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AI NewsThe New Teddy Bear: Children Love AI Toy Robots, But Do They Have a Hidden Cost?

The New Teddy Bear: Children Love AI Toy Robots, But Do They Have a Hidden Cost?

7:14 PM IST ¡ April 8, 2026

The New Teddy Bear: Children Love AI Toy Robots, But Do They Have a Hidden Cost?

AI robots are transforming childhood experiences, but psychologists and policy experts caution against overdependence and data risks.

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Theranos whistleblower Tyler Shultz warns that the AI boom is ‘a great opportunity to go deceive people’

Theranos whistleblower Tyler Shultz warns that the AI boom is ‘a great opportunity to go deceive people’

“You Can See Everything,” the documentary capturing disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes’ final weeks before prison, is sparkingnational conversationas it becomes one of the highest-grossing documentaries of all time. The film, directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, intentionally refuses to characterize Holmes as a master manipulator or victim, instead highlighting her uncanny, almost hypnotic knack for making people pity her, even when they’re well aware of hercrimes. Tyler Shultz didn’t need to see “You Can See Everything” to make up his mind about Holmes. Shultz, whose first job out of college was at Theranos, was a key whistleblower who exposed the company’s dangerously inaccurate blood testing devices, which made their way into Walgreens stores and delivered faulty results to real patients. (Theranos reached a peak valuation of around $10 billion despite its technology never actually working — the company only used its own machines for afraction of tests, instead outsourcing others to third-party equipment.) There is little reason to keep talking about Holmes — her case is closed, and she’s in federal prison — but her con-artistry has fascinated the media (myself included) for the last decade. In fact, as Shultz says in aninterviewwith The San Francisco Standard, “the only reason we’re talking about Elizabeth Holmes right now is because she wants us to be talking about Elizabeth Holmes right now.” But the cautionary tale of Theranos takes on a new significance as we enter the peak of the AI era, when companies that havenever turned a profitare raising capital at trillion-dollar valuations. “I think the days of having a thirty-minute coffee with someone and sending them $100,000 should be over. Elizabeth took that model and scaled it to $100 million,” Shultz toldSF Standard. His grandfather, former U.S. Secretary of State and Secretary of the Treasury George Shultz, was a notable investor and board member himself. “I believe that what [Holmes] did was raise the biggest angel round of funding of all time, but even at the smaller levels, I think investors need to recognize that when they put that type of money in someone’s hands, they are giving them tremendous power,” he added. Theranos’ funding often came from individual investors like the DeVos and Walton families, rather than venture firms. Theranos did not share scientific information or evidence that its machines worked with potential investors, citing concerns about revealing trade secrets, which warded off many top venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. At the time Theranos’ fraud was uncovered, it was seen as a shrill wake-up call for investors that they need to prioritize due diligence. But in the AI era, Shultz worries that investors may forget these lessons. “A huge danger with AI is that I think it is really hard to do due diligence on it,” he said. “It’s really hard to tell the difference between what is something truly unique and new versus like, a ChatGPT wrapper… If you want to deceive people, I think this is a great opportunity to go deceive people.” The first question posed by “You Can See Everything” lies in the premise of the movie itself. Why would a mother of two young children choose to invite a film crew to follow her final days with her family before surrendering to serve a prison sentence of over 11 years? The film poses questions that seem inscrutable, but this one seems pretty clear. She wants people to pity her, because this pity could be more useful for her future endeavors than hate or mockery. In the film, we see Holmes and her partner, hotel heir Billy Evans, working onHaemanthus, a diagnostics company that they call “Theranos 2.0,” which has reportedly raised about $20 million in funding. “You Can See Everything” doesn’t make Holmes look good, but it also glosses over the more heinous crimes of Theranos, like giving dangerously faulty medical information to real patients, or even itstargeted harassmentof Shultz himself when he was attempting to sound the alarm about his former employer. In the cultural zeitgeist, Holmes remains more of a joke than a persona non grata. “I have this feeling of unease about what might come next,” Shultz said. “She’s certainly preparing and beginning her second act, and I don’t know exactly where it’s going to go.”

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Google’s first data center satellite is online and writing poetry

Google’s first data center satellite is online and writing poetry

GoogleSuncatcher’sprototype space data centeris online and communicating with the ground after launching earlier this month alongside more than 100 other spacecraft on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The satellite, which carries four Google Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) and generates up to 1 kW of electricity, is intended to pave the way for future networks of close-flying satellites performing large inference workloads in orbit. However, the power demands of the TPU mean it can only turn one on for about twenty minutes at a time, complicating the already tricky business of space-to-ground communications. After a commissioning process that tested out the satellite’s subsystems over about three weeks, the spacecraft was ready to work. When engineers on the ground sent their first prompt this week, they asked the model pre-loaded onto the satellite, Google DeepMind’s Gemma 4, to write a haiku about being in space. And thus: Blue marble belowData streams in silent graceStarlight feeds my core. ✨ Google said it tested the model with these space-themed limericks (they should have sent a poet?) and, perhaps more importantly, the company asked the spacecraft to report on the orbital conditions around the satellite. A spokesperson told TechCrunch that the satellite was operating nominally. The ongoing test campaign will examine how the chips perform under thermal stress and in the space radiation environment. Google has extensively tested its TPUs in particle accelerators on Earth, but now needs to see how radiation’s real effects on their hardware in space affect their processor. Radiation can cause “bit flips”—causing a stored value in computer memory—and that in turn can corrupt data without triggering typical monitoring tools. Testing on the ground suggested the impact of radiation would be minimal for inference workloads and more of a problem for training a model, but now the Google team will get to assess those dynamics in reality, not a simulation. If the TPUs onboard this spacecraft prove capable, the next step will be launching two more satellites equipped with the advanced chips in 2027. Those spacecraft will support higher power generation and demonstrate inter-satellite optical links. Google’s Suncatcher project is largely alone among visions for space-based data centers in planning on high-speed links between the satellites to support coherent distributed workloads; SpaceX’s data centers are also expected to use laser links but also to orbit too far apart to share processing effectively. Companies like Starcloud and Cowboy Space expect to perform inference loads on individual satellites. Google and SpaceX’s visions are closely linked. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, holds a significant investment stake in SpaceX. And to launch their orbital data centers, both companies will require Starship, the still-in-development heavy-lift rocket at the center of Elon Musk’s space vision, to be fully and rapidly reusable. In a peer-reviewed analysis published earlier this month, Suncatcher researchers estimated that SpaceX would need tofly Starship 1,800 timesto achieve the same learning-driven cost reductions it saw with its earlier vehicles.Suncatcher is a classic Google moonshot—the company’s focus is on designing infrastructure that will be economical in the 2030s. Getting there, however, may depend on how the rest of the company responds to the pressures and opportunities of AI in the near term. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, saw its stock plunge this week after reporting that efforts to insert AI into its search businesses are hurting ad revenue growth. Correction: The Suncatcher prototype satellite has four TPUs onboard, but can only operate one at a time.

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Zest’s new AI agent finds restaurants and books reservations over text

Zest’s new AI agent finds restaurants and books reservations over text

Zest, the restaurant discovery app thatlaunched earlier this year,is already thinking about a future where mobile apps are no longer the primary interface. On Thursday, the startup introduced a new feature: a personal AI-powered “restaurant concierge” that lives in your text messages, similar to otherpopular AI agentslike Instinct or Poke. Thelaunchreflects a broader shift in how startups are thinking about AI, as conversational AI agents take on tasks that had previously required users to launch standalone mobile apps. For Zest, that means bringing its restaurant recommendations into texts, then allowing users to immediately take the next step of booking a table. “The agent is the product now,” explains Zest founder and CEO Mario Gomez-Hall. “You text it, and it answers from your own history and your friends’. It doesn’t need weeks of conversation to learn you because it starts from where you’ve actually been,” he said. Originally founded in November 2024, with $1.8 million in pre-seed backing from Alexis Ohanian at 776 and Steve Jang at Kindred Ventures, the app’s unique feature is that it links up with users’ credit cards to track where they’re actually eating out to get a sense of their tastes and interests. With this data on hand, Zest can make tailored suggestions of what places you might like to try next, whether that’s in your own city or suggestions of places to try when you’re traveling. The credit card data used by Zest’s app is imported via the financial services companyPlaid, which is used by banks and other fintech and budgeting apps. Zest says it focuses only on those transactions in the food and drink categories when making its personalized map and lists. The startup’s latest idea is to tackle the same problem — where should I go to eat? — from a new angle. It will now make its suggestions from inside a text message thread and can turn to AI to do things like check availability and make the reservation for you through connected services like OpenTable, Resy, and SevenRooms. To work, users will text the Zest concierge at (212) 470-6067. What’s even better is that Zest can be dropped into a group chat, where it can blend everyone’s tastes to find places the whole group will love. Here, it can also settle indecision with an in-thread voting feature and then can book a table for the group without leaving the conversation. Users can ask Zest for recommendations based on a number of factors, like cuisine, craving, occasion, dietary restrictions, or neighborhood, and can ask questions about the restaurants, like how busy the place may be, or whether it offers Wi-Fi, and more. Plus, you can ask Zest to send you the menu to help you make a decision. In TechCrunch’s tests, the AI worked fairly well, offering a list of suggestions for new places matched to our tastes that also fit particular conditions, like time of day, party size, location, and other factors. While finding an open table is something other apps have offered for years, there’s a convenience factor in being able to just text back and forth about the various options and have it tell you the available booking times. The company began testing the concierge last month, but decided to hold the launch until it could add the booking capabilities; over time, the startup is considering moving Zest beyond restaurants to offer recommendations for businesses, shopping, and more. By shifting to texts, Zest hopes the company can scale beyond its initial thousands of users and generate revenue. “Booking and ordering are the first revenue lines. Zest books your table through OpenTable or Resy today, with food ordering coming, and there are transactions there to participate in,” said Gomez-Hall. “The reason that gets interesting is that Zest learns your taste faster than a general assistant does, because it starts from where you’ve actually been instead of asking you questions. That’s worth something well beyond dinner,” he added.

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Spotify to Launch Its AI-powered Music Remix Service in 2027: Report

Spotify to Launch Its AI-powered Music Remix Service in 2027: Report

Swedish music streaming service Spotify is no stranger to AI. The platform recently announced that it would label AI-generated artist profiles with a special badge just so users who don't like the same can clearly identify these profiles and keep them out of their music recommendations. In August, the company even went as far as independently assessing AI artist profiles to ensure that there are clear demarcations on the platform. A report now claims that Spotify plans to introduce an AI-powered music remix service to the platform in 2027.

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