AI & Robotics

So bad, it’s good? Google on Friday joined in the disco ball icon fun taking place on home screens everywhere. After Spotify’s temporary new disco ball app icon, released to celebrate the company’s 20th anniversary, drew extensive online backlash (and a bit of praise for those who like a little kitsch!), Google decided to get in on the joke and rolled out a custom set of Android app icons…

When the founders of a mental health app for men called Mental saw that one feature – AI interactive audio – was resonating wildly with their users, they knew they were on to something. And so the idea for a new, and hopefully safer, kind of AI therapy app was born, which they called The Path, co-founder and CEO Anson Whitmer tells TechCrunch. Then famed author and motivational speaker Tony…

Elon Musk’s xAI lost $6.4 billion from operations on just $3.2 billion in revenue in 2025, according to SpaceX’s IPO filings. And the losses are poised to grow. SpaceX’s filing reveals plans to scale Grok to “multiple trillions of parameters,” a dramatic boost that will likely require significant additional compute spend. Elon Musk merged his AI company xAI – which had previously…

At its annual Google I/O event on Tuesday, Google announced that the Gemini app is getting a series of new updates, including a “Daily Brief” feature, a redesigned interface, access to a new AI video model called Gemini Omni, and new personal AI agent called Gemini Spark. The updates signal Google’s push to turn its Gemini app into an all-purpose AI hub rather than a stand-alone chatbot and…