Devin Coldewey

Devin Coldewey

Writer & Photographer

Devin Coldewey is a Seattle-based writer and photographer. He first wrote for TechCrunch in 2007. He has also written for MSNBC.com, NBC News, DPReview, The Economist/GE’s Look Ahead, and others.

His personal website is coldewey.cc.

The Latest from Devin Coldewey

Amazon doubles down on Anthropic, completing its planned $4B investment

Amazon invested a further $2.75 billion in growing AI power Anthropic on Wednesday, following through on the option it left open last September. The $1.25 billion it invested at the time must be produ

Why it’s impossible to review AIs, and why TechCrunch is doing it anyway

Every week seems to bring with it a new AI model, and the technology has unfortunately outpaced anyone’s ability to evaluate it comprehensively. Here’s why it’s pretty much impossibl

Truth Social SPAC could pay Trump’s astronomical legal bills — if board approves it

Donald Trump’s beleaguered SPAC deal is finally going through, and just in time to pay nearly half a billion dollars owed over several legal actions — if the board agrees to let him sell. Let&

Candela’s electric ferries multiply as the startup lines up $25M in new funding

Electric boat maker Candela is approaching cruising speed with $25 million in new funding and the first commercial deployment of its new P-12 ferry in New Zealand. The company has global ambitions for

After raising $1.3B, Inflection is eaten alive by its biggest investor, Microsoft

In June 2023, Inflection announced it had raised $1.3 billion to build what it called “more personal AI.” The lead investor was Microsoft. Today, less than a year later, Microsoft announce

Why Elon Musk’s AI company ‘open-sourcing’ Grok matters — and why it doesn’t

Elon Musk’s xAI released its Grok large language model as “open source” over the weekend. The billionaire clearly hopes to set his company at odds with rival OpenAI, which, despite i

This Week in AI: Midjourney bets it can beat the copyright police

Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable re

‘AI-powered’ ad ignites creator controversy on Instagram

A new ad from Under Armour featuring boxer Anthony Joshua has come under fire from creatives on Instagram after its director claimed it as the “first Ai-powered sports commercial” — but

Microbiome startups respond as industry is accused of ‘questionable practices’

The biotech sector has embraced the microbiome in recent years, a green field market powered by cheap genome sequencing and venture dollars, promising bespoke treatments for everything from gut troubl

Google DeepMind trains a video game-playing AI to be your co-op companion

AI models that play games go back decades, but they generally specialize in one game and always play to win. Google DeepMind researchers have a different goal with their latest creation: a model that

AI2 Incubator scores $200M in compute to feed needy AI startups

AI2 Incubator, spun out of the Allen Institute for AI in 2022, has secured a windfall $200 million in compute that startups going through its program can take advantage of to accelerate early developm

Saildrone’s first aluminum Surveyor autonomous vessel splashes down for Navy testing

Ocean intelligence company Saildrone has just put the first of a new generation of Surveyor autonomous vessels in the water: an aluminum version that the Navy is keen to take advantage of. But don&#82

Roku disables TVs and streaming devices until users consent to new terms

Roku users around the country turned on their TVs this week to find an unpleasant surprise: The company required them to consent to new dispute resolution terms in order to access their device. The de

Signal’s Meredith Whittaker scorns anti-encryption efforts as ‘parochial, magical thinking’

AI is “not open in any sense,” the battle over encryption is far from won, and Signal’s principled (and uncompromising) approach may complicate interoperability efforts, warned the c

Why Signal ‘turned our architecture inside out’ for its latest privacy feature

Adding usernames to a messaging app may seem like a standard feature, but for Signal, such identifiers were anathema to its mission of total privacy and security — until now. The upcoming 7.0 versio

Rabbit’s Jesse Lyu on the nature of startups: ‘Grow faster, or die faster,’ just don’t give up

Rabbit co-founder and CEO Jesse Lyu isn’t afraid of death … the death of the company, at least. He told TechCrunch that the company is a startup whose fortunes may be swayed by the whims of mu

Syrenna’s WaterDrone is the ocean-monitoring ‘underwater weather station’ of the future

As crucial as the ocean is to countless industries, we lack the kind of systematic knowledge of it that we have of the surface. Syrenna has built a versatile robotic platform that you might think of a

AIs serve up ‘garbage’ to questions about voting and elections

A number of major AI services performed poorly in a test of their ability to address questions and concerns about voting and elections. The study found that no model can be completely trusted, but it

This Week in AI: Addressing racism in AI image generators

Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable re

‘Embarrassing and wrong’: Google admits it lost control of image-generating AI

Google has apologized (or come very close to apologizing) for another embarrassing AI blunder this week, an image-generating model that injected diversity into pictures with a farcical disregard for h
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