to precision engineering and automotive parts, Chinese firms have recruited top engineers, allegedly spied on Western rivals and been linked to cyberattacks aimed at gaining access to valuable trade…

Google’s new Gemini 3.8 Live update lets users have conversations with the model while watching an animated AI persona respond in real time. The “Live Avatar” will lip-sync and show different facial expressions during conversations, but it’s currently only available to Gemini Enterprise customers.

The AI Lab PrismML — founded by Caltech researchers and advised by UC Berkeley’s Ion Stoica — has created a version of its tiny language models for smart glasses running on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips. On Wednesday, at Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit, the chipmaker showcased PrismML’s 1-bit Bonsai LLM, which can be run locally on AI smart glasses built on the…

We’re closing in on the last couple of weeks until TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 kicks off! To help everyone in your network gain new tech insights, discover emerging tech, and make impactful connections that move the needle, we’ve opened up a 50% discount on a second ticket across all ticket types.

Oracle has sent a force majeure notice to the developer of Project Jupiter, a Stargate data center campus in New Mexico, Bloomberg first reported Thursday. Force majeure clauses, common in energy and commodities contracts, excuse a party from contractual obligations when events outside its control get in the way.

As Jensen Huang puts it, AI can help fight climate change — but only if it inflicts “an enormous amount of pain and suffering” first. The Nvidia CEO discussed the future of energy and AI’s impact on our planet in the latest episode of The Ezra Klein Show .

While PC component prices remain high, you can save a good bit of money on a system by purchasing a prebuilt desktop. Walmart has a well-equipped CyberPowerPC gaming PC on sale for $1,549, almost $600 off its original price of $2,139.

Google’s new AI-powered feature that turns photos of your outfits into a virtual closet — one seemingly inspired by Cher’s iconic virtual wardrobe app featured in the movie “Clueless” — is now available to everyone in the U.S., Brazil, and India, on both iOS and Android devices. The company announced the feature earlier this year with plans to begin the…

Is Meta’s just-announced Muse Charm a playful device that will make AI more approachable to everyday consumers, or will it be yet another flop in a long list of AI hardware gadgets that didn’t take off, like the Ai Pin, Rabbit, or Friend pendant? Reactions, so far, have been mixed.

This is Optimizer , a weekly newsletter sent from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest gizmos and potions that swear they’re going to change your life. Opt in for Optimizer here .

Google is rolling out some new Chrome browser features that are designed to make it easier to research and study complicated topics. The cross-device tab switching feature is getting a memory upgrade, alongside new capabilities for Gemini in Chrome that can analyze more types of media and generate interactive study quizzes.

We seem to be entering into an AI agent renaissance. Meta’s new consumer-facing AI agent, Muse, topped the App Store charts soon after its release and has 600,000 daily active users in the US, by an Apptopia estimate.

A pair of developers say that with very little prompting, Meta’s Muse will share its entire filesystem with you. Peter James and Jonny L.

Meta has a new plan to get people to make games for its Horizon social platform. The company today announced two new development tools that will let you create games with AI prompts: Horizon Create, a mobile app, and Horizon Studio, a browser app that offers more granular controls.

Nintendo won its $4.5 million lawsuit against James Williams, a Reddit moderator accused of distributing pirated Switch games, as reported earlier by Aftermath . In a default judgment issued on Wednesday , a Washington federal judge also ordered Williams to shut down the online stores allegedly housing libraries of pirated Switch games.

Google’s launching an “early experiment” feature on Pixel 11 that lets users delegate local business calls to Gemini, like making a reservation, checking if a product is in stock, or rescheduling an appointment. According to Google, you don’t even need to start the call to have Gemini handle it for you: Instead of dialing yourself, just tell Gemini to call…

A company called Inmo that makes several different variations of smart glasses has issued a recall for its Air3 because the left temple “can overheat during extended use, posing a risk of serious injury or death due to burn hazard.” To date there have been 10 reports of users experiencing a “burning sensation to the face and the left side of the ear” while…

With AI agents like Meta’s Muse and Instinct now able to make calls on users’ behalf, Google is now letting Gemini call businesses with a new feature called “Call for Me.” The feature will initially roll out to Pixel 11 owners who pay for a Gemini subscription in the U.S. It will also require the use of the beta version of Google’s Phone app for Android,…

For founders, Startup Battlefield 200 is one of the biggest moments of their careers. For everyone else in the TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 audience, it’s one of the best ways to learn how great companies are actually evaluated by VCs.

ElevenLabs builds the voice layer of AI, the models that turn text into speech that sounds human. Most people encounter it when they’re talking with customer service — often without realizing it.

TechCrunch Founder Summit is a full-day gathering in Boston on November 4 where founders across all stages connect with top VCs and experienced entrepreneurs to gain tactical insights on building and scaling their companies. It’s the latest in our long line of founder-centric events, which are smaller and more hands-on than Disrupt.

Bookstores in Japan are enjoying a boom in sales right now. However, this welcome spurt in business, where used books are bought in the 100s or even by the ton, is causing mixed feelings among owners of these businesses, reports NTV Japan (machine translation).