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We’re excited to announce a big surprise for the AI community — TechCrunch Sessions: AI is getting a limited-time discount to broaden the number of people who can attend and learn from some of the brightest minds in the industry. For just $292, you can get a general admission ticket — plus a 50% discount on a second — to attend our flagship AI-centric event at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall on June 5. We’re looking for everyone from those working in the industry to founders, academics, AI die-hards, and beyond to get the chance to learn from and engage with…

Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, has missed a self-imposed deadline to publish a finalized AI safety framework, as noted by watchdog group The Midas Project. xAI isn’t exactly known for its strong commitments to AI safety as it’s commonly understood. A recent report found that the company’s AI chatbot, Grok, would undress photos of women when asked. Grok can also be considerably more crass than chatbots like Gemini and ChatGPT, cursing without much restraint to speak of. Nonetheless, in February at the AI Seoul Summit, a global gathering of AI leaders and stakeholders, xAI published a draft framework outlining the company’s…

Popular legal AI tool Harvey will now be using leading foundation models from Anthropic and Google, moving beyond strictly using OpenAI’s, Harvey announced in a blog post on Tuesday. This is noteworthy because Harvey is one of the OpenAI Startup Fund’s most successful early-backed portfolio companies. The OpenAI Startup Fund is an OpenAI-associated fund to back companies developing products on top of AI technologies, primarily OpenAI’s own. While Harvey says it’s not abandoning OpenAI, merely adding more models and clouds, this is still a huge coup for OpenAI’s big competitors.  Harvey is one of the first four startups that the…

Software maker Adobe has released patches for at least 39 vulnerabilities across a range of products alongside warnings about remote code execution exploit risks. The Patch Tuesday rollout is headlined by a major Adobe ColdFusion update that addresses a wide swatch of code execution and privilege escalation attacks. The Adobe ColdFusion bulletin documents 7 distinct vulnerabilities marked as “critical” and Adobe warned that these “could lead to arbitrary file system read, arbitrary code execution and privilege escalation.  The critical bugs carry a CVSS severity score of 9.1/10. The widely deployed Adobe Photoshop software was also updated to fix three critical-severity bugs…

Microsoft began laying off nearly 3% of its entire workforce Tuesday, its largest mass layoff in more than two years. The tech giant didn’t disclose the total amount of lost jobs but it will amount to about 6,000 people. Microsoft employed 228,000 full-time workers as of last June, the last time it reported its annual headcount. About 55% of those workers were in the U.S. Microsoft, based in Redmond, Washington, said the layoffs will be across all levels and geographies but the cuts will focus on reducing the number of managers. Notices to employees began going out on Tuesday. Microsoft…

Amazon says it will work with Humain, the AI company recently launched by Saudi Arabia’s ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, to invest “$5 billion-plus” in a strategic partnership to build an “AI Zone” in Saudi Arabia. The AI Zone will include dedicated Amazon Web Services (AWS) AI infrastructure, servers, networks, and training and certification programs, according to a press release. Humain is pledging to develop AI solutions using AWS technologies and to work with AWS on providing access to tools and programs for Saudi Arabia-based AI startups. AWS joins tech giants Nvidia, AMD, and others in partnering with Humain, which is…

Microsoft on Tuesday released security patches covering at least 70 vulnerabilities across the Windows OS and software stack and called urgent attention to five zero-days marked in the “exploitation detected” category. As part of the scheduled batch of Patch Tuesday updates, Redmond’s security response team warned that malicious hackers are already exploiting bugs in the Microsoft Scripting Engine and the oft-targeted Windows Common Log File System (CLFS) Driver. The five zero-days marked for immediate attention: CVE-2025-30397 — Scripting Engine Memory Corruption Vulnerability (remote code execution). Access of resource using incompatible type (‘type confusion’) in Microsoft Scripting Engine allows an unauthorized…

WizardLM, a Beijing-based Microsoft AI research group, appears to have joined Tencent, the Chinese company that owns WeChat and blockbuster games like PUBG Mobile. In a post on X on Tuesday, Can Xu, a senior AI researcher who led a number of projects within WizardLM, said that he and the team left Microsoft to join Hunyuan, one of Tencent’s AI development orgs. Over the past few months, Hunyuan has released AI models, including video and 3D object generators. WizardLM has already released a Hunyuan-branded model, in fact: Hunyuan-TurboS 0416. In an X post, Qingfeng Sun, who claims to be a…

TikTok is launching its first image-to-video AI feature, the company announced on Tuesday. The new feature is called “TikTok AI Alive” and allows users to turn static photos into videos within TikTok Stories. The feature is only accessible via TikTok’s Story Camera and uses AI to create short-form videos with “movement, atmospheric and creative effects,” TikTok says. For instance, if your static photo features a sky, clouds, and the ocean, TikTok could turn the photo into a video where the sky gradually shifts hues, the clouds start to drift, and you hear the sound of waves crashing. Or, you could…

Contrary to reports of her 10-figure status, Forbes estimates the Disney star turned business mogul’s fortune to be short of $1 billion. Here’s why. Over the weekend, Forbes published a report about financial issues at Wondermind, a mental health startup cofounded by actress and business mogul Selena Gomez, which failed to pay its employees, freelancers and vendors in recent weeks. Then on Monday, a source with knowledge of the situation confirmed that nine employees were laid off and given two weeks severance, leaving just four remaining. Forbes’ reporting revealed that the startup, which Gomez founded in 2021 with her mom…