Sunday, May 25, 2025

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A startup called Intempus aims to retrofit existing robots to give them human emotional expressions and responses. The goal is to both improve human-robot interaction and to provide data for AI training.

Founder Teddy Warner noted that robots don't currently have a "physiological state" — in other words, "they don't have fun, they don't have stress." With his team at Intempus, Warner is trying to get robots closer to that state by training them to respond with kinetic movement, based on data around human responses like sweat, body temperature, and heart rate.

Keep reading to see what other (AI-heavy) headlines TechCrunch is covering this weekend.

Weekend news and opinion

Image Credits: Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket / Getty Images

What is Mistral AI? We break down everything you need to know about what might be the only European startup positioned to compete against OpenAI. For starters, despite its $6 billion valuation, Mistral AI has relatively low global market share.

OpenAI upgrades the model behind Operator: Operator is an AI agent that's supposed to autonomously browse the web and use certain software. Until now, it's been powered by a custom version of GPT-4o, but OpenAI is switching it over to one of its latest reasoning models, o3.

Microsoft says its latest AI can predict typhoons: Microsoft is making big claims for Aurora AI — claims backed up in a paper recently published in Nature, where the company says Aurora can forecast atmospheric events with greater speed and precision than traditional meteorology.

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What else we're reading 📗

Reuters reports that Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency has been expanding the use of Grok — the chatbot created by Musk's AI startup xAI — to analyze data for the federal government. Reporters weren't able to verify the specific data being used, but they suggested that DOGE could be violating long-held privacy protections, as well as laws around conflicts of interest.

Also, Defector argues that when it comes to de-extinction, Colossal Biosciences can't have it both ways.

Before you go 🎬

It's hard to believe that the world needs another "Jurassic World" movie, but the latest trailer for "Jurassic World Rebirth" has me cautiously optimistic.