AI & Robotics

Airbnb says its custom-built AI agent is now handling roughly a third of its customer support issues in North America, and it’s preparing to roll out the feature globally. If successful, the company believes that in a year’s time, more than 30% of its total customer support tickets will be handled by AI voice and chat in all the languages where it also employs a human customer service…

Has AI coding reached a tipping point? That seems to be the case for Spotify at least, which shared this week during its fourth-quarter earnings call that the best developers at the company “have not written a single line of code since December.” That statement, from Spotify co-CEO Gustav Söderström, came alongside other comments about how the company is using AI to accelerate…

On Tuesday night, Elon Musk gathered the employees of xAI for an all-hands meeting. Evidently, he wanted to talk about the future of his AI company and, specifically, how it relates to the moon. According to The New York Times, which reports that it heard the meeting, Musk told employees that xAI needs a lunar manufacturing facility, a factory on the moon that will build AI satellites and fling…

Hauler Hero has picked up fresh funds as demand for its AI-powered waste management software continues to pile up. The New York-based startup raised $16 million in a Series A round led by Frontier Growth with participation from K5 Global and Somersault Ventures, among others, TechCrunch has learned. Hauler Hero has raised more than $27 million in venture capital, to date. Hauler Hero has developed…