Latest AI News
How to turn off AI in your Google Docs
It happened to me: I opened a Google Doc to write an article, and I was immediately confronted with a text box inviting me to “write with Gemini.” I looked for some button to swipe away the garish AI display, but I could not find it. It made me mad. Now, instead of writing the article I’m supposed to be working on, I am writing about how to get the AI pop-ups off of your Google Docs screen, since it took me some time to figure out. You’re welcome. The first fix is pretty straightforward: Full disclosure: I was so enraged when I set out to find “bottom bar preferences” that I initially missed it entirely. Instead, I clicked “Ask something else” and asked Gemini to help me remove itself from my life. AI may not be human, but Gemini seemed to have some sort of survival instinct, because it told me to click the “X” icon. That does not remove Gemini. It simply closed the conversation, the one in which I was asking it how to turn itself off. Suspicious! Other aggrieved Google Docs users have reported features that I have yet to encounter, like a“help me write” featurethat hovers over your cursor while you work. This seems like something that would upset me, so it’s probably worth nipping that in the bud before it’s too late. Benjamin Franklinonce said, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” (He was talking about fire safety. I am talking about product design.) Instead of turning off each individual AI feature like a game of whac-o-mole, we can disable “smart features” across our Google workspace via Gmail. You should now be safe from annoying Gemini pop-ups that disrupt your writing process in Google Docs. You can rest easy.
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NEA’s Tiffany Luck on AI IPOs, personal agents, and the ROI reckoning
Tokenmaxxingwas the hottest trend in Silicon Valley earlier this year, with CEOs encouraging employees to push AI usage as far as it would go.Then the bill came due. Uber reportedly blew through its annual AI budget in a few months, some companies cut Claude licenses for parts of their org, and Meta killed its internal leaderboard. This tension between hype and ROI is exactly whereNEA partner Tiffany Lucklives these days. She got her start convincing companies that e-commerce was the future, and now she’s all in on AI, especially when it comes to the possibilities for “magic moments” in the consumer business. On this episode of TechCrunch’sEquitypodcast, Luck joins Rebecca Bellan to talk about the future of personal agents, her thoughts on this year’s AI IPOs, and how startups are stepping in to help enterprises track return on AI spend. Listen to the full episode to hear: Subscribe to Equity onYouTube,Apple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotifyand all the casts. You also can follow Equity onXandThreads, at @EquityPod.
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Anthropic becomes first AI startup to join the Frontier carbon removal coalition
Anthropic is joining Frontier, the carbon removal collective, contributing to a new $915 million tranche of funding and marking its arrival as the first AI startup to join the group. The new funding nearly doubles pledges toFrontier, bringing the total to $1.8 billion. So far, Frontier has contracted nearly $700 million across more than 50 projects to remove 1.8 million tons of carbon. Companies that have pledged money to Frontier typically use the company’s carbon removal credits to reduce their publicly listed carbon footprints. The new funding will help bolster Frontier’s position in the carbon removal industry, but more notable are Anthropic’s pledges. While Google is a founding member, Anthropic is the first pure AI company to join the ranks. Its membership comes at a time when AI companies have been on an energy buying spree,not allof whichhas been squeaky clean. Joining Frontier is Anthropic’s first climate-related deal. The company has yet to produce a sustainability report, and ithas saidit favors an “all of the above” approach to energy, a statement which typically translates into large purchases of polluting power. But the move might signal changing attitudes within the company. Frontier was founded by tech companies, including Stripe, Google, and Shopify, to help them fulfill their climate pledges. The founding companies, and others, face a dilemma: Many want to hit zero emissions in the next decade or two, but there are some emissions they can’t eliminate today, like air travel. But at the same time, carbon removal was, and still is, a nascent industry without large players that could remove the amount of carbon companies needed. Frontier vets carbon removal companies and signs contracts for those it thinks will be able to deliver. Carbon removal credits, like the kind supported by Frontier, let companies continue to emit some pollution. The credits can be subtracted from their carbon footprint, similar to how profits might counter debts on a balance sheet. Frontier vets projects, serving as a sort of shared resource for companies interested in carbon removal. In the announcement of the new pledges, Frontier said that funding for future projects would come with a higher level of scrutiny. The organization said it will fund fewer projects, focusing on those that it thinks have the best chance at removing a gigaton — 1 billion metric tons — of CO2or more annually. New contracts will run around eight to 10 years, Frontier said. Since its launch in 2022, Frontier has backed a range of carbon removal technologies over the years, includingdirect air capture,enhanced rock weathering,bio-oil,ocean antacids, andbioenergy with carbon removal and sequestration. Frontier’s shift from lots of smaller bets to fewer larger ones mimicswhat appears to be happening at Microsoft, which has been the largest buyer of carbon removal credits. Though companies want the carbon removal market to grow and mature, they’re making it clear that they don’t want to underwrite it in perpetuity. For any new contract it signs, the carbon removal company must “show a path to government subsidy/support,” a Frontier spokesperson told TechCrunch. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that carbon dioxide removal technologywill be necessaryif the world is to reach net zero emissions, though few companies or consumers are interested in footing the bill. Like clean water, the problem is almost certain to fall on governments eventually. Frontier said it will contract as far out as 2040. It didn’t say what will happen after that, but it’s pretty clear they hope governments will have started to take the reins by then. Any if they don’t? At therate the climate is warming, we’ll have bigger problems on our hands.
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World leaders want American AI. They just don’t want America to be able to turn it off.
At the G7 Summit on Wednesday, world leaders like French President Emmanuel Macron and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi voiced concerns that the U.S. could cut off their countries’ access to top American AI models at any time. Macron warned G7 leaders and top AI executives — including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and President Donald Trump — over lunch that if the U.S. “from one day to the next can turn off the switch,” it could not only harm the economies of European customers but also damage the AI firms themselves. The comments come a few days after the Trump administration blocked Anthropic from exporting its newest Mythos 5 and Fable 5 models on national security grounds. The order came after Amazon flagged to the White House that certain safety guardrails could be bypassed. Even thoughcybersecurity expertshaveargued that the capabilitiescited by the government are also present in models that remain freely available, including from OpenAI, Anthropic’s models are still on ice. The episode has exposed a risk that manyinternational companies have been grappling with: Any company or government that builds on U.S. AI infrastructure now has to reckon with the possibility that access can be revoked overnight, for reasons they may never be told. Prime Minister Modi also said he was concerned about Trump’s move to block Anthropic’s model, according to reporting fromFinancial Times, adding that democratic nations must have unfettered access to top AI models to protect critical infrastructure. “The recent restriction on access to Anthropic’s models confirms what we at Cohere have known all along: that companies and democratic nations remaining dependent on a small handful of big tech companies is dangerous to resilience,” Aidan Gomez, co-founder and CEO of Canadian enterprise AI firm Cohere, said in a statement shared with TechCrunch. “Digital sovereignty is not just about market competition or any one company or nation. It’s about who controls the foundational technology that will shape our economic security and national sovereignty for decades to come.” During the meeting, G7 leaders also discussed thecreation of a “trusted partners”scheme that would grant access for non-U.S. nations to advanced AI models from firms like Anthropic and OpenAI. The goal is to maintain a sort of open trade network that bypasses U.S. restrictions. Both countries and companies could be trusted partners, as long as they used the models to develop stronger defenses against rivals like China. But it’s not clear how far that trusted partner scheme would extend, or whether it’s an answer for a startup in Paris or Bangalore that just had its product break without warning. Regardless, Macron noted that it would make sense for Washington to back such a scheme and to ensure Mythos access was granted more broadly. Nobody would want to buy U.S. AI access if it could disappear overnight. The comments were made even as Europe and other non-U.S. countries attempt topush for AI sovereignty— an increasingly difficult case to make when American models keep pulling ahead and nobody wants to be left out.
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NEA’s Tiffany Luck says enterprises are still figuring out their AI ROI
Loading the player… Tokenmaxxingwas the hottest trend in Silicon Valley earlier this year, with CEOs encouraging employees to push AI usage as far as it would go.Then the bill came due. Uber reportedly blew through its annual AI budget in a few months, some companies cut Claude licenses for parts of their org, and Meta killed its internal leaderboard. This tension between hype and ROI is exactly whereNEA partner Tiffany Lucklives these days. She got her start convincing companies that e-commerce was the future, and now she’s all in on AI, especially when it comes to the possibilities for “magic moments” in the consumer business. On this episode of TechCrunch’sEquitypodcast, Luck joins Rebecca Bellan to talk about the future of personal agents, her thoughts on this year’s AI IPOs, and how startups are stepping in to help enterprises track return on AI spend. Subscribe to Equity onYouTube,Apple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotifyand all the casts. You also can follow Equity onXandThreads, at @EquityPod.
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After unveiling ridiculously expensive AR glasses, Snap’s stock takes a dive
Snap’slong-awaited AR glasses, Specs, didn’t have the best debut. The company’s stockhasn’t been on the healthiest trajectorylately. It’s dropped 30% over the past year. Following Specs’ launch, it sank more than 5% — falling from $5.86 a share on Tuesday to a low of $4.83 on Wednesday morning. As of this writing, the stock still hasn’t recovered the position it held prior to the announcement. The big concern surrounding Snap’s new smart glasses — which the company has been working on for over a decade — is the cost: The company maintains they will retail at nearly $2,200 apiece. It’s worthy of note that Snap’s core user demographic — teenagers — are not typically equipped with that kind of pocket change, leading onlookers to question the profitability path for the new product. Snap’s CEO, Evan Spiegel, didan interviewwith CNBC on Tuesday (during which he sported the new glasses) and, when questioned about the hefty price, responded: “The most important way to think of Specs is as a computer, and so they’re comparably priced to other high-end computers or high-end laptops.” Spiegel further justified the cost by saying that Specs occupies a unique space in the AR market between glasses like Meta’s Ray-Bans — which cost a lot less but provide significantly less compute power — and bulkier headsets like the Apple Vision Pro, which are powerful but very expensive. Spiegel said his product was both “highly wearable but also incredibly capable for immersive computing.”
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Roelof Botha joins SpaceX’s board of directors
Former Sequoia Capital managing partner Roelof Botha is joining SpaceX’s board of directors, less than a week after the company went public in the largest IPO ever. SpaceXannouncedthe appointment in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday. It said Botha was appointed “to fill the existing vacancy on the Board” and that he will serve until SpaceX’s next annual shareholder meeting. He will also join the SpaceX board’s audit committee. Botha didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Botha “brings extensive public company experience along with a deep audit committee background, having served on the boards and audit committees of numerous public companies,” SpaceX wrote in the filing. He stepped down fromhis role as Sequoia’s leader late last yearas the firm was dealing with blowback against partner Shaun Maguire, who had made comments attacking then-New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. The SpaceX filing also discloses that a “family member” of Botha’s has worked at the company “since January 2025 as a member of the enterprise operations team.” SpaceX says this family member’s “compensation exceeded the $120,000 reporting threshold” but noted the compensation is “generally commensurate with their peers’.” Botha is on many public company boards, but none quite like SpaceX, where CEO Elon Musk enjoys near-absolute control and shareholders have little power. Musk has more than 80% of the now-public company’s voting power, and owners of SpaceX stock will haveseverely limited opportunitiesto challenge him should they disagree with his actions. Musk also has control over all changes to the board’s makeup,filings show. Botha has experience with Musk, though. Musk brought Botha — who is also from South Africa — in to run the finance division of PayPal in 2000. Botha started at the payments company in March of that year, according to his LinkedIn profile. Musk was pushed out as CEO of PayPal in September 2000. “I’ve known Elon for over 25 years,” Botha toldFortunelast year in an interview during Musk’s time running DOGE. “He was the first person to offer me a job in America. He believed in me when I was an unknown student at Stanford. I have a lot of appreciation and understanding that he’s not perfect. None of us are. He deeply cares about doing the right thing.” The addition of Botha brings SpaceX’s board to nine directors. He joins Musk confidants Ira Ehrenpreis, Antonio Gracias, Steve Jurvetson, and Luke Nosek; SpaceX chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell; Google executive Donald Harrison; and VC Randy Glein. Musk is chairman of the board. Botha has been with Sequoia for more than 20 years, and the firm invested in SpaceX in 2019. It reportedlyowned1.5% of SpaceX heading into the IPO, giving it a position worth more than $20 billion.
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Collecting robot training data is dirty, unglamorous work. Some AI labs are already paying XDOF to do it.
Two weeks ago, OpenAIsaidit would relaunch the robotics program it shuttered in 2021 — the latest signal that the biggest AI labs are racing to teach machines to operate in the physical world. But building capable robots requires something the AI industry doesn’t yet have, which is the training data to match that used for language models. That gap is creating a new kind of infrastructure business. Unlike LLMs that were trained on a vast sea of publicly available text, robots need data that captures physical interaction, and that kind of data barely exists. YouTube videos and footage captured by gig workers are low-fidelity and hard to reconcile with the physical world. XDOF(pronounced “ecks-doff”), emerging from stealth today, is betting that the next great bottleneck in AI isn’t models or chips, but the data feedback loop needed to teach robots how to interact with the physical world. The startup aims to build the data pipelines, collection tools, and annotation systems that frontier labs and robotics companies can’t easily build themselves — and has raised $70 million from Thrive Capital, Spark Capital, a16z, Lux, and WndrCo to do it. Co-founder and CEO Philipp Wu says XDOF, which has about 60 employees, is already working with 20 customers, including several frontier AI labs, but cannot name them. “All of the top labs are trying to pursue robotics,” Wu said. “We’ve already seen some of the downfalls of falling a little bit behind in the language model race … you don’t want to be in this type of situation where you pursue this technology too late, and everyone is in this boat where physical AI is the next frontier.” Wu ran into this problem himself as a PhD student at UC Berkeley. His focus was on enabling robots to learn skills from large-scale datasets. There was just one problem. “We didn’t have large-scale data to work with,” he told TechCrunch. “There was this chicken-and-egg problem — we first needed to actually collect data before we could even ask how to train a foundation model for robotics.” Wu and his future XDOF co-founder and CTO, Fred Shentu, worked on a project called GELLO, a low-cost teleoperation system that lets a human operator control a robotic arm to generate training data. “It ended up becoming a very influential paper in robotics, because a lot of people had similar needs and bottlenecks, and many started leveraging this type of device for data collection,” Wu said. Spotting the opportunity, Wu, Shentu, and third co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Nemo Jin launched XDOF in October 2024 to provide a data ecosystem for companies pursuing robotics models. Mindful that data provision alone can be a dead-end business, the company is also focused on data cleaning, tooling, and annotation — creating a self-reinforcing feedback loop for robot trainers. As a starting point, the company is partnering with UC Berkeley’s AI Research lab to release what it believes is the largest collection of high-quality robot training data ever assembled, dubbedABC. It includes 130,000 trajectories of robot manipulation data, 300 hours of simulation, and 100 hours of evaluations. That kind of scaled-up pre-training data has never been available to academia before. “We’ve seen in language, image generation, and other fields, that when models and data are released, the community achieves things that you wouldn’t necessarily have expected,” David McAllister, a Berkeley PhD student who helped organize the release, told TechCrunch. The team has already used the data to train robots on benchmark tasks like folding T-shirts and flattening boxes, or loading AirPods into their cases. The company plans to work across three tiers of a data pyramid. The most valuable tier is teleoperation data collected on the actual robot being deployed; next comes teleoperated robots gathering more general data, as with GELLO; and finally “egocentric” data gathered by humans performing everyday tasks, for which XDOF plans to build its own wearable sensors. “Your camera choice is going to affect the quality of your data — which is going to affect how your hand-tracking algorithm performs,” Wu said. “If you don’t design the hardware well from the start, the data you collect might have very specific problems that you didn’t anticipate.” The company plans to hire and train armies of teleoperators and egocentric data operators around the world — a labor-intensive model that raises an obvious question: Why aren’t the major labs doing this data production work themselves? “You need a warehouse of hundreds of thousands of square feet with hundreds of robots,” Wu said. “You need to maintain these robots, calibrate their physical parameters, and properly train operators.” It’s a build-out that requires focus, capital, and operational scale that most AI labs would rather outsource — which is precisely the market XDOF is betting on. The name XDOF is a play on the robotics term “degrees of freedom,” which describes the number of independent motions a robot can perform. Your arm, from shoulder to wrist, hasseven degrees of freedom. Humanoid robotics company Figure AI’s latest robot has 30. The X in the company’s name captures its ambition: “Arbitrary degrees of freedom, unlimited degrees of freedom,” Wu says.
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The slowtech revolution is here to kill your phone addiction and rescue your attention span
When Tony Fadell entered New York City’s 28th Street Subway Station, he did not expect to come face-to-face withan advertisementfor a product he designed over 20 years ago. But there it was: a five-by-four-foot poster promoting the iPod Shuffle, luring passersby with the promise of “Zero screen time.” “The first thing was, I thought, ‘Wait a second, did somebody not change the ad?’” Fadell, known as the father of the iPod, told TechCrunch. “For somebody like me who knows that thing intimately, it’s like seeing your kid’s picture.” As Fadell stood in the train station, he was surrounded by people wearing wireless Bluetooth headphones to stream music on their phones, effortlessly accessing music libraries with over 100 million songs. This technology that we take for granted makes Steve Jobs’ early iPod tagline —“one thousand songs in your pocket”— sound antiquated. The postage-stamp-sized iPod Shuffle, which relied heavily on shuffle playback and offered little control compared to today’s streaming apps, should not appeal to a modern audience. But we have become so entrenched in technology that our various devices, apps, and algorithms mediate our every experience, from grocery shopping to dating. We’ve built smartphones that can do almost anything, but we’ve also created a constant connectedness that has become more exhausting than enriching. “People are very oversaturated and overstimulated, and they really want to have a more mindful approach to what they’re doing with their tech,” Joy Howard, CMO ofBack Market, an online marketplace for refurbished tech, told TechCrunch. “There’s this fatigue that we have with the need to optimize every single aspect of our life.” Howard and her team were responsible for the iPod Shuffle ad that Fadell was so shocked to encounter. But Howard says that demand is growing for this supposedly obsolete tech — if these devices weren’t driving sales, the company wouldn’t have shelled out for a premium ad placement in a hectic New York City subway station. For younger generations who have never known a world without social media and smartphones, there’s a certain magic to wired headphones, retro gaming consoles, CDs, and digital point-and-shoot cameras. They crave experiences that aren’t trying to monopolize their attention. Old-school cameras can’t upload photos to your Instagram story, retro games don’t spam you with gambling ads, and iPods can’t automatically play music that you’re algorithmically destined to enjoy. That’s the whole point of this movement, which Howard calls “slowtech.” “The ‘fast tech’ up until now has been all about eliminating friction… [Now], people are seeing friction as a way to create boundaries for themselves,” Howard said. “It’s so stunning to me that now people are wanting to bring friction back into their lives, and see that as a feature, rather than a flaw.” Around the same time that Fadell first pitched the iPod to Steve Jobs,Austin Murrayfounded JAMDAT, one of thefirst mobile gaming companies, which quickly went public and was sold to Electronic Arts for $680 million. “When we were pitching our company back in 2000, 2001, people were laughing at us, saying, ‘Why would anyone play games on their cell phone?’” Murray told TechCrunch. Now, investors are just as incredulous when he pitches them on hisscreen-time reduction app, MOQA, which he is building to counteract the very phenomenon he helped create. “It’s watching what happened to my kids and the people around me that hurts my soul the most,” Murray said. “When everyone is doing the same thing — meaning everyone, the average screen time is like five hours probably on a phone every day — it’s not a willpower problem. It’s a product design problem.” This desire to cut back on the time we spend using our phones, computers, and TVs has become ubiquitous —about 53%of American adults say they want to reduce their screen time. “At a certain point, I realized that willpower was insufficient to not waste time on my phone,” said writerCalvin Kasulke, whose novel “Several People Are Typing” imagines workers trapped inside a Slack workspace. He now pays forOpalandFreedom, two apps designed to limit his screen time and social media use. “I don’t need to limit my time on iMessage — that’s people who I really know! But I certainly don’t want to be wasting my time doomscrolling.” “I want to be very clear… I don’t feel smug about this. It’s embarrassing to have two different apps to limit how I use this,” Kasulke said. “I don’t think screens are inherently bad. I just think the way I was using [my phone] was worse and dumb, and now it’s a little bit less dumb.” Others have given up their iPhones altogether, opting instead for flip phones,e-ink devicesthat run Android software, or minimalist touch-screen hardware like theLight Phone. “Our customers for the last 10 years are telling us how they feel more free after switching to the Light Phone,” Light co-founder Kaiwei Tang told TechCrunch. “It’s getting more and more attention, especially among young people. We have quite a lot of the community using Light Phone as 20- to 35-year-olds, which surprised us.” Murray isn’t as optimistic about the future of “dumb phones,” though. “There’s certainly a movement of people who are just kind of anti-tech and ‘get it out of our lives,’” he said. “That’s really hard though, because then you realize you can’t do things that are now assuming you have a smartphone, like banking, or going into a hotel, or [using] credit cards.” Kasulke said if Apple ever made an e-ink iPhone, he would “f–ing donate plasma to be able to afford it.” But that’s unlikely, so he’s not particularly interested in downgrading his phone. “I’m not like a, ‘I wish I could throw this thing in the toilet and go live in the woods’ kind of guy,” Kasulke said. “My phone has some utility for my personal and professional life, but it also lives in your pocket, and it is very, very easy, and in fact, designed in some ways to be addictive and to mindlessly waste time on it.” Screen time isn’t universally bad. We’re accumulating screen time when we video chat with our family, text our friends, read news articles, maintain our Duolingo streaks, or play Wordle. But for as much as tech brings us closer to one another, it also yanks us out of the present moment. “It’s clear people want the convenience of digital, but they don’t want the annoyance of being always connected,” Fadell said. “I’ve always been like, ‘We need less screens, not more of them.’ So to have an Apple Watch with everything, like, no, no, no — I don’t want more, I want less.” It’s not surprising that Fadell’s preferences are a bellwether for the market — he’s a veteran product designer, after all. American spending on fitness trackersgrew 88%year-over-year, according to market research firm Circana, which credits screenless wearables like the Oura ring and Whoop wristband as key sales drivers. Even though these devices don’t have screens, you have to use your smartphone to see your data, which would make it even harder for Oura and Whoop users to try out something like the Light Phone. But most consumers aren’t looking to make such an extreme change as pivoting to a flip phone — instead, some are embracing even more sophisticated hardware that relies on their smartphone, but cuts down their overall screen time. Mark, a $159 AI bookmark, advertises itself as a tool to help users stop pulling out their phone to take notes while they’re reading. While some readers might find the idea of an AI bookmark to be symptomatic of the same problem that pushes people toward a digital detox, Mark founder Eason Tang sees it differently. “The way we try to brand it now is this sort of analog tool, very culturally integrated with design, film, books, and literature,” Tang told TechCrunch. We raised $1M dollars to reinvent how people read. Introducing Mark II – a $159 AI bookmark. Thread belowpic.twitter.com/eL0XsyRlgC There’s something undoubtedly absurd about using an AI bookmark to mediate your relationship with your phone, yet there is a bit of truth to Tang’s pitch — when you stop reading to take notes or snap a photo of a key passage on your phone, you’re bound to encounter some other distracting notification that interrupts your reading. Though AI developments are almost synonymous with “fast tech” culture, there’s a clear allure to the promise that AI agents could simplify our lives and give us more time away from screens. “I think that this idea that people want tools to serve them and not to dominate them is very profound,” Howard said. “I think what the ‘slowtech’ movement is about is people pushing back against the constant digital fatigue, distraction, overwhelm, so if you can use AI to do that, to kind of protect yourself… That’s what people want: more control.” The ubiquity of AI turns some consumers off from the latest products, but this isn’t their sole grievance with big tech. People are also disillusioned by these companies for continually bricking perfectly good hardware just to make us buy the latest model. Back Market, for example, rehabsdiscontinued laptopsand resells them with USB keys that can install ChromeOS Flex, which turns supposedly obsolete hardware into functioning Chromebooks. “One of our developers started finding a way to hack things that had their OS sunsetted to bring it new life. And so one of the first things he hacked was a rice cooker,” Howard said. “His rice cooker didn’t have support anymore! This is actually a really cool use of AI — like, vibe coding your own app to keep your hardware alive longer.” While slowtech adherents may not all agree about AI use, the debate is secondary to the bigger problem at play: We’ve created an ecosystem where we are so dependent on smartphones and our various apps that the whims of the tech industry can control how we cook rice. In this reality, it’s no wonder that people are so eager to disconnect that they want to downgrade to an iPod Shuffle. “People just really want to take back control of their time, their lives, their attention,” Howard said. “They’re down for whatever helps them do that.”
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Google bets on Gemini to reinvent the smart home speaker
After years of incremental updates, Google is betting that its Gemini AI can reinvent its smart speaker. On Wednesday, the company introduced its first audio device built specifically for Gemini with the $99.99 Google Home Speaker. The new Google Home device is the first stand-alone smart speaker from the tech giant since theNest Audio in September 2020. That older device arrived at a time when smart speakers were thought of largely as handy controllers for your smart home and music-playing systems. They lacked the smarts of today’s AI chatbots, as commands often had to be phrased correctly to get things to work. The Google Home Speaker is changing that, as you’ll be able to speak using natural language requests and even make multistep requests using the phrasing you’d like. For instance, you could tell the speaker to “turn off all the lights except for my bedside lamp,” or “dim the kitchen lights, play some relaxing music, and set a timer for 20 minutes.” You can also make corrections mid-sentence as you speak instead of having to try requests again, and Gemini will understand. That means you could say something like, “Turn off the coffee maker … I mean, turn it on!” and the AI will respond appropriately, Google points out. Plus, the device will ship with 10 new voices that can have two-way conversations with you about topics that aren’t limited to smart home tasks or other simple commands. You can ask more nuanced questions and dive deeper into topics you want to learn about, as you could when speaking with Gemini on your smartphone. The speaker’s microphone can also remain on briefly when using the “Continued Conversation” feature, so you can more naturally ask follow-up questions without having to say “OK, Google” again. The device looks similar to older versions, with its 3D-knit textile wrapping and rounded 3.4 x 4.2-inch design. In the U.S., the speaker comes in Jade and Berry colors in addition to the Hazel and Porcelain options available in the rest of the world. A new ring light at the bottom will indicate if the speaker is listening, thinking, or responding. But not all of the new device’s AI smarts will be free. Google will sell Google Home Premium subscription plans for $10 per month (or $100 per year) if you want to take advantage of more powerful AI features. This includes being able to have more free-flowing conversations with Gemini Live, which you kick off by saying, “Hey, Google, let’s chat.” Home Premium can also help you ask about and make sense of activity captured on your home’s Nest cameras, or offer summaries of what happened in the home while you were out. Whether those capabilities are compelling enough to justify another monthly subscription remains to be seen, particularly when many of the device’s Gemini features are available without paying. Google will try to get you used to the advanced features by offering them for free for six months before pushing you to subscribe. If successful, Google will have reinvigorated the smart speaker lineup with generative AI and will have found a way to get some customers to pay for those technological advances. The device is available forpreordernow and will ship later this month.
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Only 16 percent of Americans think AI will have a positive impact on society, a new study shows
Despite the fact that AI increasingly dominates our economy (it’s ahot IPO summerand we’re all just along for the ride), most Americans are not particularly optimistic about the technology’s long-term impact on the country, a new study from Pew Research reveals. In fact, although a whole lot of Americans increasingly use AI in their daily lives, most of them have neutral to negative views about it, the research reveals. Only 16% of Americans think that AI’s impact on society during the next 20 years will be positive, Pew says, while around 40% say that it will have a negative impact. A vast majority of people (67%) don’t believe that the U.S. government will do anything to meaningfully regulate AI. A similarly skeptical cohort (59%) don’t trust companies to develop it safely. Young people — that is, those people under 30 — are the ones with the most negative feelings about AI. Pew says that only 14% of this cohort believe the tech will have a positive impact on society. On top of all this, a vast majority of Americans — nearly two-thirds — also think that AI’s development is occurring too quickly. Despite all of the skepticism, a whole lot of Americans also report using AI in their daily lives on an increasingly regular basis. About a quarter of Americans say they use AI chatbots on a daily basis. Those who do are typically using the chatbots for research purposes or for work, Pew says. A vast majority of people using AI are using ChatGPT. Pew writes that 44% of U.S. adults now say they use OpenAI’s chatbot, a figure that’s more than doubled since 2023. The next most popular chatbot is Gemini (24%), followed by Copilot (17%) and Meta AI (14%), with Grok (8%), Claude (6%), and Character.ai (3%) lagging behind. There is a bit of a gender divide. While chatbot use is growing for both men and women, men still use AI more and are more enthusiastic about it, while women are more skeptical, Pew says. Men are more likely to say they use AI chatbots in their daily lives (27% versus 20% for women) and while equal shares of men and women report using ChatGPT, men more commonly report usage of other brands, such as Copilot and Grok. The report also highlights how AI is changing the ways Americans consume information. Six in 10 survey respondents told Pew that they routinely read AI-generated internet summaries (indeed, on Google, they’re pretty much unavoidable). A much smaller number report using AI to get information on fitness and dieting. There are also still a whole lot of people — about half of the country — that say they donotuse AI in their daily lives. The people who do not use AI tend to be older, while those under 50 are more likely to say that they use it. Nearly 75% of Americans aged 65 or older say that they never use AI chatbots. Those people who don’t use chatbots say they don’t because they’re not interested in them, and add that they have no intention of using them in the future.
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World model maker Odyssey nabs $1.45B valuation backed by Amazon and other big names
Odyssey, a world model AI startup founded by self-driving vehicle pioneers CEO Oliver Cameron and CTO Jeff Hawke, has raised a $310 million Series B round at a $1.45B valuation led by Natural Capital, with Amazon, AMD Ventures, GV, and others participating. World models are the next big thing in AI beyond text- and chat-based large language models. They gather data from the physical world and simulate it with accurate physics. In Odyssey’s case, it has mimicked how Google Earth gathered data; the startupsent people out with cameras strapped to their backs. (Google drives camera-equipped cars around.) That approach makes sense given the backgrounds of the founders. Cameron was the co-founder and CEO of autonomous vehicle startup Voyage, which wasacquired by GM’s Cruise, where he later became VP of product; Hawke was an engineer atbuzzy U.K. self-driving startup Wayve. Odyssey, founded in 2023, now offers a handful of world models for a variety of use cases, from video-game creation to robotics. It is perhaps best known for producing rich, interactive video from text prompts. With the backing from Amazon, the startup says AWS is now its preferred cloud provider and it will optimize its models to run on AWS’s Trainium chips, a competitor to Nvidia’s AI chips. In addition to the VCs that participated in this unicorn-crowning round, Odyssey has corralled an impressive list of angel investors as well. These include Jeff Dean, Elad Gil, Garry Tan, Guillermo Rauch, and Cruise founder Kyle Vogt. The company has now raised $337 million to date.
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