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Natron’s liquidation shows why the US isn’t ready to make its own batteries

Sodium-ion battery startup Natron ceased operations this week, ending the company’s 12-year quest to commercialize its technology in the U.S. The company had $25 million worth of orders lined up for its Michigan factory, but it couldn’t deliver them until it had UL certification, according to Raleigh’s The News & Observer, which reported on the business’s closure because Natron had been planning to bring jobs to the state of North Carolina with its new factory. However, receiving the UL certif

Nothing teases its fourth-gen earbuds called the Ear (3) because numbers are hard

TL;DR Nothing has confirmed it will launch its next-generation flagship TWS earbuds soon. After previously adopting a new naming scheme that removed numbers from the name, Nothing is going back to “straightforward numerical order.” The next earbuds will be called the Ear (3). There’s nothing that London-based electronics maker Nothing loves more than teasers. In typical fashion, the company released a teaser for a new product this morning. The teaser in question is for Nothing’s next-generati

A Quarter of Nvidia's Revenue Comes From a Single Giant Customer

In case you haven't heard, there might be a slight problem with the US economy: that it's being propped up by a tiny number of tech companies betting big on an AI revolution. Among the tech titans, no company is more important than the AI chip maker Nvidia. Often likened to a shovel seller during a goldrush, Nvidia's revenue has exploded in recent years, from $26.9 billion in 2023 to a heart stopping $130.5 billion in 2025. That unprecedented growth propelled Nvidia to become the first company

Why Browser Company at $610M is cheap

first, what does this price mean for the browser company? their last round valued them at $550m, so this is basically giving the previous investors their money back. in other words, bare minimum price they could sell for without somebody taking a loss. pretty bad for them: the market sees no future value, josh’s “vision” for browsers couldn’t get better than buzzwords. second, what does this price mean for atlassian? they have $3b cash, so this is 20% of their piggy bank. and with $1.2b q3 prof

Tesla offers $1 trillion to Elon Musk to unleash his army of robots

is transportation editor with 10+ years of experience who covers EVs, public transportation, and aviation. His work has appeared in The New York Daily News and City & State. Elon Musk could become the world’s first trillionaire if Tesla shareholders approve a new pay package that was just put forward by the company’s board. Musk would need to meet certain milestones in order to receive that eye-popping compensation, such as producing 1 million robotaxis and 1 million humanoid robots, as well a

Tesla shareholders to vote on investing in Musk’s AI startup xAI

Tesla shareholders will soon vote whether to let the electric vehicle maker invest in Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI, a proposal pitched as a way to strengthen Tesla’s ambitions in AI, robotics, and energy. Listed in Tesla’s proxy statement alongside a company-backed push to raise Musk’s 10-year pay package to $1 trillion, the proposal comes from Stephen Hawk, a Florida shareholder with a $2,000 stake of common stock. His supporting statement reads: Tesla’s integration of Grok into its vehicles de

Topics: ai company musk tesla xai

Microsoft Goes Back to BASIC, Open-Sources Bill Gates’ Code

In the era of vibe coding, when even professionals are pawning off their programming work on AI tools, Microsoft is throwing it all the way back to the language that launched a billion devices. On Wednesday, the company announced that it would make the source code for Microsoft BASIC for the 6502 Version 1.1 publicly available and open-source. The code is now uploaded to GitHub under an MIT license (with a cheeky commit time stamp of “48 years ago”). Microsoft called the code—written by the com

OpenAI is reportedly producing its own AI chips starting next year

OpenAI is gearing up to start the mass production of its own AI chips next year to be able to provide the massive computing power its users need and to lessen its reliance on NVIDIA, according to the Financial Times. The company reportedly designed the custom AI chip with US semiconductor maker Broadcom, whose CEO recently announced that it has a new client that put in a whopping $10 billion in orders. It didn't name the client, but the Times' sources confirmed that it was OpenAI, which apparent

Waymo Says You’re Not Getting Its Footage Without a Warrant

Waymo is quietly drawing new boundaries over how authorities access data from its autonomous vehicles. The company said it will reject any requests that are not backed by a legal request such as a warrant or court order. The move is one of several signaling a growing tension between innovation, privacy, and law enforcement power. A new privacy guardrail Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana recently emphasized that the company will challenge, limit, or reject robotaxi footage requests from law enforc

Tesla proposes new pay package for Elon Musk worth up to $1T

Tesla has proposed a new 10-year compensation plan for CEO Elon Musk that could be worth as much as $1 trillion even as the EV maker’s car business stumbles and it sets its sights on humanoid robotics and AI. The company has tied the compensation to a number of benchmarks, one of which involves increasing Tesla’s overall valuation from around $1 trillion to more than $8 trillion. The plan would grant Musk more than 423 million additional shares in the company, boosting his level of control to a

Trump warns ‘fairly substantial’ chip tariffs are coming; signals Apple, others will be safe

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., and U.S. President Donald Trump during a dinner with tech leaders in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, DC, U.S., on Sept. 4, 2025. President Donald Trump has reiterated a warning that he will soon impose "fairly substantial" tariffs on semiconductor imports from companies that do not shift production to the U.S., but will spare firms like Apple that expand investments domestically. Trump made the comments Th

21 years later, Meta still hasn't given up on the Facebook 'poke'

Meta currently has lots of priorities Mark Zuckerberg likely never would have imagined back in the early days of Facebook. The company has pivoted from social networking to the metaverse and, most recently, to AI. But somehow, one of its earliest — and most useless — features has not only survived but is apparently getting a revamp. I'm talking, of course, about the poke, which Meta is once again trying to revive. The company is making the storied feature easier to find by adding pokes back to

Apple has reportedly launched an AI chatbot, but it's not for the iPhone 17 (or you)

Jason Hiner/ZDNET Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET's key takeaways Apple has reportedly launched an AI chatbot for its retail staff. Asa is intended to be an automated digital sales assistant. The chatbot arrives just weeks before the launch of iPhone 17. Apple has reportedly launched a new AI chatbot -- for its employees, not for its customers. Nicknamed Asa, the chatbot is designed to serve as an automated digital assistant for the company's retail staff, maki

Updating restrictions of sales to unsupported regions

Anthropic's Terms of Service prohibit use of our services in certain regions due to legal, regulatory, and security risks. However, companies from these restricted regions—including adversarial nations like China—continue accessing our services in various ways, such as through subsidiaries incorporated in other countries. Companies subject to control from authoritarian regions like China face legal requirements that can compel them to share data, cooperate with intelligence services, or take ot

Elon Musk, AI Startups, and The Case of The Allegedly Missing Trade Secrets

A second lawsuit filed by an artificial intelligence company alleging a former employee stole trade secrets has been filed in California, just days after Elon Musk’s xAI alleged it had recently experienced corporate espionage. In this case, Scale AI, a leading AI data-labeling firm, sued competitor Mercor Inc. in federal court Wednesday, accusing the startup and a former employee of misappropriating trade secrets to win new business. Scale is valued at approximately $29 billion following a mas

Rivian makes its second small workforce cut of the year ahead of R2 SUV launch

In Brief Rivian is laying off around 150 workers — its second small staff cut in a matter of months — as the company readies itself for the all-important launch of its more-affordable R2 SUV next year. The company confirmed to TechCrunch that the new cuts were mostly to its “commercial” team, which deals with sales and service operations, and that affected employees will be eligible for rehire and encouraged to apply for other open positions. The Wall Street Journal first reported the layoffs

Desperate Companies Now Hiring Humans to Fix What AI Botched

For a while now, we've been seeing companies that fired a bunch of their human workers in favor of artificial intelligence move to recoup some of that flesh-and-blood labor. Now, that push has resulted in a new line of gig work: slop fixer-uppers, who get paid to improve AI-generated art, writing, and code — by making it less, well, sloppy. In an interview with NBC News, longtime freelance illustrator Lisa Carstens said fixing AI-generated logos, many of which have fuzzy lines and garbled text

Elon Musk's New Robot Demo Is Astonishingly Bad

Hot off of proudly announcing that he had replaced 4,000 people with AI at his company, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff posted a video of Tesla's humanoid robot, Optimus, calling it a "productivity game-changer." However, going by the 52-second clip, the carmaker has a long way to go until it can successfully have AI-powered bipedal robots replace human jobs. Is this really what will make up a whopping 80 percent of Tesla's value, as Tesla CEO Elon Musk promised in a tweet earlier this week? In an

Rocketships and Slingshots

The dominant metaphor for a successful startup these days is the rocketship. The not so humble brags are all over x and the press, founders and VCs saying - “0-100m in ARR faster than any company in history” and “idea to $1m in revenue in a month.” I get why these are exciting. The stories are simple, the progress is amazing, the pull of the market is irresistible. Sometimes these will be the biggest and most interesting companies of the future. Then again, as with most stories, the realities o

Non-Obviously Great Startups

The dominant metaphor for a successful startup these days is the rocketship. The not so humble brags are all over x and the press, founders and VCs saying - “0-100m in ARR faster than any company in history” and “idea to $1m in revenue in a month.” I get why these are exciting. The stories are simple, the progress is amazing, the pull of the market is irresistible. Sometimes these will be the biggest and most interesting companies of the future. Then again, as with most stories, the realities o

Who Owns ‘Telepathy’?

Elon Musk’s neural implant startup Neuralink has been trying to trademark two product names: Telepathy and Telekinesis. Musk has previously claimed that his company will be able to give people “superpowers,” so the desire to take ownership over these special abilities makes sense. Unfortunately for Neuralink, patent applications for Telepathy and Telekinesis have already been filed by a different business. Wired reports that a lucid dreaming startup (who knew there was such a thing?) called Pro

Stripe enlists a who’s who, including Anthropic, OpenAI, and Paradigm, to build a new blockchain

In Brief Stripe is funding a new blockchain company called Tempo, co-founder CEO Patrick Collison announced on Thursday. Tempo is aimed at high-volume processing of stablecoins — coins that help reduce crypto’s notorious volatility because they are pegged to a stable asset like the U.S. dollar. That’s not surprising given that Stripe acquired stablecoin company Bridge. What is surprising is the eye-popping list of companies Stripe has already enlisted: Anthropic, Coupang, Deutsche Bank, DoorDa

Figma's stock slumps almost 20% after first earnings report to lowest since IPO

Figma shares plummeted nearly 20% on Thursday, falling to the lowest price since the design software vendor's initial public offering in July after the company reported earnings for the first time as a public company. Results for the second quarter were largely in line with expectations, as Figma had issued preliminary results a little over a month ago. Revenue increased 41% from a year earlier to $249.6 million, slightly topping analysts' estimates of $248.8 million, according to LSEG. Analys

Apple’s winning AI strategy might come down to three simple words, per CNBC

Earlier this week, Apple received good news when a judge ruled that its lucrative search deal with Google could continue. And per CNBC, the ruling offers Apple a simple, but winning path forward for the iPhone in AI centered around three words: “pay to play.” ‘Pay to play’ could be Apple’s AI solution, modeled after Google search deal With Apple’s $20 billion search deal with Google now seemingly safe, investors see AI as one of the company’s other significant perceived threats. But according

Roborock's new weed-killing robot mowers will save your back (and time)

Maria Diaz/ZDNET Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET's takeaways Roborock has introduced its first robot lawnmowers. Three models will be available, each with a different purpose. The company hasn't revealed pricing or release date yet. Roborock is headed outdoors. The company best known for its robot vacuum cleaners (including the recent viral one with a mechanical arm that picks up small objects) has unveiled its first robot lawnmower. In an announcement today

DeepSeek Is Working on an AI Agent. Will It Be Better Than ChatGPT?

China-based DeepSeek is working on developing a new agentic generative AI model, Bloomberg reports, citing anonymous sources. Agentic AI is the latest wave of AI technology. AI agents are a kind of digital assistant; they can complete tasks without a lot of human oversight. AI agents can do anything from coding to ordering you a pizza, as my colleague Imad Khan recently tested. Details about the specifics of the DeepSeek agent model are still fuzzy. An August update to DeepSeek's V3 model was

OpenAI announces AI-powered hiring platform to take on LinkedIn

OpenAI says it’s developing an AI-powered hiring platform to connect businesses and employees, a service that would put the outfit in close competition with LinkedIn. The product is called the OpenAI Jobs Platform, and the company expects to launch the service by mid-2026, an OpenAI spokesperson told TechCrunch. OpenAI CEO of Applications Fidji Simo announced the new endeavor in a blog post Thursday, saying the company will “use AI to help find the perfect matches between what companies need an

Ex-Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor's Sierra is the latest $10 billion AI startup

Bret Taylor, chairman of the board of directors of OpenAI, attends the annual Allen and Co. Sun Valley Media and Technology Conference at the Sun Valley Resort in Sun Valley, Idaho, on July 8, 2025. Bret Taylor's artificial intelligence startup Sierra has just joined an exclusive club: The company sports a new $10 billion valuation after raising $350 million in fresh capital. Sierra is one of just a handful of AI startups, including OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Safe Superintelligence and Thinking M

Waymo cleared to offer robotaxi rides at San Jose airport

Waymo has been cleared to serve its first airpot in California: San Jose Mineta International. The company announced Thursday that it will start testing its robotaxis there in the coming months, and that it plans to start offering commercial rides by the end of the year. The company has spent years working toward serving airports in its home state. Waymo was going back-and-forth with officials at San Francisco’s airport back in 2023 but was rebuffed. Earlier this year, though, Waymo was granted

DeepSeek Is Working on an AI Agent: Will It Be Better Than ChatGPT?

China-based DeepSeek is working on developing a new agentic generative AI model, Bloomberg reports, citing anonymous sources. Agentic AI is the latest wave of AI technology. AI agents are a kind of digital assistant; they can complete tasks without a lot of human oversight. AI agents can do anything from coding to ordering you a pizza, as my colleague Imad Khan recently tested. Details about the specifics of the DeepSeek agent model are still fuzzy. An August update to DeepSeek's V3 model was