from the fingers-and-no-thumbs dept

It appears Bill Cassidy is going to make every effort to ignore his own culpability for RFK Jr. on his way out the door. In case you need to be reminded, Cassidy was a key, if not deciding vote to confirm RFK Jr. to his current role as Secretary of HHS. Cassidy’s background is as an MD and many of his GOP colleagues reportedly looked to his vote as to whether to support Kennedy’s nomination, despite Kennedy being perhaps the loudest evangelist for anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories on the planet. He voted to confirm Kennedy, leading several others to follow suit. It’s probably not inaccurate to say that Kennedy has his position because Cassidy voted for him.

Despite his attempts to lick Trump’s boots so clean that he could perform surgery with them, Cassidy lost his primary because his love for Trump went unrequited. In the immediate aftermath of that loss, Cassidy rediscovered his own backbone and flipped his vote from no to yes on the war powers resolution that went before the Senate. While that was bad enough for Cassidy to get a big ol’ middle finger from me, listening to him now try to poke a finger in Kennedy’s eye is a bridge too far.

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) directly blamed Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for a resurgence in vaccine-preventable illnesses Thursday.

On the social media platform X, Cassidy shared a New York Times article reporting on hospitals seeing a resurgence in vaccine-preventable illnesses, with doctors telling the outlet they’re frequently seeing illnesses they used to rarely encounter.

“A terrible outcome from RFK and others promoting vaccine skepticism,” wrote Cassidy.

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This has to be one of the most tone-deaf things a sitting senator has ever uttered. And for several reasons. Chief among them is that Cassidy is the one who helped promote vaccine skepticism by literally promoting a brain-addled anti-vaxxer into a cabinet position in charge of Americans’ health. To crow about the consequences of the very HHS administration Cassidy helped to put in place is befuddling in the extreme. Cassidy has ownership of this, whether he wants to admit it or not.

And, again, Cassidy had every opportunity to try to do something to correct his own mistake before he fumbled his incumbency so badly. There were impeachment efforts around Kennedy that he could have helped bolster. He could have crafted legislation to try to mitigate Kennedy’s worst actions in his role. He could have done literally anything other than complain publicly that Kennedy lied to him during his confirmation hearings and then just leaving it at that.

Cassidy has a few months left in office and then he will disappear into the vapor. If he wants to do something, then he should do something. This very much isn’t that and the fact that it’s coming in the wake of his no longer having any stakes in electoral politics is pathetic.

Filed Under: bill cassidy, health & human services, rfk jr., vaccines

But they didn’t miss the chance to argue over who’s censoring who.

India’s AI model output has been slow compared to the U.S., Europe, and China. Only a few startups are releasing models, and most of them are large language models or voice models. To encourage more development, the government launched the India AI Mission, a roughly $1.2 billion initiative that — among other things — gives selected startups access to subsidized GPU compute in exchange for releasing their models publicly. One of the 12 startups selected for the program, Avataar AI, has launched a new video model called Varya that is built to understand local context — such as identifying different festivals, food, and clothing.

The Peak XV-backed startup, which focuses on creating video tools for e-commerce, didn’t build Varya from scratch. It started with Wan 2.2, a publicly available video generation model released by Alibaba, and used a technique called distillation — essentially compressing the model’s capabilities into a leaner, faster version optimized for Avataar’s specific use cases. The result is a model that runs in four steps rather than Wan 2.2’s 50, producing video 10 times faster and at a fraction of the cost.

To put that in concrete terms: using an NVIDIA H200 GPU, Varya can generate a 5-second 720p clip in 45 seconds, compared to 1,230 seconds for Wan 2.2.

The most striking aspect of Varya may be its price. The company plans to charge ₹0.48 ($0.005) per second of video on its hosted service — far cheaper than models like Veo, Kling, Luma, and Runway, which typically charge $0.10 or more per second. That’s a roughly 20x price difference.

“India is a video-first market. We see this across every large consumer internet product in India: video wins over text. Current AI video models are too expensive for population-scale use in India. If video AI is going to reach students, teachers, MSMEs, creators, enterprises, and public services, costs have to come down dramatically. Cost is the biggest unlock for AI adoption in India,” Peak XV’s managing director Rajan Anandan told TechCrunch.

Image and video generation models often miss cultural nuances and produce stereotyped or generic outputs — a problem TechCrunch has reported on before. Avataar AI says it has used curated data to train Varya to recognize cultural nuances including food, clothing, architecture, and festivals.

Varya will be released as an open-weight model on India’s AI Kosh portal — the Indian government’s centralized repository for publicly available AI models and datasets — along with its training data, meaning developers can self-host or modify it for their own needs. Avataar also plans to make the model available to its enterprise customers and says it is open to partnerships with video tools including Higgsfield and Adobe Firefly. Anyone can try it now on its website using text prompts or reference images.

Varya’s launch reflects a fundamental tradeoff in India’s AI ambitions. Industry veterans have noted that India can make its mark in AI by creating applications and a robust developer ecosystem rather than competing on foundation models. And there’s a reason for that pragmatism: model development has been slower in India than in global rivals due to a lack of compute and limited quality data availability.

The India AI Mission is also part of a broader government push to close that gap. Last year, it selected 12 startups — Avataar AI among them — to develop AI models and provided them with cost-efficient compute. Earlier this year, IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said India aims to attract $200 billion in AI investment by 2028 and more than double its GPU capacity within six months.

In India, consumers receive a lot of calls every day, ranging from spam and scams to delivery people and financial service companies trying to contact them. There are apps like Truecaller and the government’s Calling Name Presentation (CNAP) system to identify who is calling, but knowing the name of the caller is often not enough. That is why Equal AI is creating an assistant that can receive calls on your behalf, gather information, and tell you why someone is calling.

The app is currently available on Android, and since its launch last year, it has grown to more than a million monthly active users and over 300,000 daily active users, it says. The app screens the call and displays the reason someone is calling you.

The dialer shows quick reply options like “Leave the delivery near the door” or “Give it to the neighbor,” and the AI reads them back to the caller. You can also type a custom message for the AI to read out. The app records the call, and users can see the recording and transcription history with a summary in the app.

Equal AI said today it has raised $30 million in Series B funding led by Prosus Ventures and Tomales Bay Capital with participation from Think Investments and Valiant Fund. Individual investors include Indian fintech PhonePe’s founder Sameer Nigam, Zubin Bharti Mittal from Airtel Family Office, Skyflow AI co-founder Anshu Sharma, Meta India and Southeast Asia’s VP Sandhya Devanathan, and CtrlS Datacenters’ Chairman Sridhar Pinnapureddy. With the new funding, the company has raised over $42 million to date.

The round is structured in three tranches, with the startup carrying a different valuation at each stage depending on whether it hits predetermined targets — a growing but still uncommon approach in which startups sell equity at different prices within the same round. The structure has an unusual quirk: it lets a startup advertise the highest valuation achieved, even if the bulk of the equity was sold at a lower one. Equal AI declined to provide its specific valuations.

The startup was founded by Keshav Reddy in 2022. Reddy comes from the family behind Indian conglomerate GVK, which has holdings across infrastructure, energy, and healthcare. Equal started as a data-sharing company for financial services and still offers data for financial analysis and know your customer (KYC) verification services for employers.

“We always wanted to be a customer-facing company, and with Equal AI, the first use case we launched was a call assistant because we realized users get a ton of calls for financial services or job openings. If you are buying car insurance, you might get 20 calls over a week, and that is hard to tackle for a human,” founder Reddy told TechCrunch about why the company started there.

The app currently only screens unknown calls, but the company is planning to introduce the ability to screen calls from known numbers too. The company also wants the AI assistant to take proactive action on a user’s behalf — such as texting a delivery person your address (with consent) or making outbound calls to book appointments. The startup said it is also working on an iOS version of the app and a paid subscription tier with more features.

Equal AI is using a mix of speech recognition, automatic speech recognition (ASR), and speech generation models with its own orchestration layer. English support matters, but consumers in India often speak in their native language or blend multiple languages in a single sentence — a phenomenon called code-mixing. Equal AI says it has built support for over 10 languages with this in mind.

The startup has stiff competition. Google and Apple both have call screening products. Truecaller, already a household name in India, has been building out its own AI assistant features. In the U.S., a16z-backed privacy startup Cloaked also launched call screening last year. Thiago Viana, global co-head at Prosus Ventures, said that Equal’s understanding of local context gives it an edge.

“Equal AI promises to screen calls for you and provide context on why someone is calling. We think that if an app does well in a few use cases, it can quickly become popular in its niche and create user stickiness to expand in different areas later on,” Reddy told TechCrunch by phone.

Prosus has been investing in AI assistant startups that focus on local markets. Its portfolio includes Spain-based Luzia and Latin America-based Zapia. Both were caught up in Meta’s ban on third-party AI bots on WhatsApp, which serves as a cautionary tale for platform dependency. Equal AI said that it didn’t want to create that kind of dependency — which is why it built around calls and its own app rather than piggybacking on a messaging platform.

Microsoft is accelerating updates to its Edge browser, switching from a monthly release schedule to a biweekly one. The change takes effect with Edge 152, due on August 27, and puts the browser on the same cadence as Google Chrome.

More updates, not more features

The shift does not mean users will get twice as many new features. As Microsoft explained in a recent blog post, each release under the new schedule will carry roughly half the content of the current monthly drops, keeping the overall volume of changes roughly constant. The practical effect for most users is a steadier, smaller stream of updates rather than a sudden jump in new functionality.

Microsoft framed the change as a benefit for both consumers and enterprise customers, noting that security and platform fixes will reach users faster, and that smaller change sets are easier for IT teams to validate before deployment.

Who it affects and when

The new cadence applies to users on the standard Stable channel. Those on the Stable Extended channel, a longer-term option aimed at organizations that prefer less frequent updates, will stay on the current every-two-months schedule.

Google Chrome moved to a two-week release cycle in March, and Edge’s realignment closes the gap between the two Chromium-based browsers. The biweekly releases kick in with Edge 152 on August 27, giving users and IT admins a couple of months to prepare before the new schedule takes hold. For everyday users, the transition should be largely invisible. Automatic updates will simply arrive more often, each with a smaller footprint than before.

Personal Tech

Casual IT team learns that building bespoke PCs can be a false economy

ON CALL 你好 Nǐ hǎo, dear reader, and welcome to another installment of On Call, The Register’s Friday column that shares your stories of translating technical trauma while delivering transcendent tech support.

This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Jackson” who
told us about his time providing tech support in a university’s biology
department.

“It was sometime in the mid-2000s and our IT group at the
time consisted of myself, my boss, and a part-timer,” he told On Call. “We were
a very casual IT group; nothing in the way of any formal policies or standards
for anything at all. If someone needed a new PC, we just ordered parts and
assembled them ourselves.”

The department’s PC fleet therefore had a diverse gene pool,
with no two machines possessing the same bill of materials.

“This was fine by me – I enjoyed building them and it never
really caused any issues that I couldn’t handle,” Jackson told On Call. “Until
one day we got a panicked support call from one of the secretaries who claimed
that her PC just rebooted and then started talking to her.”

Jackson and his colleagues didn’t believe a word of it until
the secretary stopped talking and placed her phone next to the talking PC.

“I could clearly hear a muffled voice repeating a message of
some sort,” Jackson told On Call.

There was nothing for it but to visit the PC, which he found
hung in the middle of a Power-On Self-Test, flashing an alphanumeric error code
and unmistakably playing a voice through its internal speaker.

In Chinese!

Jackson rebooted the machine and it ended up in the same
state, reciting the same message. Chinese isn’t a language in which Jackson is
fluent, so he had no idea what the PC was trying to tell him.

“After poking around in the BIOS, I found the culprit,”
Jackson revealed. “This particular model of motherboard had a ‘talking error
BIOS’ whereby certain POST codes triggered the playback of a friendly, spoken
error message, with Chinese set as the default language.”

Jackson found the relevant BIOS settings, changed the
default language to English, and the next time he rebooted the machine it
helpfully let him know: “Your floppy drive may not be connected
properly.”

In his mail to On Call, Jackson hypothesized that the PC’s
CMOS battery died, so the BIOS was unable to access its stored settings and
reverted to factory settings that assumed the presence of a nonexistent second
floppy drive.

“It triggered a feature I didn’t even know the motherboard
had!” Jackson told On Call.

Have you found yourself flummoxed by a feature you didn’t
know about? If so, click here to send On Call an email – we’ll assume that’s a feature you know well – so we
can tell your story on a future Friday. ®

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Apple’s executives say the new-and-improved Siri won’t try to be your friend or your partner, because it’s only there to help you as efficiently as it can.

Apple’s latest attempt at modernizing its virtual assistant was the star of the show at WWDC 2026. Siri AI now supports natural language, contextual awareness, and advanced in-app actions, along with a chatbot-style experience.

However, even with its improved capabilities, Siri will always be different from existing AI assistants, thanks to Apple’s approach.

During an interview in the Mostly Human podcast, spotted by 9to5Mac, Apple’s software chief and head of worldwide marketing spoke about Siri AI. The two executives explained the role of Apple’s AI features and the ideas behind them.

Commenting on the significance of AI, Apple’s SVP of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, likened it to the Industrial Revolution.

“I think that AI, in Apple’s view, can be used as this incredibly empowering thing. But there is a sense that, for one, things are changing very fast in ways that I think it’s hard for any normal person to keep up with,” said Federighi. “And while I think we can look at this as yet another thing of the scale of the Industrial Revolution, which changed our world in a giant way, that displaced a lot of people in the process and still occurred over like 80 years.”

He continues by saying he can relate to people who see AI as a big change. He believes it makes sense that people feel uncertainty about the potential impact of AI on jobs.

However, Apple remains optimistic. The company is looking for ways to make everyday tasks easier with AI.

“We don’t do AI for AI’s sake,” explained Greg Joswiak, “it’s ‘how does AI make everything better,’ and that makes our products better, our features better.” Joswiak is Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing.

For Apple, the answer is to use AI to offer convenient, non-intrusive suggestion buttons in the Messages app. Users can add events to their Calendar app without engaging with a chatbot. In a sense, the company still views AI as a tool first and foremost, and not something that can replace social interaction.

Siri doesn’t encourage user engagement, and it won’t replace human interaction

Even with Siri’s new conversational abilities, Craig Federighi says the assistant never tries to make a connection with its users.

Example of a conversation with the new Siri AI. Image Credit: Apple

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“If you use many of the existing chatbots, they’re really focused on engagement to a large degree, and sycophancy, right? They kind of want to pull you in,” says Federighi. “They might encourage you to reveal things about yourself and then use that as a basis to establish a connection.”

He suggests that Apple’s approach is quite the opposite. “The way that we have designed Siri, Siri really wants to say, ‘Listen, that’s not what I’m here for. I’m here to help you.’”

Siri won’t pursue romantic or emotional connections with its users, he said. “But if you try to engage Siri as a romantic partner, Siri’s not into that,” Federighi continued.

Greg Joswiak echoed Federighi’s statements regarding Apple’s approach to AI. In short, the company doesn’t prioritize user engagement with AI features.

“The motivations of Apple are different than some other companies,” said Joswiak. “Some people, their whole business model is ‘I need to keep you in what you’re in, I need to keep you in my app, my experience; that’s how I make my money’. That’s not us.”

Joz goes on to say that Apple’s motivation is to help the user, not keep them engaged. Delivering concise answers is the goal and it is up to the user to continue the conversation if needed.

In essence, the two Apple executives highlighted the company’s balanced idea of AI. Siri needs to understand natural language to help its users, not to build perceived emotional bonds with them.

Sometimes, as with the suggestions in the Messages app, Apple’s AI is a non-intrusive, optional utility. Simply put, Siri is not there to replace humans, their jobs, or their partners and friends.