Latest AI News
Vertu wants CEOs to run companies from an AI foldable starting at $6,880
Luxury smartphone brand Vertu on Thursday unveiled a foldable phone powered by an AI agent that connects with enterprise software and coordinates workflows. The company is targeting executives who manage business operations and communications on the move. Called the Alphafold, the foldable smartphone starts at $6,880 for the calfskin version. Higher-end models feature bespoke finishes including alligator leather, 18K gold, and natural diamond accents, along with customized detailing. This continues Vertu’s long-standing strategy of positioning its phones as luxury status symbols aimed at affluent buyers. The company told TechCrunch that its highest-end standard model is currently priced at $46,800, with further customization options available. The launch marks Vertu’s latest attempt to reinvent itself for the AI era after struggling to remain relevant in the modern smartphone market. The Hong Kong-headquartered company, onceknown for luxury handsetsand concierge services popular among wealthy buyers before the rise of the iPhone, haschanged ownership multiple timesover the years as mainstream smartphone makers came to dominate the industry. Nonetheless, Vertu is betting the Alphafold can help reinvent the brand for the AI era by combining luxury hardware with enterprise-focused AI capabilities. Vertu’s Alphafold comes with Hermes Agent, built on top of the open-source Hermes project by Nous Research. The agent can connect to enterprise systems like ERP and CRM, and coordinate tasks such as approvals, scheduling, sales tracking, travel planning, and operational reporting through natural-language prompts. However, the company said that its Phone-to-ERP and VPS deployments would be customized for each customer depending on their existing enterprise systems, with pricing varying accordingly. The Alphafold, Vertu said, can route requests across multiple AI models including OpenAI’s GPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and selected open-source models, while also integrating with more than 80 apps and dozens of native phone functions for cross-platform workflows. Existing AI features on smartphones from major manufacturers remain focused largely on consumer tools such as image editing and voice assistance, Vertu CEO Molly Ma said. This leaves room for more advanced AI-agent workflows tied to enterprise systems. She also pointed to earlier AI-agent smartphone experiments in China thatgained popularitybefore facingchallenges over data privacyand cloud-based data collection. The Alphafold, Ma said, aims to address those concerns through a privacy-focused architecture featuring a proprietary A5 security chip. This silicon is designed to isolate authentication keys, biometric credentials, and sensitive enterprise information from the main operating system, the company said. It added that commercially sensitive data can be processed locally on the device, while prompts sent to external AI models are redacted or tokenized before leaving the phone. While Vertu has emphasized the device’s privacy and security architecture, including on-device processing and data redaction features, the company said the system has not yet undergone third-party security audits or independent certification. However, Vertu told TechCrunch that independent audits and certification remain on its security roadmap “as an explicit next-stage commitment,” adding that it would “communicate the progress and the results publicly” once the product matures further. The Alphafold is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 processor and features an 8.05-inch foldable display alongside a 6.53-inch outer screen, a 6,500mAh battery, and satellite communication capabilities. The device also includes a triple rear camera setup with 50-megapixel primary and ultrawide cameras, as well as a 5-megapixel telephoto lens. Vertu said the phone’s hinge uses metal, titanium, and carbon-fiber components and is rated for up to 650,000 folds. The Alphafold is not Vertu’s first attempt to combine AI with foldable devices. The company last yearintroduced Agent Q, a clamshell-style foldable smartphone focused on AI-driven automation and productivity features. However, Ma told TechCrunch that Alphafold represents a significant step forward from Agent Q, arguing that AI-agent technology has matured rapidly over the past year, with improvements in memory, automation and app integration. Foldable smartphones remain a niche segment globally despite years of investment by major manufacturers including Samsung and Huawei. As many as 20 million foldable smartphones were shipped globally in 2025, accounting for less than 2% of total smartphone shipments, according to IDC data shared with TechCrunch. The research firm said foldables sold at an average price of about $1,300 last year — roughly three times the price of non-foldable smartphones. Kiranjeet Kaur, associate research director for mobile phones research at IDC, said foldables could eventually benefit from AI-agent workflows because their larger displays are better suited for multitasking and productivity-oriented experiences. She, however, added that enterprise AI adoption on smartphones still lags behind computers, and that most enterprise smartphone decisions continue to be driven by ecosystem integration and device management support rather than AI capabilities. The first 115-unit batch of Vertu’s Alphafold begins shipping this week across major markets including the U.S.
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OpenAI’s New Tax AI Tool Processed 7,000 Returns With ‘Up to 97% Accuracy’
Co-developed with Thrive Holdings, the Codex-powered tool uses a three-step loop to continuously improve tax-preparation workflows.
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OpenAI Commits $250 Million to Prepare Economies for AI-Driven Job Disruption
The funding will support research, labour-transition programmes, and economic policy experiments focused on managing the long-term effects of advanced AI systems on jobs, wages, and wealth distribution.
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Cognizant, Travelport Partner With Anthropic To Build AI-Powered Travel Infrastructure
The collaboration aims to bridge the gap between AI-powered travel planning tools and legacy booking systems that still rely heavily on manual workflows and human agents.
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What Happened When Tredence Brought 100 AI Builders in One Room
The Hyderabad edition of Tredence AI Foundry saw AI professionals working in pods to build practical enterprise AI solutions.
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Why Enterprise AI Projects Stall Between Pilot and Production
When the demo ends, and production begins, enterprise AI often stalls, caught between impressive pilot results and the harsh operational reality that no controlled environment has prepared for.
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Snowflake Signs $6 Bn AWS Deal to Push Enterprise Agentic AI
Snowflake said the partnership will help enterprises run AI applications directly on governed data without moving sensitive information across systems.
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Cognite Recognised as a Best Firm for Data Engineers
The certification is based on structured feedback from data engineering and AI professionals within the organisation
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AI Influencers are Coming for the Creator Economy
Human influencers bring lived experience and spontaneity, while AI influencers excel at narrative continuity, frequency, and precision at scale.
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Why Google’s AI can’t spell Google (or anything else)
How many Ps are in Google? According to Google, there are two. There’s also is also “exactly 1 ‘r’ in the word ‘poop’,” Google’s AI Overview says, as well as two ‘d’s in the word journalism, yet spelled it: j-o-u-r-n-a-d-i-s-m. Google did at least identify that there is one P in the last name of the U.S. president, but spelled it as t-r-p-u-m. You didn’t need to be a prophet to predict thatGoogle’s AI-forward Search overhaulwas going to go over poorly. We’ve done this before. The first time Google added AI Overviews to Search, the feature ended upciting satirical posts from The Onion and Reddit, advising people to eat rocks and put glue on their pizza. This time around, as Google doubles down on its commitment to make generative AI the centerpiece of its 29-year-old flagship product, it’s not surprising to see it stumble. Google is revamping its entire search engine to this btwpic.twitter.com/PIR4llFhiV “Counting within words has been a known challenge for LLMs, and we’re working to fix this particular issue,” Google told TechCrunch in an emailed statement. These basic spelling errors may seem familiar. LLMs, the kind of artificial intelligence that powers chatbots and other text-generators, are not built to understand spelling. It’s been a running joke for years that whenever a company unveils a new AI model, you should ask ithow many ‘r’s are in the word strawberry. These AI models — which can code an app in seconds, or solve problems that have stumped mathematicians for decades — are about as good as a kindergartener at spelling. Google’s AI overview woes reach beyond silly spelling mistakes though. Google already patched an issue from last week in which searching the word “disregard” would yield what looked like a dictionary definition of the word, only the definition was shown as, “Understood. Let me know whenever you have a new prompt or question!” But these spelling errors have remained amusing because they’re so difficult to quash. As researchers havepreviously explainedwhen we’ve asked about these spelling conundrums, AI doesn’t perceive sentences as units of language made up of words and letters. Many LLMs are built on transformers models, which break down text into tokens, which can be full words, syllables, or letters, depending on the model. Instead of “reading” like a human would, the AI converts the text into numerical representations of itself, which are then contextualized to help the AI come up with a logical response. “LLMs are based on this transformer architecture, which notably is not actually reading text. What happens when you input a prompt is that it’s translated into an encoding,” Matthew Guzdial, an AI researcher and assistant professor at the University of Alberta,told TechCrunch. “When it sees the word ‘the,’ it has this one encoding of what ‘the’ means, but it does not know about ‘T,’ ‘H,’ ‘E.’” The token-based architecture that powers LLMs like Google’s AI overview is inherently limiting, and researchers haven’t been optimistic that they can solve the spelling problem. “It’s kind of hard to get around the question of what exactly a ‘word’ should be for a language model, and even if we got human experts to agree on a perfect token vocabulary, models would probably still find it useful to ‘chunk’ things even further,” Sheridan Feucht, a PhD student studying large language model interpretability at Northeastern University,told TechCrunch. “My guess would be that there’s no such thing as a perfect tokenizer due to this kind of fuzziness.” This isn’t necessarily an urgent problem on researchers’ minds, since the utility of LLMs doesn’t come in their capacity to spell. But these blatant failures help us remember that AI is not perfect, even if it may sometimes seem like an all-knowing power beyond our comprehension. We cannot blindly trust AI outputs without double-checking their accuracy.
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Meta launches Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp subscriptions, with more to come, including AI plans
Meta is doubling down on its subscription offerings. On Wednesday, the social networking giant announced it’s now rolling out its consumer subscription plans globally for its flagship apps, Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, and beginning tests of new subscriptions for businesses, creators, and Meta AI users. For a few dollars per month, consumers subscribing to Instagram Plus ($3.99/mo), Facebook Plus ($3.99/mo), or WhatsApp Plus ($2.99/mo) will gain access to extra features, like profile customization, super reactions, and story insights, among other things. In anannouncement, Meta’s head of product Naomi Gleit noted that “more fun features” will be added in the future. Meanwhile, Meta will begin testing other offerings, including professional plans for creators and businesses, and AI-focused plans for all users. These new tests will be branded as “Meta One,” which will serve as the company’s home for its subscription offerings going forward. Metaconfirmed it was planning a subscription offeringearlier this year, with itsinitial testsrolling out in the spring. The idea behind the plans aimed at consumers is to provide additional features for power users who want more from their social apps. It also allows Meta to diversify its revenue streams beyond advertising by extracting more value from its existing audience of billions, given the limited growth opportunities for these apps, which have already achieved global saturation. The new “Plus” plans are tailored to each individual app, with Facebook Plus and Instagram Plus focused more on social expression, while WhatsApp Plus focuses on personalization and messaging. However, the company tells us the new plans don’t replace its existing offering,Meta Verified, which is focused on verification, impersonation protection, and extra support. (This could change in time, but for now, Meta is not winding down the older plans.) For starters, the new Instagram Plus plan gives subscribers access to extra features, like the ability to see how many people have rewatched your Story in aggregate, as well as the ability to create unlimited audience lists for Stories, beyond the “Close Friends” option. Users will also be able to spotlight a story once a week for additional views, extend a story beyond 24 hours, preview a story without showing up as a viewer, search their story viewer list to see who is watching, and more. Users will also be able to post straight to their profile and highlight without showing up on their followers’ feeds. There are also other features like Super Heart animated reactions for Stories, custom app icons, customizable fonts for profile bios, and access to additional pins for your profile. These features are designed to better serve creators and those looking to grow their following and understand their audience, but could also appeal to heavy users. Facebook Plus offers a similar set of features to Instagram Plus. WhatsApp Plus, however, offers other features, like app themes, custom ringtones, additional pinned chats, list customization, premium stickers, and more. Alongside the launch, Meta says it will begin testing even more subscription plans, which is where things start to get confusing. For Meta AI users, it will test two plans — Meta One Plus ($7.99/mo) and Meta One Premium ($19.99/mo) with the same features, but the Premium plan unlocks more capacity on higher compute queries. That means the Premium plan would offer deeper reasoning for complex tasks (i.e., more of “thinking mode” in the Meta AI app or on the web). It would also offer move video and image generation capabilities across Meta’s apps. Meta AI will remain free for more casual users, but these plans follow the same path as those put forth by other AI model providers that charge for additional compute and heavier usage. The plans will later expand in the weeks to come with more benefits for those who use AI glasses, Meta says. The AI plans will start testing next month, initially in Singapore, Guatemala, and Bolivia. Two other plans for creators and businesses will begin tests later this week, in markets including Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Thailand, and Bangladesh. The Meta One Essential plan ($14.99/mo) will offer the Verified badge, impersonation protection, and an enhanced linksheet where users can link out to their online presence across social channels and the web, similar to Meta Verified. The more expensive Meta One Advanced plan ($49.99/mo) will include the Essential plan benefits, as well as the ability to be featured in the Facebook feed, appear higher in Facebook and Instagram search results, gain attention with a bold “Follow” button on Reels, and automatically send “follow” invitations to people who engage with your content. It can also help creators and businesses drive people to their website or shop through links in Instagram posts, Instagram Reels, and through enhanced Facebook and Instagram profiles with their expanded linksheets. These plans, not surprisingly, include better analytics, including deeper, competitive insights on Instagram, and custom audience insights on Facebook. Advanced plan subscribers will have access to optimized scheduling tools, tools to share access with other account moderators (without sharing a password), and notifications that alert you when others on Facebook or Instagram reuse your content so you can request a label crediting your original reel. Gleit acknowledged that Meta is still experimenting with these AI and professional plans for the time being, but aims to bring them all together under Meta One, where they will then continue to be updated and expanded over time.
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Your SEO strategy is optimized for a search engine that no longer exists.
Google I/O made it official: AI-generated answers are now front and center in search, and most brands have almost no visibility into how AI is describing them to their customers. For anyone who has spent years building a strategy around 10 blue links, the rules just changed in a pretty significant way. On this episode of TechCrunch’sEquitypodcast, Rebecca Bellan caught up withMatt Thompson, VP of partnerships atScrunch, a startup positioning itself at the center of the AI search shift, to talk about what Google’s changes mean and what marketers and founders should actually do about it. Listen to the full episode to hear: Subscribe to Equity onYouTube,Apple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotifyand all the casts. You also can follow Equity onXandThreads, at @EquityPod.
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