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David Pierce is editor-at-large and Vergecast co-host with over a decade of experience covering consumer tech. Previously, at Protocol, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired. If you had a Roomba, especially in the early days of the robot vacuum, it was in many ways a fairly unsophisticated machine. It would
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The Ecovacs Deebot X12 OmniCyclone isn’t just another premium robot vacuum; it introduces a couple of genuinely clever ideas to a category often short on innovation. Chief among these is its bagless Dyson-style OmniCyclone dock, which reduces running costs while maintaining suction performance — great for pet owners. The self-cleaning
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I recently downloaded the Star Foxdemo from the Nintendo Switch 2 eShop and thought it had the smoothest, most perfectly-framed camera in gaming history. And you’d write hyperbolic sentences like that, too, if you’d also spent the last week wrestling with the nightmare that is its predecessor. From
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Earlier this week, at TechCrunch’s newest StrictlyVC event in El Segundo, Shinkei Systems founder Saif Khawaja and Founders Fund partner Delian Asparouhov sat down for a conversation that kept circling back to a question that doesn’t usually come up at a venture event: How do you know if
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Formula 1 President and CEO Stefano Domenicali has reinforced that the sport has no desire to step away from human drivers, despite the growing rise in autonomous vehicle technology. "First of all - I start with the easy point - we will never go with a robot driver, the
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TL;DR Wharton researchers found people accept wrong AI answers 80% of the time. Now apps like Moot are monetising the instinct to outsource decisions. A pair of Wharton researchers have put a name to something that many AI users have quietly started doing: letting chatbots make their decisions for
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TL;DR VLC developer Jean-Baptiste Kempf raised $5M led by Lightspeed for Kyber, an open-source SDK that controls remote machines with ultra-low latency. Jean-Baptiste Kempf, the lead developer of VLC Media Player, has raised $5 million for his startup Kyber, an infrastructure layer for controlling remote devices in real time.
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The DIY promise sure is appealing: a fun project, a beautiful bespoke result, and a cost that is just a fraction of what the store wants. Of course, it never works out that way. The project ends up being a nightmare, the results aren’t as good as you expect,
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You’ve probably used VLC Media Player, the free video player with the orange traffic-cone icon — it’s been downloaded more than 6 billion times. But according to its lead developer, Jean-Baptiste Kempf, robots will soon be almost as ubiquitous as his open source video software. Convinced that “hundreds of
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Most of the AI industry is betting that bigger models mean smarter machines. A new startup is betting the opposite. Aether AI, based in San Diego, has raised a $20mn seed round to chase a different idea entirely. Its founder thinks the next leap will not come from scale. It
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Immigrant founders have long played a significant role in U.S. technology, but access to early-stage capital often still depends on local networks, customer introductions and proximity to established investors. That gap has created room for a small number of venture firms focused on immigrant, diaspora and cross-border founders, a
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Robots are getting better at manipulating objects, but they still struggle with many tasks that are easy for humans. If these machines are going to be of much use in our world, they need to learn how to behave more like us. The problem is that we don’t have
