Waymo regularly takes its autonomous vehicles on winter road trips to test the cars in snowy environments. In 2017, it was Michigan. Last year, it was Buffalo. 

This year, Waymo will hit multiple wintry locales, including Truckee, California; Upstate New York; and Michigan, from the Upper Peninsula to the metro Detroit area. 

Waymo didn’t say whether it would take its Zeekr vehicles up north for testing, but the company will be putting both its fifth and sixth generation Driver through its paces. The hardware for the sixth generation Driver is designed for winter environments, with sensors that can melt snow off them. 

Details of the tests are scant, but we do know the tests will always feature a human safety driver behind the wheel.

Waymo regularly takes its autonomous vehicles on winter road trips to test the cars in snowy environments. In 2017, it was Michigan. Last year, it was Buffalo.  This year, Waymo…

Waymo to double down on winter testing its robotaxis
Image Credits: Waymo

An AI social media vetting startup Ferretly has raised $2.5 million in seed funding and is launching a new platform designed to screen election personnel. Founded in 2019, Ferretly leverages…

AI social media vetting startup Ferretly secures $2.5M, launches election personnel screening tool

Prytek had already been a big investor in TipRanks since 2017, most recently leading a $77 million round in the company in 2021.

TipRanks, an AI-based stock tip evaluator created after its founder got burned by bad advice, sells for $200M to Prytek

Journalists, researchers, and politicians are mourning Meta’s shutdown of CrowdTangle, which they used to track the spread of disinformation on Facebook and Instagram. In CrowdTangle’s place, Meta is offering its…

Meta axed CrowdTangle, a tool for tracking disinformation. Critics claim its replacement has just ‘1% of the features’

Swedish fintech giant Klarna is rolling out two new products on Thursday that could make its buy now, pay later offerings more enticing to use.  The company is offering consumers…

Klarna takes on banking with new savings, cash-back offerings

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Cockroach Labs shakes up its licensing to force bigger companies to pay

Cockroach Labs, the business and core developer behind the eponymous distributed SQL database known as CockroachDB, is changing its licensing once again — five years after it moved on from an open source model. The company revealed today that its consolidating its self-hosted product under a single enterprise license, a…

Cockroach Labs shakes up its licensing to force bigger companies to pay

Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, has resumed operations for users in India after a seven-month hiatus imposed by a local authority for operating “illegally” in the country. The exchange…

Binance restarts services in India after seven-month regulatory halt

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who has since moved on to greener and perhaps more dangerous pastures, told an audience of Stanford students recently that “Google decided that work-life balance…

Video of Eric Schmidt blaming remote work for Google’s woes mysteriously vanishes

Elon Musk’s Grok released a new AI image-generation feature on Tuesday night that, just like the AI chatbot, has very few safeguards. That means you can generate fake images of…

Meet Black Forest Labs, the startup powering Elon Musk’s unhinged AI image generator

One of the first topics tackled was the impractical nature of today’s video generators.

Filmmakers say AI will change the art — perhaps beyond recognition

At the first ever White House Creator Economy Conference, the most popular man to drop by was not a TikTok superstar or a YouTube sensation. It was President Joe Biden,…

Biden tells creators they have something traditional media does not: ‘You’re trusted’

World Labs, a stealthy startup founded by renowned Stanford University AI professor Fei-Fei Li, has raised two rounds of financing two months apart, according to multiple reports. The latest financing was…

NEA led a $100M round into Fei-Fei Li’s new AI startup, now valued at over $1B

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A comprehensive list of 2024 tech layoffs

The tech layoff wave is still going strong in 2024. Following significant workforce reductions in 2022 and 2023, this year has already seen 60,000 job cuts across 254 companies, according to independent layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi. Companies like Tesla, Amazon, Google, TikTok, Snap and Microsoft have conducted sizable layoffs in the…

A comprehensive list of 2024 tech layoffs

Faced with a new hack-and-leak operation targeting the Trump presidential campaign, journalists and media outlets are taking a different approach to their reporting.

Trump campaign hack-and-leak appears like a rerun of 2016. This time, media outlets are responding differently

Roughly one week ago during an earnings call, the chief executive addressed ongoing issues with Sonos’ mobile app.

Sonos CEO Patrick Spence confirms 100-person layoff

The research suggest that models aren’t hallucinating much less, despite claims to the contrary from OpenAI, Anthropic and the other big AI players.

Study suggests that even the best AI models hallucinate a bunch

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced on Wednesday a final rule that will tackle several types of fake reviews and prohibit marketers from using deceptive practices, such as AI-generated…

FTC finalizes rule banning fake reviews, including those made with AI 

Cybersecurity giant Palo Alto Networks is getting a lot of grief for a recent trade show event in which two women posed with lampshades on their heads. The debacle —…

Palo Alto Networks CEO apologizes for happy hour display featuring women with lampshades on their heads

Hiya, folks, welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. This week in AI, a new study shows that generative AI really isn’t all that harmful — at least not in the…

This Week in AI: AI isn’t world-ending — but it’s still plenty harmful

Popular iOS pro photography app Halide launched its new version today with a new feature called Process Zero, which does not use AI in image processing. Lux Optics, the company…

Camera app Halide’s latest update adds an option for ‘zero-AI’ image processing

Definity focuses on the data transformation plane on top of a data lake or warehouse, not the data ingestion part of the pipeline.

Definity raises $4.5M as it looks to transform data application observability

Analytics and AI giant Databricks reportedly paid nearly $2 billion when it acquired Tabular in June, a startup that was only doing $1 million in annual recurring revenue, according to…

Databricks reportedly paid $2 billion in Tabular acquisition

Apple’s exclusive access to the iPhone’s NFC capabilities had been under investigation by the European Commission for years.

Apple opens up NFC transactions to developers, but says there will be ‘associated fees’

Stoke Space is nothing if not ambitious. The five-year-old launch startup has generated a lot of hype due to its bold plans to develop the first fully reusable rocket, with…

Stoke Space’s initial launch plans at Cape Canaveral take shape

Telegram announced on Wednesday that it’s adding new ways for creators to make money on its platform. Most notably, the platform is launching monthly paid subscriptions that users can purchase…

Telegram adds new ways for creators to earn money on its  platform

A Texas company says it lost $60 million to a criminal fraud scheme, which the FBI says makes fraudsters billions of dollars every year.

Texas firm says it lost $60M in a bank wire transfer scam

Software as a service (SaaS) is an ever-evolving industry. We’ll talk to some of the brightest minds and leaders in the industry — executives from early- and late-stage SaaS companies,…

Announcing the final agenda for the SaaS Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024

What is the right way to build a software business? Many startup advisers say that B2B software should solve one pain point, gain customers, then add features as their company…

Parker Conrad says founders have been building software wrong for the last 20 years

Virtuix’s timeline has coincided with a rise of interest around mixed reality, led by Oculus/Meta, HTC and now Apple, among others.

Virtuix’s VR treadmill is finally launching in September

London-based Roto VR’s spinning gaming chair is the first of its kind to boast a “Made for Meta” seal of approval.

Check out this $800 rotating VR chair for Meta Quest

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