Author: TechBrunch

Astrohaus has cornered a very specific niche. This Michigan-based startup builds hardware for writers who want to eliminate distractions. After all, it's really hard to finish that novel when Instagram exists. The company has made a name for itself by going against most technology trends, but its latest product has managed to jump on the bandwagon. Announced at CES 2025, Wordrunner embraces the mechanical keyboard craze while staying true to Astrohaus' mission statement of writing without distractions. The Freewrite Wordrunner is essentially a standard mechanical keyboard with a few tricks for writers. Specifically, the peripherals include a word meter (word…

Last April, Company X's billionaire owner Elon Musk teased the mysterious “unhinged mode” of Company X's AI-powered chatbot Grok. Almost a year later, xAI, the Musk-owned company behind Grok, has updated its FAQ page on its website to reveal the new mode. According to the FAQ page, Grok in Unhinged mode will provide answers that are “intended to be offensive, inappropriate, or offensive,” and is “much like an amateur stand-up comic who is still learning his craft.” ”. This mode doesn't seem to be available yet. TechCrunch tried to find it in X's Grok web interface to no avail. Unhinged…

When you walk up to someone wearing Halliday smart glasses, you might not realize that they're seeing smartphone notifications, real-time language translation, and advice from an AI assistant. The only advantage is a small green dot on their eyeball. Wearable startup Halliday unveiled smart glasses at CES 2025 that project a 3.5-inch circular display into your line of sight. The device that creates the display is called a DigiWindow, a small round module smaller than your pinky nail that sits inside the Halliday frame just above your right eye. Close-up of DigiWindow. Image credit: Sean O'Kane While most augmented reality…

Last year, police surveillance startup Flock Safety hired the mayor of a California city with more than 200,000 residents to promote its product. However, Moreno Valley Mayor Ulises Cabrera now refuses to allow Flock to use his position as mayor to benefit Flock, according to a lawsuit Cabrera filed against Flock in November 2024. He claims that he was unfairly dismissed for this reason. Backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Flock grew to a $3.5 billion valuation by selling license plate recognition technology across the country (and recently expanded into drones), but the lawsuit , concerns have been raised about the influence…

Francois Cholet, a former Google engineer and influential AI researcher, co-founded a nonprofit organization that helps develop benchmarks to examine “human-level” intelligence in AI. The nonprofit ARC Prize Foundation will be led by Greg Kamradt, former Salesforce engineering director and founder of AI product studio Leverage. Mr. Kamrat will serve as president and director. Fundraising for the ARC Prize Foundation will begin in late January. “[W]We are…growing into a proper nonprofit foundation that serves as a useful north star to artificial general intelligence,” Chollet wrote in a post on the nonprofit’s website. (Artificial general intelligence is a vague term, but…

Watch Duty, an app that tracks wildfires with live maps and alerts, was the No. 1 free app on Apple's App Store as of Wednesday morning. As devastating fires continue to rage across Southern California, the fire tracking app has surpassed the ChatGPT app to take the number one spot. Watch Duty has been available since 2021 and is used by firefighters and first responders across the western United States. Fire tracking apps are spreading rapidly amid wildfires. Image credit: Maxwell Zeff The Watch Duty app obtains information about ongoing wildfires from a network of active and retired firefighters, first…

The tech layoff wave continued through 2024. Following significant workforce reductions in 2022 and 2023, 2024 saw more than 150,000 job cuts across 542 companies, according to independent layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi. Large companies like Tesla, Amazon, Google, TikTok, Snap, and Microsoft conducted sizable layoffs in 2024, while smaller-sized startups also experienced cuts, and in some cases, shut down operations altogether. We’re continuing to track the industry’s layoffs into 2025 so you can see the trajectory of the cutbacks. Later this year, we will break out our 2024 and 2025 lists in order to make the trends easier to parse. By…

Russian internet provider Nodex suffered a devastating cyberattack earlier this week in which hackers breached its network and wiped its internal servers, immediately completely cutting off internet connectivity to Russian customers. announced that the system is being restored. The Russian regional ISP outage began late on January 6, and customer internet traffic levels continue to show 0%, according to data from Cloudflare, a leading network that monitors internet trends and traffic. Nodex's internet traffic collapsed late on January 6, 2025. Image credit: Cloudflare / TechCrunch (screenshot) In a post on Russian social networking site VK, Nodex acknowledged the cyberattack. “The…

Hello everyone, welcome to TechCrunch's regular AI newsletter. If you'd like to have this sent to your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. The AI ​​news cycle didn't slow down much this holiday season. Blink and you'll miss some new developments between OpenAI's 12-day “shipmas” and DeepSeek's major model release on Christmas Day. And its momentum has not slowed down even now. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a blog post on Sunday that OpenAI knows how to build artificial general intelligence (AGI) and is starting to set its sights on superintelligence. He said he was thinking about it. AGI…

TikTok's potential competitor, Triller, hopes to capitalize on a potential ban on TikTok in the US by pitching creators to move their content from the popular short-form video app to its own app. The company has now launched a website, SaveMyTikToks.com, which promises to back up all your TikTok videos by uploading them to Triller. The site is powered by Amplify.ai, a customer engagement platform that Triller's parent company, TrillerNet, acquired in 2021. The deal was initially focused on helping Triller creators track and monetize their content, while also helping brands and advertisers match their content with consumers. . From…