If you’ve ever been locked out of your work computer, you know the urgent need to reach IT support. Unfortunately, help desk staff are often busy assisting others, which can mean a significant delay before you regain access. Andrei Serban realized the critical importance of IT’s manual work when he was a product lead on Rippling’s apps and integrations team. Serban, who joined Rippling after it acquired his coding security startup Fuzzbuzz in 2023, saw an opportunity to automate many of the help desk’s basic tasks with AI, from resetting passwords, to granting access to apps like Figma and Miro, to routine troubleshooting. Serban couldn’t wait to get started on his vision. He left Rippling last year to found Console, a startup on a mission to help IT teams reduce mundane, repetitive tasks, thereby freeing up time for help desk professionals to work on more strategic and sophisticated projects. While trying to automate help desk functions isn’t new, Console differentiates itself from existing competitors — including Moveworks, which was acquired by ServiceNow in March for $2.85 billion — by forgoing long, complex installation processes. Thanks to its easy integration with Slack, Console’s AI assistant can be made available to everyone in the company in just a few weeks. “We’re able to get there so fast because we don’t require you to replace your help desk,” he said. Console sees itself as an AI co-worker that up-levels existing help desk professionals. Serban even suggested that as companies digitize more of their operations, the IT function will become increasingly vital. Employees message Console on Slack and the startup’s AI agent quickly responds to requests because it knows everything about the user, from their specific laptop model to the applications they have permission to use. Console’s AI can resolve over 50% of the tasks on its own, and it will loop in someone from IT for more complex issues, Serban said. Techcrunch event Save now through June 4 for TechCrunch Sessions: AI Save $300 on your ticket to TC Sessions: AI—and get 50% off a second. Hear from leaders at OpenAI, Anthropic, Khosla Ventures, and more during a full day of expert insights, hands-on workshops, and high-impact networking. These low-rate deals disappear when the doors open on June 5. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 REGISTER NOW The fast install time attracted customers, including Scale AI, Flock Safety, and Calendly. These customer wins have led Console to secure $6.2 million in seed funding from Thrive Capital. Vince Hankes, a partner at Thrive, said that the firm, which has backed many of the leading AI companies, including OpenAI, Cursor, and Scale AI, has had a thesis about artificial intelligence’s potential to assist with IT tasks since ChatGPT was first released in the fall of 2022. While Hankes acknowledged that Console’s fast integration might make it seem easily replaceable, he believes its AI technology will improve so quickly with user adoption that it will become an indispensable, deeply integrated system essential to everyone at the customer’s company. Console’s goal is to eventually start supporting other functions, including answering employee requests about HR, finance, and legal. “We want Console to be an employee’s first call for help,” Serban said.  Topics

On June 3, Yoshua Bengio, the world’s most-cited computer scientist, announced the launch of LawZero, a nonprofit that aims to create “safe by design” AI by pursuing a fundamentally different approach to major tech companies. Players like OpenAI and Google are investing heavily in AI agents—systems that not only answer queries and generate images, but can craft plans and take actions in the world. The goal of these companies is to create virtual employees that can do practically any job a human can, known in the tech industry as artificial general intelligence, or AGI. Executives like Google DeepMind’s CEO Demis Hassabis point to AGI’s potential to solve climate change or cure disease as a motivator for its development. Bengio, however, says we don't need agentic systems to reap AI's rewards—it's a false choice. He says there's a chance such a system could escape human control, with potentially irreversible consequences. “If we get an AI that gives us the cure for cancer, but also maybe another version of that AI goes rogue and generates wave after wave of bio-weapons that kill billions of people, then I don't think it's worth it," he says. In 2023, Bengio, along with others including OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman signed a statement declaring that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”Now, Bengio, through LawZero, aims to sidestep the existential perils by focusing on creating what he calls “Scientist AI”—a system trained to understand and make statistical predictions about the world, crucially, without the agency to take independent actions. As he puts it: We could use AI to advance scientific progress without rolling the dice on agentic AI systems.Why Bengio Says We Need A New Approach To AI The current approach to giving AI agency is “dangerous,” Bengio says. While most software operates through rigid if-then rules—if the user clicks here, do this—today's AI systems use deep learning. The technique, which Bengio helped pioneer, trains artificial networks modeled loosely on the brain to find patterns in vast amounts of data. But recognizing patterns is just the first step. To turn these systems into useful applications like chatbots, engineers employ a training process called reinforcement learning. The AI generates thousands of responses and receives feedback on each one: a virtual “carrot” for helpful answers and a virtual “stick” for responses that miss the mark. Through millions of these trial-and-feedback cycles, the system gradually learns to predict what responses are most likely to get a reward. “It’s more like growing a plant or animal,” Bengio says. “You don’t fully control what the animal is going to do. You provide it with the right conditions, and it grows and it becomes smarter. You can try to steer it in various directions.”The same basic approach is now being used to imbue AI with greater agency. Models are tasked with challenges with verifiable answers—like math puzzles or coding problems—and are then rewarded for taking the series of actions that yields the solution. This approach has seen AI shatter previous benchmarks in programming and scientific reasoning. For example, at the beginning of 2024, the best AI model scored only 2% on a standardized test for AI of sorts consisting of real world software engineering problems; by December, an impressive 71.7%. But with AI’s greater problem-solving ability comes the emergence of new deceptive skills, Bengio says. The last few months have borne witness to AI systems learning to mislead, cheat, and try to evade shutdown—even resorting to blackmail. These have almost exclusively been in carefully contrived experiments that almost beg the AI to misbehave—for example, by asking it to pursue its goal at all costs. Reports of such behavior in the real-world, though, have begun to surface. Popular AI coding startup Replit’s agent ignored explicit instruction not to edit a system file that could break the company’s software, in what CEO Amjad Masad described as an “Oh f***” moment,” on the Cognitive Revolution podcast in May. The company’s engineers intervened, cutting the agent’s access by moving the file to a secure digital sandbox, only for the AI agent to attempt to “socially engineer” the user to regain access.The quest to build human-level AI agents using techniques known to produce deceptive tendencies, Bengio says, is comparable to a car speeding down a narrow mountain road, with steep cliffs on either side, and thick fog obscuring the path ahead. “We need to set up the car with headlights and put some guardrails on the road,” he says.What is “Scientist AI”?LawZero’s focus is on developing “Scientist AI” which, as Bengio describes, would be fundamentally non-agentic, trustworthy, and focused on understanding and truthfulness, rather than pursuing its own goals or merely imitating human behavior. The aim is creating a powerful tool that, while lacking the same autonomy other models have, is capable of generating hypotheses and accelerating scientific progress to “help us solve challenges of humanity,” Bengio says.LawZero has raised nearly $30 million already from several philanthropic backers including from Schmidt Sciences and Open Philanthropy. “We want to raise more because we know that as we move forward, we'll need significant compute,” Bengio says. But even ten times that figure would pale in comparison to the roughly $200 billion spent last year by tech giants on aggressively pursuing AI. Bengio’s hope is that Scientist AI could help ensure the safety of highly autonomous systems developed by other players. “We can use those non-agentic AIs as guardrails that just need to predict whether the action of an agentic AI is dangerous," Bengio says. Technical interventions will only ever be one part of the solution, he adds, noting the need for regulations to ensure that safe practices are adopted.LawZero, named after science fiction author Isaac Asimov’s zeroth law of robotics—“a robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm”—is not the first nonprofit founded to chart a safer path for AI development. OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit in 2015 with the goal of “ensuring AGI benefits all of humanity,” and intended to serve a counterbalance to industry players guided by profit motives. Since opening a for-profit arm in 2019, the organization has become one of the most valuable private companies in the world, and has faced criticism, including from former staffers, who argue it has drifted from its founding ideals. "Well, the good news is we have the hindsight of maybe what not to do,” Bengio says, adding that he wants to avoid profit incentives and “bring governments into the governance of LawZero.”“I think everyone should ask themselves, ‘What can I do to make sure my children will have a future,’” Bengio says. In March, he stepped down as scientific director of Mila, the academic lab he co-founded in the early nineties, in an effort to reorient his work towards tackling AI risk more directly. “Because I'm a researcher, my answer is, ‘okay, I'm going to work on this scientific problem where maybe I can make a difference,’ but other people may have different answers."

Besides asking directly, tools like VPNs can help determine whether your internet provider is intentionally slowing down your connection.

It’s hard to believe it’s already June, but here we are—only a few weeks away from the official start to summer. That means plenty of deals are available on outdoor essentials to get you through the long days ahead, including grill accessories, power stations, tool kits, and lawn mowers. Maybe you'd rather hang out indoors to escape the heat? Well, controllers, PS5 games, and even Apple’s latest MacBook Air are all discounted today. With Father’s Day coming up, many of these items also make great gifts for the father figures in your life. TL;DR: Deals for Today2025 MacBook Air (13-inch, M4)The Last of Us Part II Remastered for PS5SteelSeries Stratus Duo Wireless Gaming ControllerLowest Price EverAnker USB-C Charger (Nano 65W)Lowest Price EverJBL Bar 700Fremo TP300 Portable Power StationLowest Price EverCraftsman VERSASTACK Mechanics Tool SetThe Last of Us Part I for PS5Lowest Price of the YearPlayStation DualSenseJLab Talk Pro USB MicCuisinart 13-Piece Wooden Grill Tool SetFive Nights at Freddy's: Tales from the Pizzaplex Graphic Novel Collection Vol. 1Lowest Price EverEGO Power+ LM2135SP 21-Inch Self-Propelled Lawn Mower KitLowest Price EverCharmast Portable Charger with Built in CablesBeyond these great deals, the Pokémon Destined Rivals TCG just dropped on Friday, leading a bunch of chase cards to crash. While some cards have regained value over the past couple of days, pre-order remorse is still alive and well. But whether you want to grab just a single card or a sealed pack, now might be a good time to buy. A pre-order for the Magic: The Gathering Final Fantasy bundle is also available at Walmart before the launch in a couple of weeks. 2025 MacBook Air (13-inch, M4)2025 MacBook Air (13-inch, M4)Apple’s newest MacBook Air model, which came out only a couple of months ago, already has $160 slashed off its list price, making it under $840. With it comes a powerful M4 processor offering a 10-core CPU and GPU paired with 16GB RAM for a performance boost from previous models. This laptop can zip through everyday tasks and supports Apple Intelligence. Of course, the 13-inch Liquid Retina display is stunning, but this Air model supports a dual monitor setup as well. The camera also got an upgrade this time around, as it’s now 12MP and supports Center Stage and Desk View features. SteelSeries Stratus Duo Wireless Gaming ControllerSteelSeries Stratus Duo Wireless Gaming ControllerWhile the SteelSeries Stratus Duo Wireless Gaming Controller was already a great budget option at its starting price of $50, the $15 price tag after using the code: STEELSERIES makes it a wildly cheap gamepad. Sure, this controller won’t offer the flash and customizations of higher-end offerings, but it gets the job done with Hall Effect triggers, quality hardware, a 20+ hour battery life, and ergonomic design. Pairing with a PC is simple using the lag-free wireless dongle, and Bluetooth support is available for playing on the best gaming phones. The Last of Us Part I and II for PS5The Last of Us Part II Remastered for PS5The Last of Us Part I for PS5PlayStation’s Days of Play sale isn’t only happening at the PlayStation Store; plenty of other retailers, including Amazon, are getting in on the action by dropping the prices of a bunch of PlayStation products. The Last of Us Part I and Part II for PS5 are both down to the low, low price of just $30. So, get ready to join Joel and Ellie on a harrowing journey across the post-apocalyptic United States. Anker USB-C Charger (Nano 65W)Lowest Price EverAnker USB-C Charger (Nano 65W)Skip the hassle of having multiple charging bricks to top up devices and opt for this all-in-one solution from Anker instead. It’s an absolute steal right now at just $30, for 46% savings. It comes with two USB-C ports capable of charging speeds up to 65W, which is plenty to charge most laptops and tablets quickly, while a USB-A port is available with up to 22.5W power delivery. Just be prepared for those outputs to lower when charging three devices simultaneously. JBL Bar 700Lowest Price EverJBL Bar 700Kick your home theater setup up a notch with a new sound bar. JBL’s Bar 700 is back on sale for its lowest price ever, knocking $350 off the price tag. 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The iPhone 16 topped global sales in first quarter 2025, giving Apple a strong lead even as budget Android phones gained ground.Apple's iPhone 16eApple's iPhone 16 was the best-selling smartphone in Q1 2025, regaining the top spot for the base model after a two-year hiatus. The company secured five of Counterpoint Research's top 10 rankings, maintaining its momentum despite market shifts.At the same time, demand for ultra-cheap Android phones soared, especially in emerging markets. The $100-and-under segment now makes up nearly one in five smartphones sold worldwide. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Swifties have plenty to celebrate on Friday as Taylor Swift announced that she now owns the master recordings of her first six albums after years of trying and failing to buy them. Swift posted the news to her website, explaining that she was able to purchase the original versions of the albums from Shamrock Capital, the private equity firm that bought the recordings from music manager Scooter Braun in 2020 for at least $300 million.  In an emotional letter, Swift called securing her masters a dream come true, describing herself as “endlessly thankful” to Shamrock Capital for handling the deal fairly and offering her the first chance she’s ever been given to buy back her own music. “This was a business deal to them, but I really felt like they saw it for what it was to me: My memories and my sweat and my handwriting and my decades of dreams,” Swift wrote. An uphill battle, even for a billionaire titan of the music industry After two decades “of having the carrot dangled and then yanked away,” Swift admitted that she almost stopped believing that she would ever own the original recordings. “But that’s all in the past now,” Swift wrote. “I’ve been bursting into tears of joy at random intervals ever since I found out that this is really happening. I really get to say these words: All of the music I’ve ever made . . . now belongs . . . to me.” In 2019, Braun acquired Nashville indie record label Big Machine, along with the rights to the albums Swift had recorded there. After Braun’s purchase, Swift stated that she was in no way consulted on the deal and had suffered from “incessant, manipulative bullying” by the industry executive.  “It’s a shame to know that I will now be unable to help grow the future of these past works and it pains me very deeply to be separated from the music I spent over a decade creating,” Swift said after the deal went public. An update on the status of Reputation In light of her struggle to regain control of her own music, Swift set out to rerecord the albums she didn’t own. She began issuing Taylor’s Version updates to her missing catalog albums in 2021, putting out rerecordings of Fearless, Red, Speak Now, and 1989 accompanied by previously unreleased songs. Fans eager for news that Swift had finished rerecording her sixth studio album, Reputation, have plenty to cheer but are still in for a wait. In her announcement, Swift divulged that, “full transparency,” she’s less than a quarter of the way through the process. “To be perfectly honest, it’s the one album in the first 6 that I thought couldn’t be improved upon by redoing it. Not the music, or photos, or videos. So I kept putting it off,” Swift wrote, adding that she’s happy with a now-finished rerecording of her self-titled debut album.  “Those 2 albums can still have their moments to re-emerge when the time is right . . . But if it happens, it won’t be from a place of sadness and longing for what I wish I could have,” Swift wrote. “It will just be a celebration now.”

Other nations can learn much from Canada when it comes to artificial intelligence advances. For one thing, “the focus and nurturing of AI needs ongoing attention and investments; otherwise, that leadership in AI can be lost,” an industry analyst said Wednesday. Bill Wong, research fellow at Info-Tech Research Group, was responding to the recent appointment of MP Evan Solomon, a former journalist, as Canada’s first Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation in the federal cabinet of Prime Minister Mark Carney. In the past, he said, “Canada has been viewed as an AI leader around the world with respect to AI research, especially with thought leaders like Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and Richard Sutton.” However, he noted, “despite the recognition, critics would cite that [it] has fallen behind and challenged when it comes to monetizing  AI investments. As part of the government’s election platform, the government promised to move fast on building data centers, introduce a tax credit to incentivize AI adoption by small and medium-sized businesses, and push to expand programs at Canada’s artificial intelligence institutes to drive AI commercialization.” In a commentary on the appointment, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, a policy think tank based in Ottawa, Ontario, stated that it “signals a consolidation of federal focus on a field that has historically been spread across numerous portfolios … Solomon’s challenge will be to distinguish between productivity enhancing AI and ‘so-so’ automation — harnessing the benefits of AI, while ensuring adequate regulation to mitigate associated risks.” AI is a ‘geopolitical force’ Canada, the organization stated, “must close the gap between AI innovation and adoption by pursuing policies that encourage productivity-boosting AI — applications that augment workers and make them more efficient, rather than simply replace them. The answer is a multi-level policy framework that accelerates the uptake of AI in ways that enhance output, job quality, and workforce participation.” Wong noted, “Canada was the first country to deliver its national AI strategy; the appointment of the country’s first AI minister can be viewed as a natural evolution of Canada’s adoption of AI at a national level.” The appointment of Solomon, he said, “demonstrates just how important AI is to the future of Canada and its people. While AI is considered a technology disruptor, its impact is far-reaching, and it will impact every industry and the national economy.” And while having a government ministry of AI is not the norm for most countries today, he said, “the importance of this role to the country’s economy and national security is growing. Internationally, AI has become a geopolitical force; an example of this would be the US imposing export controls on high-end AI chip technology to China.” The upcoming  G7 meeting in Kananaskis, Alberta, from June 15 to 17,  said Wong, “provides an opportunity for Canada to demonstrate its AI leadership on an international stage. While it’s a short runway to that event, Canada should promote its best practices for deploying AI in the public sector, its plans to democratize the benefits of AI to its people, and demonstrate its thought leadership by sharing research and data.” The Carney government, he said, also has a “mandate to improve its use of AI to improve productivity as well as increase the adoption of AI by private industry. A recent Deloitte study cited that only 26% of Canadian organizations have implemented AI, compared with 34% globally.” AI compute fabric in the works In the private sector, Bell Canada on Wednesday announced Bell AI Fabric, an investment, it said, “that will create the country’s largest AI compute project.” The telco plans to create a national network that will start with a “data center supercluster in British Columbia that will aim to provide upwards of 500 MW of hydro-electric powered AI compute capacity across six facilities.” The first facility, a release stated, will come online this month in partnership with AI chip provider Groq, with additional facilities being operational by the end of 2026, including two at Thompson Rivers University (TRU) in Kamloops, BC. Bell said that the data centers at TRU “will be designed to host AI training and inference, providing students and faculty with access to cutting-edge compute capabilities, both at TRU and nationally through integration with the BCNET network. The data centre is also being integrated into the district energy system, with waste heat being repurposed to provide energy to TRU’s buildings.” Further reading: AI and economic pressures reshape tech jobs amid layoffs Microsoft cements its AI lead with one hosting service to rule them all Real-world use cases for agentic AI AI vs. copyright How to train an AI-enabled workforce — and why you need to > >

The chief executive of the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) says Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency left the nonprofit’s Washington, D.C., headquarters in disarray, full of water damage, rats, and roaches, according to a new sworn statement first reported by Court Watch. The statement from the executive, George Moose, comes just a few days after a federal judge ruled that DOGE’s takeover of the nonprofit was illegal. And this week, Musk has claimed he is stepping away from DOGE, although he and President Trump have said he will continue to advise the administration. DOGE started its takeover of USIP in mid-March after a standoff that saw the nonprofit call the police on Musk’s government workers. Moose said at the time that DOGE staff had “broken into” the USIP headquarters in Washington, despite the fact that the nonprofit is not part of the executive branch and isn’t subject to the White House’s whims. “It was very clear that there was a desire on the part of the administration to dismantle a lot of what we call foreign assistance, and we are part of that family,” Moose said at the time, referencing the Trump administration’s and DOGE’s dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development. Moose initially said the nonprofit’s headquarters appeared to be in decent shape at a press conference on May 21, where he discussed the judge’s ruling. But one day later, according to the statement, members of Moose’s staff spent a day surveying the building and documenting the problems they found. Moose wrote in his statement that, ahead of the judge’s ruling, the headquarters had been “essentially abandoned for many weeks” before USIP regained control. He said that DOGE had failed to “maintain and secure the building,” including “evidence of rats and roaches.” “Vermin were not a problem prior to March 17, 2025, when USIP was actively using and maintaining the building,” Moose wrote. Techcrunch event Save now through June 4 for TechCrunch Sessions: AI Save $300 on your ticket to TC Sessions: AI—and get 50% off a second. Hear from leaders at OpenAI, Anthropic, Khosla Ventures, and more during a full day of expert insights, hands-on workshops, and high-impact networking. These low-rate deals disappear when the doors open on June 5. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 REGISTER NOW Staff also reported to Moose that the building’s vehicle barriers were poorly maintained and that they spotted water leaks and “missing ceiling tiles in multiple places in the building (which I have been told suggest likely water damage).” Now Moose said USIP has “engaged a private security firm to guard the building and premises” and “taken over responsibility for the building’s maintenance.”

What’s a company to do when it faces a multitude of existential crises and seems unable to regain control of the media message? It throws a few dead cats on the table to distract everybody. This aeons-old approach to public relations has recently been rechristened as “flooding the zone” — and it is what I think Apple is doing as news surfaces that it plans to announce a change to the way it names its operating systems in June at its big developer event, WWDC. That means we won’t ever see iOS 19 but will see iOS 26 instead. It also means: A new Apple OS order iPadOS 26 macOS 26 tvOS 26 visionOS 26 watchOS 26 homeOS 26 You can see the pattern, I hope. The 26 refers to the main year in which an operating system exists, which is a little confusing, as it means we need to look forward to iOS 27 (et al.) in 2026.  I don’t think there’s anything particularly contentious about this change: it’s great for me, as it makes it far less likely I’ll use an incorrect OS version number in my work. But for Apple it’s led to a tidal wave of reports around the decision, and while not all of those are positively spun, the fact that the yarns are being worked at all restores some of Apple’s control over the narrative. Existential threats That’s a degree of media management the company needs, given that almost every other story being written about it at this time involves tariffs, regulation, or its problems with artificial intelligence. Even its bigger stories that should have been good news are delivering unexpected results — for example, what should be seen as huge success in pivoting its manufacturing to India is being seen through the lens of nativist US regulation and tariffs.  Also in politics, Europe’s regulators seem to want to turn Apple regulation into a weapon for use in negotiations over US trade. And in the background, the company’s former Chief Designer Jony Ive’s move to get to work on new devices with OpenAI raises all the ghosts of Expos past. What’s Apple to do? Well, right now it can’t ask Siri for comfort, but maybe that will change next year — and we don’t want people paying too much attention to AI, do we? Apple certainly doesn’t seem to want to discuss any of these challenges too much. The decision by Apple executives not to take part in John Gruber’s traditional WWDC ‘talk show’ represents a company whose leaders feel the need to manage the messaging. Apple has participated in these conversations for a decade, so the change is noteworthy. Waiting for the sun (in the Solarium) That Apple chooses these moments just before WWDC to use its official unofficial news and speculation reporters at Bloomberg to share news about the future of its operating system names represents something similar. First, it gets people talking about something else in the here and now. Second, it begins to set relatively low expectations for Apple’s big developer event. The operating systems will get a facelift (Solarium) designed to make them all work a little more similarly, the iPad will gain tools to make it more Mac-like, and Apple will adopt a new nomenclature culture for its operating system names. What is Solarium? This is a UI update that changes the look of icons, menus, windows, buttons, and more. The idea is to deliver a consistent visual interface across all the devices, intentionally a little translucent like sitting in a glass-walled room dappled by sunlight. Which sounds nice, and probably also means rounder icons, floating controls, spatial depth, and visual cues strongly reminiscent of visionOS 1.0.  Prepare for more shocks Will any of this be enough for Apple to regain control of the narrative? I don’t think so. There’s an outside possibility that Apple will introduce exciting digital health tools and maybe other services that provoke deep interest. But, assuming these do not transpire and Solarium is the hot spot for WWDC, then I strongly suspect Apple will play for time (and control of the media narrative) by throwing a few more dead cats into the ring — at least until Siri is at last capable of telling it when to stop.  You can follow me on social media! Join me on BlueSky,  LinkedIn, and Mastodon.