ALL

For generations, Ida Huddleston and her family have owned a farm in northern Kentucky. And they’ve turned down at least one multimillion-dollar offer to preserve it. Last year, a “major artificial intelligence company” offered them $26 million to sell part of their farm for a proposed data center, according to a recent report from WKRC . Huddleston and her family declined, saying they didn’t want a data center built near them or on any of their 1,200 acres of farmland outside

Google announced on Wednesday that it’s releasing Lyria 3 Pro, a music generation model, a month after Lyria 3’s release. The new model will let users create tracks up to three minutes long, as compared to the 30-second-long tracks offered with the Lyria 3 model. The company said that, apart from allowing users to create longer tracks, the Lyria 3 Pro model will offer better creative control and customization. In the prompt, users can also specify different elements of a mu

Andrew Ashur, the founder and CEO of window-cleaning robot startup Lucid Bots, likes to joke that his company is the antithesis of the robotics industry right now. While many companies are trying to build humanoids or tout demos of their robots dancing and doing flips , Lucid Bots’ drones are out in the field making traditionally unsexy and dangerous work, like cleaning windows, safer and more efficient. “The sad truth is most are still selling a lot of hype and headlines, a

ADIIMA Awards: A New Global Stage for Afro Culture Comes to San Francisco A major cultural milestone is set to take place this year as the ADIIMA Awards (Afro Diaspora Influence, Impact & Music Awards)  make their debut in San Francisco, USA. In what marks a historic first, an event of this scale dedicated to Afro culture from Africa to its global diaspora, will be hosted in one of the world’s leading innovation hubs. Celebrating Afro influence and excellence The ADIIMA Award

A new wave is reshaping the African digital content industry and at the center of it stands Wastream TV . More than just a streaming service, Wastream TV is emerging as a next-generation platform built by Africans, for Africans , both on the continent and across the diaspora. A platform built on real African consumption habits Unlike traditional platforms driven by monthly subscriptions, Wastream TV introduces a more flexible and locally adapted approach. The platform is stru

Wastream TV: The Startup Rethinking How African Content Makes Money In a digital landscape dominated by global models that often fail to reflect local realities, one platform is working to reshape how African content is distributed and monetized. Wastream TV, headquartered in San Francisco, is positioning itself as a bold alternative for streaming Afro-centric content worldwide. At the center of this vision is Youssef Ouattara , an Ivorian entrepreneur and founder of the plat

The space ambitions of nation states and billionaires alike demand better sources of power, and a new startup founded by two Stanford PhDs may have the answer.  Arinna , founded by CEO Koosha Nazif and CTO Alex Shearer, said Wednesday that it had raised a $4 million seed round to build ultrathin solar panels from a brand new material developed during their doctoral research.  The capital raise was led by Spacecadet Ventures, with participation from Anorak Ventures and Breakth

Sony Honda Mobility, the joint venture established by the two Japanese conglomerates, has decided to give up on the two “Afeela”-branded EVs that it has spent the last few years developing. The decision comes after Honda announced earlier this month that it was doing a major about-face and canceling three electric vehicles planned for the U.S. market — a decision that could cost the Japanese automaker nearly $16 billion . Honda blamed President Trump’s tariffs and rising co

One of the blockbuster hits of the AI age is, without a doubt, legal tech startup Harvey . On Wednesday, the company confirmed that it had closed a new raise at an $11 billion valuation, after reports circulated last month that it was working on another monster round. The company confirmed it inhaled $200 million from this round, co-led by returning investors Singapore’s GIC and Sequoia. Existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, Conviction Partners, Elad Gil, Evantic,

Would-be Reddit competitor Digg just shut down because it couldn’t get a handle on the bots overrunning its site. On Wednesday, Reddit said it’s taking on the challenge itself. The company will begin labeling automated accounts that are providing a service to users, similar to how the “good bots” are labeled on X, and it will now require accounts that are suspected of being bots to verify if they’re human. Reddit stresses this is not going to be a sitewide verification requi

The explosion of new data center projects in the U.S. has led to a growing backlash against the infrastructure that powers AI. Two influential politicians are now proposing a ban on any new data centers with peak power loads in excess of 20 megawatts. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York are introducing companion legislation in their respective chambers today that would halt the projects until Congress enacts comprehensive AI regulat

Meta is laying off several hundred employees across multiple teams, including sales, recruiting, and the Reality Labs division, as reported by The Information and Bloomberg . The cuts will impact employees in the U.S. and other international markets. Some of those employees will be offered other jobs or the opportunity to relocate to remain with the company, Bloomberg reported. “Teams across Meta regularly restructure or implement changes to ensure they’re in the best positi

As demand grows for training and refining AI models, Deccan AI — a startup supplying post-training data and evaluation work — has raised $25 million in its first major funding round, with much of that work carried out by an India-based workforce of experts. The all-equity Series A round was led by A91 Partners, with participation from Susquehanna International Group and Prosus Ventures. While frontier AI labs, including OpenAI and Anthropic, build core models in-house, much

Google announced on Thursday that “ Live Translate ,” its AI-powered Google Translate feature that lets you hear real-time translations in your headphones, is expanding to iOS and to more countries. With this expansion, the feature is now available on iOS and Android in the U.S., India, Mexico, Germany, Spain, France, Nigeria, Italy, the United Kingdom, Japan, Bangladesh, and Thailand. Previously, it was only available on Android in the U.S., India, and Mexico. The capabilit

Netflix has quietly hiked its prices once again. The streaming giant’s most affordable, ad-supported tier now costs $8.99 per month, up from the previous $7.99 monthly subscription fee, Netflix confirmed to TechCrunch in an email. The standard plan without ads also now costs $19.99 per month, a $2 increase from the previous $17.99 subscription fee, while the premium plan is also going up by $2 and will now cost $26.99 per month. It’s also getting more expensive to add extra v

You can now transfer your chats and personal information from other chatbots directly into Gemini When it comes to AI chatbots, there’s currently a war on for consumer attention. All the big chatbot providers are looking to increase their user count and, in a minor coup for itself, Google just made it significantly easier for users of those other chatbots to defect to Gemini. On Thursday, the company announced what it calls “switching tools,” new widgets that are designed to

Waymo is now providing 500,000 paid robotaxi rides every week across 10 U.S. cities, the company shared in a post on X this week. The eye-popping figure is reflective of the Alphabet-owned company’s accelerated commercial expansion. But it’s Waymo’s rate of growth in ridership and markets that offers a more compelling story.  In less than two years, the company’s average weekly paid robotaxi trips have grown tenfold, from 50,000 per week in May 2024 to 500,000 per week today

SoftBank has taken on a new $40 billion loan to help it cover its $30 billion commitment to invest in OpenAI as part of the AI model maker’s record-breaking $110 billion raise last month , the Japanese conglomerate said on Friday . Most striking is that the loan is unsecured and has a 12-month term, meaning it must be repaid or refinanced by next year. This could be a signal that the lenders believe OpenAI’s highly anticipated public listing will indeed come later this year,

Physical Intelligence, the two-year-old San Francisco robotics startup, is in discussions to raise about $1 billion in new funding at a valuation exceeding $11 billion, according to Bloomberg . The deal would effectively double the company’s $5.6 billion valuation in just four months. Founders Fund is set to participate with Lightspeed Venture Partners also in talks to invest alongside returning backers Thrive Capital and Lux Capital, Bloomberg reported. The deal is still in

Investors have flocked to Y Combinator’s Demo Days for years to get their hands on promising startups building cool tech. After all, the accelerator has produced some of the biggest tech companies in the world, from Airbnb and Reddit to Dropbox, Zapier and Stripe. That’s why we make it a point to keep an eye on the event to spot the most interesting companies from each batch. As I’ve been doing nearly every quarter now that the accelerator has moved to four cohorts a year, I