In Brief Tesla and Rivian may have resolved a lawsuit in which Tesla accused Rivian of poaching employees and stealing trade secrets.Bloomberg reports that Tesla told a California statement judge that the companies have reached a “conditional” settlement, and that it expects to seek dismissal of the lawsuit by December 24. Tesla filed the suit, which was set to got to trial in March, back in 2020. The EV maker alleged that it had discovered an “alarming pattern” in which Rivian was recruiting Tesla employe ...

In Brief The European Commission (EC) has quietly closed a longstanding antitrust investigation into Apple over rules it enforces against third-party e-book and audiobook app developers. The EC opened the probe back in 2020 after receiving complaints over how Apple forced competing e-book and audiobook app developers to use Apple’s own in-app payment system, while also preventing them from informing customers of alternative ways to pay — a practice known as anti-steering. The EC opened a parallel investigat ...

In Brief Apple is developing a new version of its voice assistant, Siri, powered by advanced large language models, according to sources cited by Bloomberg. This more conversational Siri is part of Apple’s attempt to catch up in AI, where competitors have released impressive features, like Google’s Gemini Live, that are far more natural to talk to than Siri.The new assistant reportedly will fully replace the Siri interface that users rely on today, and Apple is planning to release the feature in the spring ...

Malicious hackers have compromised potentially thousands of organizations by exploiting two new zero-day vulnerabilities found in widely used software made by cybersecurity giant Palo Alto Networks.Security researchers at Palo Alto Networks said Wednesday that they have observed a “limited set of exploitation activity” related to the two vulnerabilities in PAN-OS, the operating system that runs on all of Palo Alto’s next-generation firewalls. The bugs are considered zero-days because the company had no time ...

Maxwell Zeff is a senior reporter at TechCrunch specializing in AI and emerging technologies. Previously with Gizmodo, Bloomberg, and MSNBC, Zeff has covered the rise of AI and the Silicon Valley Bank crisis. He is based in San Francisco. When not reporting, he can be found hiking, biking, and exploring the Bay Area’s food scene. ...

Nvidia raked in more than $19 billion in net income during the last quarter, the company reported on Wednesday, but that did little to assure investors that its rapid growth would continue. On its earnings call, analysts prodded CEO Jensen Huang about how Nvidia would fare if tech companies start using new methods to improve their AI models.The method that underpins OpenAI’s o1 model, or “test-time scaling,” came up quite a lot. It’s the idea that AI models will give better answers if you give them more tim ...

Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo has urged the European Union to widen its Digital Markets Act (DMA) investigation into Google, claiming the search giant is in breach of several areas where the bloc has yet to formally probe the company’s compliance.The EU’s flagship market contestability rulebook has been in force on a handful of tech giants since March, including Google. Fines for failing to abide by DMA rules that mandate things like platform access on FRAND (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminat ...

Cable television has long been viewed as a stagnant business, showing little promise for growth over the years. However, Comcast believes it has found a new growth opportunity.On Wednesday, the company announced that it’s spinning off NBCUniversal’s cable television networks — such as CNBC, E!, Golf Channel, MSNBC, Oxygen, SYFY, and USA Network — into a separate publicly traded company. It’s also including digital assets like GolfNow, Fandango, Rotten Tomatoes, and Sports Engine. This bold spin-off strate ...

Meta hired Salesforce’s CEO of AI, Clara Shih, to lead a new organization building AI tools for businesses that use Meta’s apps to reach consumers, according to a LinkedIn post from Shih on Tuesday. Meta confirmed the appointment and the new Business AI group in a statement to TechCrunch.“I’m thrilled to share today that I’ve joined Meta to lead a new Business AI group,” said Shih in a LinkedIn post. “Our vision for this new product group is to make cutting-edge AI accessible to every business, empowering a ...

Microsoft on Tuesday revealed new custom chips aimed at powering workloads on its Azure cloud and bolstering security, particularly a new hardware accelerator that can manage data processing, networking and storage-related tasks.The Azure Boost DPU is Microsoft’s first data processing unit, designed for “data-centric workloads with high efficiency and low power,” the company said. Microsoft expects future DPU-equipped Azure servers to run storage workloads at four times the performance of existing servers w ...