AIN
Barclays bets on AI to cut costs and boost returns
Barclays recorded a 12 % jump in annual profit for 2025, reporting £9.1 billion in earnings before tax, up from £8.1 billion a year earlier.
Global AI Picks
Curated AI coverage from TechCrunch, MIT Technology Review, WIRED and other top global tech media. Please cite this site when republishing.
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MIT
EVs could be cheaper to own than gas cars in Africa by 2040
Electric vehicles could be economically competitive in Africa sooner than expected. Just 1% of new cars sold across the continent in 2025 were electric, but a new analysis finds that with solar off-grid charging, EVs could be cheaper to own than gas vehicles by 2040. There are major barriers to high
WD
AI Industry Rivals Are Teaming Up on a Startup Accelerator
AI labs are taking a break from sniping at one another to partner on a new accelerator program for European startups building applications on top of their models.
MIT
The Download: inside the QuitGPT movement, and EVs in Africa
This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. A “QuitGPT” campaign is urging people to cancel their ChatGPT subscriptions In September, Alfred Stephen, a freelance software developer in Singapore, purchased a
TC
Meridian raises $17 million to remake the agentic spreadsheet
The fight to tame spreadsheets with AI isn’t over yet. A new company called Meridian has emerged from stealth with a more comprehensive IDE-based approach to agentic financial modeling — and plenty of funding to build it.
TC
Build a pipeline and close deals with an exhibit table at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026
From October 13–15 at San Francisco’s Moscone West, 10,000+ founders, investors, operators, and decision-makers will converge at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026. This isn’t just an event. It’s three days of concentrated deal flow. An exhibit table turns that energy into measurable business growth.
TC
OpenAI policy exec who opposed chatbot’s “adult mode” reportedly fired on discrimination claim
Ryan Beiermeister, who served as OpenAI’s vice president of product policy, was fired in January after a male colleague accused her of sexual discrimination, the Wall Street Journal has reported. “The allegation that I discriminated against anyone is absolutely false,” Beiermeister told the Journal.
TC
With co-founders leaving and an IPO looming, Elon Musk turns talk to the moon
On Tuesday night, Elon Musk gathered the employees of xAI for an all-hands meeting. Evidently, he wanted to talk about the future of his AI company and, specifically, how it relates to the moon. According to The New York Times, which reports that it heard the meeting, Musk told employees that xAI ne
MIT
A “QuitGPT” campaign is urging people to cancel their ChatGPT subscriptions
In September, Alfred Stephen, a freelance software developer in Singapore, purchased a ChatGPT Plus subscription, which costs $20 a month and offers more access to advanced models, to speed up his work. But he grew frustrated with the chatbot’s coding abilities and its gushing, meandering replies.
ARS
Yet another co-founder departs Elon Musk's xAI
xAI co-founder Tony Wu abruptly announced his resignation from the company late Monday night, the latest in a string of senior executives to leave the Grok-maker in recent months. In a post on social media, Wu expressed warm feelings for his time at xAI, but said it was “time for my next chapter.” T
TC
Facebook adds new AI features, animated profile photos, and backgrounds for text posts
Facebook announced new AI-powered features on Tuesday designed to let users express themselves in more playful ways across the platform.
WD
RFK Jr. Says Americans Need More Protein. His Grok-Powered Food Website Disagrees
A 30-second Super Bowl ad featuring boxing legend Mike Tyson and paid for by the nonprofit MAHA Center encourages viewers to avoid processed foods and visit Realfood.gov. The government website, which Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
TC
Nearly half of xAI’s founding team has now left the company
Monday night, xAI co-founder Yuhuai (Tony) Wu announced he was leaving the company. “It’s time for my next chapter,” Wu wrote in a late-night post on X.
TC
Boston Dynamics CEO Robert Playter steps down after 30 years at the company
Boston Dynamics, the Massachusetts-based robotics company known for its four-legged robots and humanoids, is going through a leadership change. Robert Playter announced in an internal memo on Tuesday that he would be stepping down as the company’s chief executive, as first reported by A3.
TC
This Sequoia-backed lab thinks the brain is ‘the floor, not the ceiling’ for AI
Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify AI lab Flapping Airplanes just landed $180 million in seed funding from the likes of Google Ventures, Sequoia, and Index to do something most labs have quietly given up on: making models learn like humans instead of vacuuming up the internet.
TC
An ice dance duo skated to AI music at the Olympics
Czech ice dancers Kateřina Mrázková and Daniel Mrázek made their Olympic debut on Monday, an unfathomable feat that takes a lifetime of dedication and practice.
TC
Amazon may launch a marketplace where media sites can sell their content to AI companies
The AI industry’s pursuit of licensable content has been a messy affair, filled with lawsuits and accusations of copyright infringement.
DLRMv3: Generative recommendation benchmark in MLPerf Inference
计算规模扩展遵循神经缩放定律，已显著减少自然语言处理和计算机视觉领域的手动特征工程需求，转而依赖大规模注意力Transformer模型从数据中自动学习丰富表示。类似趋势正变革深度学习推荐系统，传统依赖MLP、GNN和嵌入表架构，如今大型序列和生成模型已在在线内容推荐平台部署，大幅提升模型质量。MLPerf推出DLRMv3，作为首个序列推荐推理基准，基于HSTU架构，模型规模从50GB增至1TB（20倍），每候选计算从40M FLOP飙升至260 GFLOP（6500倍），紧跟生产级负载，助力基础设施发展。该基准聚焦排名阶段，支持长序列、注意力密集计算和大嵌入表，真实反映现代推荐工作负载。（128字）
AIN
Chinese hyperscalers and industry-specific agentic AI
Major Chinese technology companies Alibaba, Tencent, and Huawei are pursuing agentic AI (systems that can execute multi-step tasks autonomously and interact with software, data, and services without human instruction), and orienting the technology toward discrete industries and workflows.Alibaba’s o
MIT
The Download: Making AI Work, and why the Moltbook hype is similar to Pokémon
This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. A first look at Making AI Work, MIT Technology Review’s new AI newsletter Are you interested in learning more about the ways in which AI is actually being used? W