PITAA

Bluecore Energy announced Tuesday an oversubscribed $50 million seed round — just months after raising a $10 million pre-seed and coming out of stealth.  As TechCrunch previously reported, the company, founded earlier this year by Kofi Asante, builds small nuclear reactors (SMRs) on floating barges, rather than fixed locations, to generate clean energy for ports … Read more

Less than two weeks after Meta agreed to a massive $18 billion multistate settlement in a lawsuit over social media’s consumer harms, the company announced its biggest bet on consumer AI to date — and one that requires significantly more trust than social media ever did. On Tuesday, the company introduced Muse, its new personal AI agent … Read more

NYU mathematics professor Tristan Buckmaster announced three proofs on Tuesday with a preliminary finding on one of the major unsolved problems in theoretical mathematics. The findings, made in collaboration with Anthropic mathematician Levent Alpöge and using both Codex and Claude AI models, are significant in themselves — but they’re also accompanied by an unusual controversy … Read more

Apple will host its annual iPhone event on Wednesday, September 9 at 10 AM PDT, and it’s expected to be a big one. All signs point to Apple’s long-awaited entrance into the foldable smartphone market, finally shipping this kind of hardware about seven years after Samsung did. Apple has a YouTube stream prepared for the … Read more

A hacker stole thousands of bitcoins worth about $340 million in a heist at a settlement exchange used by several cryptocurrency exchanges, representing one of the largest known thefts of crypto this year. Liquid Network, launched in 2018 by crypto firm Blockstream, said in a post on X on Sunday that a “white hat” hacker … Read more

Google Cloud and Accenture are working together on a joint unit dedicated to sending engineers into enterprises to help them better adopt Google’s AI tools and services.  The new unit, dubbed Accenture Gemini Enterprise Business Group, is Google’s latest foray into the increasingly competitive world of “forward-deployed engineers,” or FDEs. Rivals in the AI race, … Read more

Last October, Google said it would bring an Iowa nuclear power plant back from the dead. Now, the facility’s owner, NextEra Energy, has received a $1.9 billion loan from the U.S. Department of Energy to finance the refurbishment. The sizable loan is the second of its kind, suggesting that the Trump administration views revived nuclear … Read more

Chrome has officially switched from a four- to a two-week release schedule, as Google promised earlier this year, with Tuesday’s launch of Chrome 153 on desktop, iOS, and Android. The shift to faster releases is tied to Chrome’s evolving security strategy in the AI era, the company explained. As automated AI tools and community bug … Read more