Author: Editor-in-Chief

Researchers at consulting firm BetterUp Labs, in collaboration with Stanford Social Media Lab, have coined a new term to describe low-quality, AI-generated work: “workslop.” As defined in an article published this week in the Harvard Business Review, workslop is “AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.” BetterUp Labs researchers suggest that workslop could be one explanation for the 95% of organizations that have tried AI but report seeing zero return on that investment. Workslop, they write, can be “unhelpful, incomplete, or missing crucial context,” which just creates…

A wider leadership shake-up at Hyundai’s electric air taxi startup Supernal is underway just a few weeks after it paused work on its vehicle program and its CEO and CTO left, TechCrunch has learned. Supernal’s chief strategy officer, Jaeyong Song, and chief safety officer, Tracy Lamb, are no longer with the company, the startup confirmed Friday. Lina Yang, the chief of staff to Supernal’s recently departed CEO, Jaiwon Shin, is also out. (Yang had previously served as Supernal’s “Head of Intelligent Systems” until April 2025.) “As we transition to new leadership, we have taken the opportunity to strategically review our…

Renowned roboticist Rodney Brooks has a wake-up call for investors funneling billions into humanoid robot startups: you’re wasting your money. Brooks, who co-founded iRobot and spent decades at MIT, is particularly skeptical of companies like Tesla and Figure trying to teach robots dexterity by showing them videos of humans doing tasks. In a new essay, he calls this approach “pure fantasy thinking.” The problem? Human hands are incredibly sophisticated, packed with about 17,000 specialized touch receptors that no robot comes close to matching. While machine learning transformed speech recognition and image processing, those breakthroughs built on decades of existing technology…

Fintech Checkout.com announced on Friday that it reached a $12 billion valuation as part of an employee stock buyback program. On the one hand, very few startups ever achieve decacorn status, so $12 billion is nothing to sneeze at. It’s a valuable enough company to have landed its founder and CEO Guillaume Pousaz on Forbes’ billionaire list. On the other, there was a short period of time when Checkout.com was valued at a whopping $40 billion, as part of its $1 billion Series D round closed in 2022. By the end of that year, with the venture world crashing into…

For years, “know your customer” checks have become commonplace on the internet, often by way of sharing a copy of your government-issued ID and a selfie to confirm that it’s really you, to access a website or app, or to purchase certain goods. Nowadays, age-verification laws taking effect across the U.S., the United Kingdom, Australia, and beyond are also giving rise to an entire industry of ID-checking companies charged with granting you access to the “adult” web. But uploading your identity details and selfie to a company’s servers has long had privacy advocates spooked and fearful that this sensitive…

A data spill from an unsecured cloud server has exposed hundreds of thousands of sensitive bank transfer documents in India, revealing account numbers, transaction figures, and individuals’ contact details. Researchers at cybersecurity firm UpGuard discovered in late August a publicly accessible Amazon-hosted storage server containing 273,000 PDF documents relating to bank transfers of Indian customers. The exposed files contained completed transaction forms intended for processing via the National Automated Clearing House, or NACH, a centralized system used by banks in India to facilitate high-volume recurring transactions, such as salaries, loan repayments, and utility payments. The data was linked to at…

In its latest bid to boost semiconductor production in the U.S., the Trump administration is reportedly considering a ratio-based approach that would penalize domestic manufacturers with tariffs if they don’t produce enough chips. The administration is weighing a policy that would mandate U.S. semiconductor companies to manufacture the same number of chips in the U.S. as their customers import from overseas manufacturers, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing anonymous sources. Companies that don’t comply with this 1:1 ratio will be subject to tariffs, the report said, though the timeline to achieve this ratio isn’t clear. President Donald Trump has been talking about imposing tariffs on the semiconductor industry since the beginning of August.…

When Sierra Space won a contract to deliver cargo to the International Space Station nearly a decade ago, the company promised a first for the commercial space market: a privately built, rapid reuse and cargo return spaceplane capable of landing on commercial runways. That dream has changed. In a modification to the contract announced earlier this week, NASA and Sierra Space agreed to remove the agency’s guarantee to purchase cargo flights to the ISS. Instead, the Dream Chaser spaceplane will debut in a free-flying demonstration in late 2026, and will not dock with the station. NASA said it will…

Earlier this year, Apple introduced its Foundation Models framework during WWDC 2025, which allows developers to use the company’s local AI models to power features in their applications. The company touted that with this framework, developers gain access to AI models without worrying about any inference cost. Plus, these local models have capabilities such as guided generation and tool calling built in. As iOS 26 is rolling out to all users, developers have been updating their apps to include features powered by Apple’s local AI models. Apple’s models are small compared with leading models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or Meta.…

A viral app called Neon, which offers to record your phone calls and pay you for the audio so it can sell that data to AI companies, has rapidly risen to the ranks of the top-five free iPhone apps since its launch last week. The app already has thousands of users and was downloaded 75,000 times yesterday alone, according to app intelligence provider Appfigures. Neon pitches itself as a way for users to make money by providing call recordings that help train, improve, and test AI models. But Neon has gone offline, at least for now, after a security flaw…