July 24, 2025

Preston Thorpe is a software engineer at a San Francisco startup — he's also serving his 11th year in prison: A senior software engineer for Turso, Thorpe is part of an experimental program in the Maine state prison system that allows incarcerated people to work remote jobs from custody. Read More

Apple iOS 26 public beta arrives: Apple released iOS 26 in public beta. Here's everything you can expect, from the Liquid Glass design to features powered by Apple Intelligence. Read More

AI companions: A threat to love, or an evolution of it?: As AI companions from companies like Replika, Character AI, and Nomi AI abound, love is no longer strictly human. In this debate, we ask the question of whether it should be, or whether dating an AI could be better than dating a human. Read More

When the founder who sold his last company to Zillow for $120M starts a new venture, people notice. No wonder well-known VCs who backed the likes of eBay, Venmo, and Uber already backed Pacaso. They've made $110M+ in gross profits to date by bringing co-ownership to a $1.3T market. They even reserved the Nasdaq ticker PCSO. And you can invest, too.

This is a paid advertisement for Pacaso's Regulation A offering. Please read the offering circular at invest.pacaso.com. Reserving the ticker symbol is not a guarantee that the company will go public. Listing on the Nasdaq is subject to approvals.

A new AI coding challenge just published its first results — and they aren't pretty: A new AI coding challenge has revealed its first winner — and set a new bar for AI-powered software engineers.  Read More

Google's new AI feature lets you virtually try on clothes: The feature is launching in the United States today, letting users try on apparel items in Google's Shopping Graph across Search, Google Shopping and product results on Google Images. Read More

Sundar Pichai is 'very excited' about Google Cloud's OpenAI partnership: The comment came shortly after analysts peppered Pichai and other Google executives with questions about how AI would affect its core search business and why Google is spending an extra $10 billion on capital expenditures this year to catch up in the AI race. Read More

This industrial AI startup is winning over customers by saying it won't get acquired: In a red-hot acquisition market, the CVector founders answer this key question in its first conversation with prospective customers. Read More

Amazon introduces a more affordable color screen Kindle: Amazon launches a more affordable, $250 Colorsoft Kindle and a version for kids. Read More

250+ top tech voices. 200 sessions. 10,000+ attendees. 3 days straight — October 27–29 at Moscone West in San Francisco. Don't miss valuable takeaways across 6 industry stages, breakouts, roundtables, and unmatched networking. All at the 20th anniversary of TechCrunch Disrupt. Register now to save up to $675 on your ticket.

Trump's 'anti-woke AI' order could reshape how US tech companies train their models: When DeepSeek, Alibaba, and other Chinese firms released their AI models, Western researchers quickly noticed they sidestepped questions critical of the Chinese Communist Party. U.S. officials later confirmed that these tools are engineered to reflect Beijing's talking points, raising concerns about censorship and bias. American AI leaders like OpenAI have pointed to this as justification for advancing their tech quickly, without too much regulation or oversight. As OpenAI's chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane wrote in a LinkedIn post last month, there is a contest between "US-led democratic AI and Communist-led China's autocratic AI." An executive order signed Wednesday by President Donald Trump that bans "woke AI" and AI models that aren't "ideologically neutral" from government contracts could disrupt that balance.  The order calls out diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), calling it a "pervasive and destructive" ideology that can "distort the quality and accuracy of the output." Specifically, the order refers to information about race or sex, manipulation of racial or sexual representation, critical race theory, transgenderism, unconscious bias, intersectionality, and systemic racism.  Experts warn it could create a chilling effect on developers who may feel pressure to align model outputs and datasets with White House rhetoric to secure federal dollars for their cash-burning businesses.  The order comes the same day the White House published Trump's "AI Action Plan," which shifts national priorities away from societal risk and focuses instead on building out AI infrastructure, cutting red tape for tech companies, shoring up national security, and competing with China.  The Read More

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