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8 billion tokens a day forced AT&T to rethink AI orchestration — and cut costs by 90%
When your average daily token usage is 8 billion a day, you have a massive scale problem. This was the case at AT&T, and chief data officer Andy Markus and his team recognized that it simply wasn’t feasible (or economical) to push everything through large reasoning models. So, when building out an internal Ask AT&T personal assistant, they reconstructed the orchestration layer. The result: A multi-agent stack built on LangChain where large language model “super agents” direct smaller, un
Bumble adds AI-powered photo feedback and profile guidance tools
Bumble and other popular dating apps, like Match Group's Tinder and Hinge, have all embraced AI-powered features.
Walmart agrees to $100M settlement over deceptive pay practices in Spark Driver program
The suit said Walmart mislead drivers about their possible tips and would reduce their base pay, among other things.
Self-driving truck startup Einride raises $113M PIPE ahead of public debut
Self-driving trucks startup Einride has raised an oversubscribed $113 million PIPE in advance of its SPAC merger scheduled for early 2026.
Cisco says hackers have been exploiting a critical bug to break into big customer networks since 2023
The U.S. government and its allies said hackers have been exploiting the newly identified bug in Cisco networking gear around the world for years, and urged organizations to patch.
A VC and some big-name programmers are trying to solve open source’s funding problem, permanently
A group of well-known open source programmers and a VC have launched the Open Source Endowment. They hope this new method will provide funding for good.
Google launches Nano Banana 2 model with faster image generation
Google is making Nano Banana 2 a default model in Gemini app and in AI mode
Spyware maker sentenced to prison in Greece for wiretapping politicians and journalists
A Greek court on Thursday sentenced the founder of Intellexa, a collective of spyware makers, to eight years in prison for illegal wiretapping and privacy violations, according to several reports.  Tal Dilian and three other Intellexa executives were tried for their role in a scandal dubbed “Greek Watergate,” which dates back to 2022. The Greek […]
X tries wooing advertisers by letting them reuse creatives made for other platforms
X has launched an expanded set of aspect ratio support for both image and video ads, so advertisers can now reuse assets they've created for other platforms.
Did Elon Musk visit Epstein island? He says Jeffrey would have bragged
The Texas billionaire and those in his circle had periodic communication with Jeffrey Epstein. Regarding the island, Musk asked “what day/night will be the wildest?” ...
The first Clinton Epstein deposition and Musk's power plant: Morning Rundown
In today’s newsletter: Hillary Clinton faces Oversight Committee questioning over her ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
Elon Musk calls Anthropic guilty of stealing AI training data at 'massive scale' after Amazon-backed company accuses Chinese rivals of copying
On Monday, xAI CEO Elon Musk escalated his feud after Amazon.com, Inc. AMZN-backed Anthropic accused Chinese firms like ...
US court's major blow to Elon Musk after he accuses OpenAI
Musk, the world's richest person, is suing Microsoft-backed OpenAI over its controversial conversion to a for-profit entity. He is seeking a staggering sum of up to $134.5 billion in damages. Jury ...
Elon Musk's makeshift AI power plant generates sound and fury in Mississippi
The jet-engine roar has been almost nonstop in a Mississippi town, residents say, since 27 turbines arrived on trailers to power Elon Musk’s AI ambitions.
HAX, One of NJEDA’s Strategic Innovation Centers, Ignites Tech-Based Economic Development
Back in 2018, Governor PhilMurphy set out to strengthen New Jersey as a home for breakthrough innovation by building new Strategic Innovation Centers (SIC), led by the New Jersey Economic Development Authority (NJEDA). Three years later, the NJEDA spotted an opportunity: an RFP from SOSV to select the global headquarters for its hard-tech program, HAX.The NJEDA, in partnership with Choose New Jersey, responded with a $25 million equity investment, bringing HAX to Newark in 2024. In case you̵
eBay to lay off 800 staff
The latest round of layoffs marks eBay’s third workforce reduction in the past three years.
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Register now to secure discounts of up to $680 on your TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 pass. Offer ends tomorrow, February 27, at 11:59 p.m. PT.
ServiceNow resolves 90% of its own IT requests autonomously. Now it wants to do the same for any enterprise
ServiceNow is handling 90% of its own employee IT requests autonomously, resolving cases 99% faster than human agents. On Thursday it announced the product technology it wants to use to do the same for everyone else.Organizations have spent three years running pilots that stall when AI gets to the execution layer. The agent can identify the problem and recommend a fix, then hand it back to a human because it lacks the permissions to finish the job or because no one trusts it to act autonomously
Alibaba's new open source Qwen3.5-Medium models offer Sonnet 4.5 performance on local computers
Alibaba's now famed Qwen AI development team has done it again: a little more than a day ago, they released the Qwen3.5 Medium Model series consisting of four new large language models (LLMs) with support for agentic tool calling, three of which are available for commercial usage by enterprises and indie developers under the standard open source Apache 2.0 license:Qwen3.5-35B-A3B Qwen3.5-122B-A10B Qwen3.5-27BDevelopers can download them now on Hugging Face and ModelScope. A fourth model, Qw
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff: This isn’t our first SaaSpocalypse
Salesforce reported a solid year-end earnings and then pulled out all the stops to ward off more talk of the death of its business to AI.