Full EV performance now comes with a monthly fee. Welcome to the subscription economy The subscription model beloved of software is now creeping into cars.  Volkswagen has become the latest automaker to adopt the pricing structure. The German marque has introduced a monthly subscription fee to access the full performance of some of its ID.3…

Apple usually announces its new hardware in the fall, and this year is likely no different. The event is reported to be on September 9, and Apple is expected to release its iPhone 17 lineup, along with updates for the Apple Watch and AirPods.  As always, there are many rumors circulating, including bigger screens and…

One of Europe’s most prominent AI startups has released two AI models that are so tiny, they have named them after a chicken’s brain and a fly’s brain. Multiverse Computing claims these are the world’s smallest models that are still high-performing and can handle chat, speech, and even reasoning in one case.  These new tiny models…

A startup called Palabra AI, which develops an AI-powered speech translation engine, is tackling one of the more difficult aspects of teaching large language models (LLMs) to understand multiple languages. Today, LLMs make it easier to convert text from one language to another, but speech translation is not as simple, according to Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian….

Apple announced on Thursday it’s introducing a redesigned Blood Oxygen feature for some Watch Series 8, Series 10, and Apple Watch Ultra. With this move, Apple is bringing back blood oxygen monitoring by tweaking the feature to get around the International Trade Commission’s (ITC) import ban. Blood oxygen data will be measured and calculated on the user’s…

Igor Babuschkin, a co-founder of Elon Musk’s xAI startup, announced his departure from the company on Wednesday in a post on X. Babuschkin led engineering teams at xAI and helped build the startup into one of Silicon Valley’s leading AI model developers just a few years after it was founded. “Today was my last day at…

India-based audio series platform maker Pocket FM aims to be the Netflix of audio. That is, the company intends to match its audio series with hundreds of episodes to its users’tastes. For that to work, it needs to release content rapidly — something it’s now turning to AI to help with. The Lightspeed-backed startup is giving its…

Anthropic has acquired the co-founders and most of the team behind Humanloop — a platform for prompt management, LLM evaluation, and observability — in a push to strengthen its enterprise strategy. The terms of the deal were not shared, but it appears to follow the acqui-hire playbook we’re increasingly seeing in the tech industry amid the war for AI talent. Humanloop’s three…

Lena Hackelöer, founder and CEO of Brite Payments, shares her vision for making Europe a magnet for tech talent There’s no doubt that Europe has ambition. Over the last decade, we’ve laid the foundation for a thriving digital economy, from regulatory leadership to tech-driven reforms and rapidly growing regional hubs. But infrastructure alone doesn’t build…

Alexandra Vidyuk, CEO at Beyond Earth Ventures, explores the breakthroughs that the James Webb telescope can bring to tech companies The scientific world is reeling. New discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope — a joint project by the European Space Agency(ESA), NASA, and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) — aren’t just surprising, they’re contradicting our deepest…