Elon Musk unveils chip manufacturing plans for SpaceX and Tesla
Elon Musk recently outlined ambitious plans for a chip-building collaboration Tesla and SpaceX — but he has a history of overpromising.
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TechCrunch Mobility: Uber everywhere, all at once
Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility, your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation.
Musk says he’s building Terafab chip plant in Austin, Texas
Elon Musk announced plans to build a Terafab plant in Austin, Texas, that will be jointly run by Tesla and SpaceX. The goal is to eventually build chips at scale for robotics, artificial intelligence, and space-based data centers for Musk’s various companies. Musk has expressed concern, as have other executives, about the chip industry’s ability […]
The secret story of the vocoder, the military tech that changed music forever
The vocoder was never supposed to be a revolution in music. It wasn’t supposed to be anything in music, really. Its development began a century ago, when an engineer at Bell Labs was looking for a simpler way to send phone calls across copper telephone lines. The engineer, Homer Dudley, built some pretty neat technology […]
The pint-sized Sonos Roam 2 is more over 20 percent this weekend
Sonos is no stranger to the occasional sale. The iconic audio company routinely runs sales around Black Friday, Amazon Prime Day, and the Super Bowl, though it’s rare to see substantial discounts on its portable speakers outside of tentpole shopping events. Fortunately, if you have no interest in the Sonos Move 2 or forthcoming Sonos […]
Online age checks came first — a VPN crackdown could be next
This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more news about online age verification and your privacy, follow Emma Roth. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started Virtual private networks, or VPNs, weren’t always […]
AI was everywhere at gaming’s big developer conference — except the games
AI was everywhere at the GDC Festival of Gaming this year. Vendors at the event pitched generative AI tools for things like making AI-driven NPCs and even entire games from a chat box. On the show floor, I spent 10 minutes playing a demo of a pixel-art fantasy world generated by Tencent’s AI tools. In […]
An exclusive tour of Amazon’s Trainium lab, the chip that’s won over Anthropic, OpenAI, even Apple
Shortly after Amazon announced its $50 billion investment in OpenAI, AWS invited me on a private tour of the chip lab at the heart of the deal.
Are AI tokens the new signing bonus or just a cost of doing business?
Maybe tokens really will become the fourth pillar of engineering compensation. But engineers might want to hold the line before embracing this as a straightforward win.