Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch Space. We’ll have to wait a little longer for the return of Boeing’s Starliner capsule from the International Space Station — the capsule and its two astronauts will stay at the station for twice as much time as originally planned, to give mission operators additional time to conduct tests […]
Loop, the car insurance company co-founded by Harlem Capital co-founder John Henry, has laid off staff as the company struggles with fundraising. Henry took to Instagram to post the email his co-founder Carey Nadeau sent to impacted staff on June 16th. Nadeu also posted the letter to LinkedIn. It stated that this was the “absolute […]
ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm since its launch in November 2022. What started as a tool to hyper-charge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved into a behemoth used by more than 92% of Fortune 500 companies. That growth has propelled OpenAI itself into […]
Two years after it was announced at WWDC, Apple’s U.S.-only Pay Later feature is no more. TechCrunch has confirmed the news, which was first noted by 9 to 5 Mac. Here’s the full statement offered to TechCrunch. Starting later this year, users across the globe will be able to access installment loans offered through credit […]
Astroscale’s space junk observation satellite has moved within striking distance to a discarded rocket upper stage that’s been floating around Earth for nearly 20 years, taking close-up pictures — preliminary to actually deorbiting the object in a future mission. The company released an image captured by its satellite from a distance of just 50 meters […]
DeepMind, Google’s AI research lab, says it’s developing AI tech to generate soundtracks for videos. In a post on its official blog, DeepMind says that it sees the tech, V2A (short for “video-to-audio”), as an essential piece of the AI-generated media puzzle. While plenty of orgs including DeepMind have developed video-generating AI models, these models […]
The U.S. Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against Adobe alleging that the company deceives consumers by hiding the early-termination fee and making it difficult for people to cancel their subscriptions. In the complaint filed on Monday, the DOJ wrote that “Adobe has harmed consumers by enrolling them in its default, most lucrative subscription […]
Amid ongoing controversy about handling of media articles and original reporting, AI-powered search startup Perplexity now displays results for factual queries such as weather and time at a place, currency conversion, and answers to simple math queries directly through cards. This is a move to stop Perplexity users from going to other search engines like […]
For consumers, one of the big pluses of e-commerce is the convenience: You can shop anytime, from anywhere, and these days pay with a simple tap of your finger (and pay pretty much any way you want). Underneath that, however, is a mass of fragmentation and complexity, and it’s usually the retailers who take it […]
The race to high-quality, AI-generated videos is heating up. On Monday, Runway, a company building generative AI tools geared toward film and image content creators, unveiled Gen-3 Alpha. The company’s latest AI model generates video clips from text descriptions and still images. Runway says the model delivers a “major” improvement in generation speed and fidelity over […]
