Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. To get this in your inbox, sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! This newsletter was wrapped and ready to go and then Travis Kalanick brought me back to …

Unacademy, once a one of India’s most valuable edtech startups, is set to be acquired by rival upGrad in an all-stock deal that would bring together two major online learning platforms in the country. On Sunday, Unacademy co-founder and CEO Gaurav Munjal said in a post on X that the …

ByteDance has paused plans to launch its new AI video model globally, according to a report in The Information. The Chinese company, best known as TikTok’s parent organization (and now a minority shareholder in its U. spinoff), launched Seedance 2. 0 in China back in February. Brief videos generated by …

Many artificial intelligence startup ideas are still little more than superficial “wrappers” built on top of existing models. But as the AI model makers add more features, investors are wary of startups that could become so easily unnecessary. Case in point: when reviewing more 4,000 applications for the joint AI …

Two Netflix films, “Frankenstein” and “KPop Demon Hunters,” won multiple Academy Awards tonight. Director Guillermo del Toro’s reimagining of “Frankenstein” won for Best Production Design, Best Costume Design, and Best Makeup and Hairstyling, while Netflix’s most-watched movie ever “KPop Demon Hunters” won for Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song. …

In 2010, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates launched a disarmingly simple campaign they called the Giving Pledge: a public commitment, open to the world’s wealthiest people, to give away more than half their fortune during their lifetime or upon their death. The moment seemed to call for it. Tech was …

OpenAI offers app integrations in ChatGPT to allow you to connect your accounts directly to ChatGPT and ask the assistant to do things for you. For instance, with a Spotify integration, you can tell it to create personalized playlists that will show up right in your Spotify app. To get …

In recent years, people have been increasingly looking for new ways to form platonic connections, as loneliness and social isolation have become more prevalent. Surgeon General went so far as to label this issue a public health crisis. Remote workers, who miss the everyday interactions found in an office, and …

Meta is considering major layoffs that could affect 20% or more of the company’s workforce, according to Reuters. These layoffs could help the Facebook parent company offset its aggressive spending on AI infrastructure, as well as AI-related acquisitions and hiring. Meta employed nearly 79,000 people as of December 31, according …

I get it; it’s not an easy time for a legacy automaker to be selling electric vehicles, what with incentives being gutted and Chinese automakers knocking at the door. But Honda is taking it to another level. This week, Honda killed its paltry — and frankly unpromising — EV programs. …