Manus probably isn’t China’s second ‘DeepSeek moment’

Manus, an “agentic” AI platform that launched in preview last week, is generating more hype than a Taylor Swift concert. The head of product at Hugging Face called Manus “the most impressive AI tool I’ve ever tried.” AI policy researcher Dean Ball described Manus as the “most sophisticated computer using AI.” The official Discord server … Read more

Trump Signs Order to Create a ‘Crypto Reserve’

Follow live updates on the Trump administration here. President Trump signed an executive order on Thursday to create a national stockpile of Bitcoin and other digital currencies, an audacious idea that has been widely criticized as a scheme to enrich crypto investors. The basis of the stockpile will be a stash of Bitcoin, estimated to … Read more

Google scrubs mentions of ‘diversity’ and ‘equity’ from responsible AI team webpage

Google has quietly updated the webpage for its Responsible AI and Human Centered Technology (RAI-HCT) team, the team charged with conducting research into AI safety, fairness, and explainability, to scrub mentions of “diversity” and “equity.” A previous version of the page used language such as “marginalized communities,” “diverse,” “underrepresented groups,” and “equity” to describe the … Read more

Signal President Meredith Whittaker calls out agentic AI as having ‘profound’ security and privacy issues

Signal President Meredith Whittaker warned Friday that agentic AI could come with a risk to user privacy. Speaking onstage at the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, the advocate for secure communications referred to the use of AI agents as “putting your brain in a jar,” and cautioned that this new paradigm of computing — where … Read more

SXSW 2025: What we’re paying attention to

TechCrunch will be on the ground at SXSW 2025 — the annual tech, music, comedy, and film conference that kicked off Friday in Austin — in search of the zeitgeist of this AI-centric era. Yup, we’re one sentence in and AI has already made its entrance. And why not? A quick scan of the massive … Read more