Wednesday, April 30, 2025

Tesla’s board reportedly sought a successor while Musk wheeled around Washington

According to a new, brow-raising WSJ report, Tesla’s board quietly began searching for Elon Musk’s potential successor about a month ago, approaching executive search firms as the carmaker faced protests, plummeting sales, and shrinking profits while Musk waded into Washington to slash government spending. Board members reportedly met with Musk to express concerns about his […]

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Microsoft’s most capable new Phi 4 AI model rivals the performance of far larger systems

Microsoft launched several new “open” AI models on Wednesday, the most capable of which is competitive with OpenAI’s o3-mini on at least one benchmark. All of the new pemissively licensed models — Phi 4 mini reasoning, Phi 4 reasoning, and Phi 4 reasoning plus — are “reasoning” models, meaning they’re able to spend more time […]

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World partners with Tinder, Visa to bring its ID-verifying tech to more places

World, the biometric ID company best known for its eyeball-scanning Orb devices, at an event late on Wednesday announced several partnerships aimed at driving sign-ups and demonstrating the applications of its tech. World is partnering with Match Group, the dating app conglomerate, to verify the IDs of Tinder users in Japan. Via collaborations with Kalshi […]

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Sam Altman’s World unveils a mobile verification device

Tools for Humanity, the startup behind the World human verification project that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman co-founded, plans to unveil Wednesday a mobile device designed to help people determine the difference between a human and an AI agent. The company, which is debuting the device during its its “At Last” event in San Francisco, also […]

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Epic Games just scored a win against Apple

Epic Games notched a win in an ongoing legal dispute with Apple. The result could be Fortnite returning to the U.S. iOS app store as early as next week. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said in a ruling Wednesday that Apple was in “willful violation” of a 2021 injunction that prohibited the company from anticompetitive pricing. […]

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Meta forecasted it would make $1.4T in revenue from generative AI by 2035

Meta made a prediction last year its generative AI products would rake in $2 billion to $3 billion in revenue in 2025, and between $460 billion and $1.4 trillion by 2035, according to court documents unsealed Wednesday. The documents, submitted by attorneys for book authors suing Meta for what they claim is unauthorized training of […]

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Amazon launches Nova Premier, its most capable AI model yet

Amazon on Wednesday released what the company claims is the most capable AI model in its Nova family, Nova Premier. Nova Premier, which can process text, images, and videos (but not audio), is available in Amazon Bedrock, the company’s AI model development platform. Amazon says that Premier excels at “complex tasks” that “require deep understanding […]

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Study accuses LM Arena of helping top AI labs game its benchmark

A new paper from AI lab Cohere, Stanford, MIT, and Ai2 accuses LM Arena, the organization behind the popular crowdsourced AI benchmark Chatbot Arena, of helping a select group of AI companies achieve better leaderboard scores at the expense of rivals. According to the authors, LM Arena allowed some industry-leading AI companies like Meta, OpenAI, […]

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Microsoft expects some AI capacity constraints this quarter

An executive cautioned during Microsoft’s earnings call on Wednesday that customers might face AI service disruptions as demand outstrips the company’s ability to bring data centers online. Microsoft’s EVP and CFO Amy Hood said during the company’s fiscal 2025 third-quarter earnings call that the company may face AI capacity constraints as early as June. “We […]

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Google’s Gemini chatbot gets upgraded image creation tools

Google’s Gemini chatbot app now lets you modify both AI-generated images and images uploaded from your phone or computer, Google announced in a blog post Wednesday. Native image editing in Gemini will start rolling out gradually today, expanding to more people in over 45 languages and most countries in the coming weeks. The launch follows […]

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JetBrains releases Mellum, an ‘open’ AI coding model

JetBrains, the company behind a range of popular app development tools, has released its first “open” AI model for coding. On Wednesday, JetBrains made Mellum, a code-generating model the company released for its various software development suites last year, openly available on the AI dev platform Hugging Face. Mellum, trained on more than 4 trillion […]

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Orb, a new app by Ookla’s ex-CEO, offers a broader picture of your internet connection

Since it launched nearly 20 years ago, Speedtest.net has been one of the most popular tools used to measure internet speeds. However, Doug Suttles, the founder and former CEO of Ookla, the network testing company behind Speedtest, felt that just measuring speed was not enough to tell people all they wanted to know about their […]

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Anthropic suggests tweaks to proposed U.S. AI chip export controls

Anthropic agrees with the U.S. government that implementing robust export controls on domestically made AI chips will help the U.S. compete in the AI race against China. But the company is suggesting a few tweaks to the proposed restrictions. Anthropic released a blog post on Wednesday stating that the company “strongly supports” the U.S. Department […]

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Duolingo launches 148 courses created with AI after sharing plans to replace contractors with AI

Duolingo is introducing 148 new language courses that were created with generative AI, the company announced on Wednesday. The launch comes as Duolingo has been facing backlash this week after sharing that it was going to replace contractors with AI and become an “AI-first” company. The company says the launch of the new courses doubles […]

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Tuesday, April 29, 2025

Sarah Tavel, Benchmark’s first woman GP, transitions to venture partner

Eight years after joining Benchmark as the firm’s first woman general partner, Sarah Tavel announced on X that she is transitioning to a more limited role at the storied venture firm. In her new position as a venture partner, Tavel will continue to make investments and serve on existing company boards, but she will have […]

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OpenAI explains why ChatGPT became too sycophant

OpenAI has published a postmortem on the recent sycophancy issues with the default AI model powering ChatGPT, GPT-4o — issues that forced the company to roll back an update to the model released last week. Over the weekend, following the GPT-4o model update, users on social media noted that ChatGPT began responding in an overly […]

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Meta’s LlamaCon was all about undercutting OpenAI

On Tuesday, Meta held its first-ever AI developer conference, LlamaCon, at its Menlo Park, California headquarters. The company announced the launch of a consumer-facing Meta AI chatbot app, which will compete with ChatGPT, as well as a developer-facing API for accessing Llama models in the cloud. Both releases aim to expand adoption of the company’s […]

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Microsoft CEO says up to 30% of the company’s code was written by AI

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that 20%-30% of code inside the company’s repositories was “written by software” — meaning AI — during a fireside chat with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at Meta’s LlamaCon conference on Tuesday. Nadella gave the figure after Zuckerberg asked roughly how much of Microsoft’s code is AI-generated today. The Microsoft CEO […]

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Waymo and Toyota are dating. If they get serious, a new autonomous vehicle could be created.

Waymo and Toyota have agreed to explore a possible deal that could one day lead to a new vehicle designed for ride-hailing and even bring self-driving tech into consumer cars. The two companies have signed a preliminary agreement to look into developing and deploying an autonomous vehicle platform, according to a blog posted by Waymo. […]

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Figure AI sent cease-and-desist letters to secondary markets brokers

Last month, Brett Adcock, founder of a robotics startup Figure AI, claimed in a post on X that his company “is now # 1 most sought-after private stock in the secondary market.” But the company has sent cease-and-desist letters to at least two brokers who run secondary marketplaces, those brokers told TechCrunch.These people said Figure […]

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Startups launch products to catch people using AI cheating app Cluely

AI cheating startup Cluely went viral last week with bold claims that its hidden in-browser window is “undetectable” and can be used to “cheat on everything” from job interviews to exams. But some startups are claiming they can catch Cluely’s users. And Cluely says it’s ready to develop hardware products like smart glasses, or even […]

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Tesla board member Joe Gebbia actually bought some stock

Tesla board member and Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia acquired about 4,000 shares of the automaker’s stock, a purchase that has a value of about $1 million and change, according to a regulatory filing. That’s not a significant stock purchase, and certainly not for the billionaire board member, as Electrek noted in its reporting. It’s notable […]

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Google’s NotebookLM expands its AI podcast feature to more languages

Google’s AI-based note-taking and research assistant NotebookLM is making its Audio Overviews feature available in 76 new languages, the company announced on Tuesday. Audio Overviews launched last year to give users the ability to generate a podcast with AI virtual hosts based on documents they have shared with NotebookLM, such as course readings or legal […]

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Google Wallet to add support for digital IDs in more states

Google announced on Tuesday that digital IDs are coming to more states and services in Google Wallet. The company also shared that Wallet is getting a way to privately verify age, and that the app is expanding to 50 more countries. Residents in Arkansas, Montana, Puerto Rico, and West Virginia will soon be able to […]

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Meta launches a standalone AI app to compete with ChatGPT

After integrating Meta AI into WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger, Meta is rolling out a standalone AI app. Unveiled at Meta’s LlamaCon event on Tuesday, this app allows users to access Meta AI in a standalone app, similar to the ChatGPT app and other AI assistant apps. To win over users, Meta is trying to […]

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Meta needs to win over AI developers at its first LlamaCon

On Tuesday, Meta is hosting its first-ever LlamaCon AI developer conference at its Menlo Park headquarters, where the company will try to pitch developers on building applications with its open Llama AI models. Just a year ago, that wasn’t a hard sell. However, in recent months, Meta has struggled to keep up with both “open” […]

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Monday, April 28, 2025

Are EWOR fellowships the real project Europe is looking for?

Supporting super-early stage entrepreneurs in Europe seems to be suddenly in vogue. Back in March, “Project Europe” was launched to great fanfare by podcaster and VC Harry Stebbings with a small $10 million fund to back founders aged only 25 and under, riffing on the ‘Peter Thiel Fellowship’ model of old. Now a new fund […]

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OpenAI is fixing a ‘bug’ that allowed minors to generate erotic conversations

A bug in OpenAI’s ChatGPT allowed the chatbot to generate graphic erotica for accounts where a user registered as a minor, under the age of 18, TechCrunch’s testing revealed, and OpenAI confirmed.  In some cases, the chatbot even encouraged these users to ask for raunchier, more explicit content. OpenAI told TechCrunch its policies don’t allow […]

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Deel has finally been served legal papers in Rippling’s lawsuit

HR tech giant Deel says it has formally accepted service of legal documents in its ongoing court battle with rival Rippling in Ireland. This ends weeks of suspense after Rippling’s bailiffs couldn’t find Deel’s executives to serve them – only for Deel’s CEO and top lawyer to turn up in Dubai. Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz, […]

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Alibaba unveils Qwen 3, a family of ‘hybrid’ AI reasoning models

Chinese tech company Alibaba on Monday released Qwen 3, a family of AI models the company claims matches and in some cases outperforms the best models available from Google and OpenAI. Most of the models are — or soon will be — available for download under an “open” license from AI dev platform Hugging Face […]

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Mysterious financier asks judge to stop Canoo asset sale

A mysterious investor out of London has asked a bankruptcy judge in Delaware to stop the sale of EV startup Canoo’s assets to its CEO, calling it a “flawed” process. Charles Garson, a UK-based investor with no obvious ties to the EV startup, offered $20 million for Canoo’s assets, according to a filing. A lawyer […]

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Hugging Face releases a 3D-printed robotic arm starting at $100

Hugging Face, the startup best known for the AI developer platform of the same name, is selling a programmable, 3D-printable robotic arm that can pick up and place objects and perform a few other basic chores. Called the SO-101, the arm is the follow-up to Hugging Face’s previous robotic arm, the SO-100, released last year. […]

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Huawei aims to take on Nvidia’s H100 with new AI chip

Chinese tech conglomerate Huawei is looking to take on semiconductor behemoth Nvidia with a new advanced AI chip. Huawei is making progress developing its latest Ascend AI GPU, the Ascend 910D, according to the Wall Street Journal, citing sources familiar. The company has been reaching out to other Chinese firms to find test partners, the […]

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Temu adds ‘import charges’ after Trump tariffs

Temu is adding “import charges” of around 145% in response to President Donald Trump’s tariffs on goods shipped from China, CNBC reports. The fees cost more than the products that U.S. consumers are buying, and in some cases are more than doubling the price of a standard order. For example, CNBC found that a summer […]

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Google shifts Android news to a virtual event ahead of its I/O developer conference

News about Android is being relegated to a side show at Google’s annual developer conference, Google I/O, next month. On Monday, the company announced it would share information about the latest updates coming to the Android ecosystem at an upcoming virtual event called “The Android Show: I/O Edition,” airing on May 13. The decision to […]

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Sunday, April 27, 2025

StrictlyVC heads to london and Athens this May: Featuring Prime Minister of Greece and Europe’s leading tech and VC voices

It’s been a busy year for TechCrunch events — and it’s about to get even bigger. StrictlyVC, our boutique, highly exclusive event series for VCs and startups, is crossing the Atlantic this May with stops in London and Athens! We’re bringing StrictlyVC’s insider conversations to Europe. On May 8, we’ll dive into Athens’ booming tech […]

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Early cancer detection startup Craif raises $22M

Cancer ranks as one of the top causes of death worldwide. The National Cancer Institute reported nearly 20 million new cancer cases and 9.7 million cancer-related deaths globally in 2022, with projections showing a rise to 29.9 million new cases by 2040. Craif, spun off from Nagoya University in Japan in 2018, is using microRNA(miRNA) […]

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From coding tests to billion-dollar startups, Ali Partovi’s eight-year experiment is paying off

In Silicon Valley, where the same high-wattage names tend to dominate the headlines, Ali Partovi has long wielded outsized influence despite limited name recognition. The Iranian-born Harvard graduate built an impressive resume early on — joining the founding team of LinkExchange (acquired by Microsoft in 1998 for $265 million), co-founding iLike (sold to MySpace for […]

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4chan is back online, says it’s been ‘starved of money’

4chan is partly back online after a hack took the infamous image-sharing site down for nearly two weeks. The site first went down on April 14, with the person responsible for the hack apparently leaking data including a list of moderators and “janitors” (one janitor told TechCrunch they were “confident” that the leaked data was […]

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Welcome to Chat Haus, the coworking space for AI chatbots

Nestled between an elementary school and a public library in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood sits a new kind of “luxury” coworking space.  Dubbed the Chat Haus, this space has many of the elements you’d find in a traditional coworking office: people hammering away at their computer keyboards, another person taking a phone call, someone else pausing […]

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Best bookmarking apps to help organize and declutter your digital life 

If you’re someone who likes to bookmark a bunch of things that you find interesting or want to come back to later, it can be hard to manage everything you have saved. There are a number of great bookmark apps on the market that can help you organize all these sorts of links, articles, and […]

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Saturday, April 26, 2025

The RealReal founder Julie Wainwright has a startling new memoir

Julie Wainwright has taken two companies public, a pretty incredible feat by any standard. Yet in her new memoir, Time to Get Real, she offers readers something even more valuable: a blunt look at the messy realities of leadership. Wainwright shares the kinds of tough truths that many high-achieving CEOs can relate to but rarely […]

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Google’s DeepMind UK team reportedly seeks to unionize

Around 300 London-based members of Google’s AI-focused DeepMind team are seeking to unionize with the Communication Workers Union, according to a Financial Times report that cites three people involved with the unionization effort. These DeepMind employees are reportedly unhappy about Google’s decision to remove a pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance from […]

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Google will stop supporting early Nest thermostats on October 25

Google announced this week that beginning on October 25, it will no longer support or release software updates for the first and second generation Nest Learning Thermostats. And it will completely stop launching new Nest products in Europe. That means owners of the Nest thermostats released in 2011 and 2012 (as well as the version […]

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Week in Review: Cluely helps you cheat on everything

Welcome back to Week in Review! We’ve got tons of news for you this week: Slate EVs spotted in the wild; Airbnb pricing updates; a hack at Blue Shield; and much more. Let’s go! Get a clue: Cluely is an AI-based tool that helps people cheat on exams, sales calls, and even job interviews. Though […]

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Amazon’s big book sale just happens to overlap with Independent Bookstore Day

Amazon is raising eyebrows with the timing of its big book sale for 2025, which runs from April 23 to 28 — which means it’s competing directly with Independent Bookstore Day. As writer Maris Kreisman explained in Lit Hub, Independent Bookstore Day is an annual event organized by the American Booksellers Association (ABA), with events, […]

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Government officials are kind of bad at the internet

Perhaps no one in the world has made such catastrophic tech flubs this year as U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. The saga started when the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, reported that he had been mistakenly added to an unauthorized Signal group chat by U.S. National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, where numerous high-ranking […]

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Lately’s new gamified app helps people arrive on time

A new app called Lately launched on the App Store a few weeks ago, targeting people with ADHD to help them arrive on time and rewarding them for doing so. The service is designed to help users manage their travel plans by notifying them when it’s time to leave for a trip, sending reminders 30 […]

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Friday, April 25, 2025

DoorDash seeks dismissal of Uber lawsuit

DoorDash has asked a California Superior Court judge to dismiss a lawsuit filed by Uber that accuses the food delivery company of stifling competition by intimidating restaurant owners into exclusive deals. DoorDash argues in its motion that Uber’s claim lacks merit on all fronts. On a post on its website on Friday, DoorDash said, “the […]

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TechCrunch Mobility: Slate’s ‘transformer’ EV truck breaks cover and Tesla’s dueling realities

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! Busy week, so let’s get to it. Starting with federal regulations! Woohoo. Exciting stuff.  I’m talking about the U.S. Department of Transportation’s new Automated Vehicle Framework, which […]

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Anthropic sent a takedown notice to a dev trying to reverse-engineer its coding tool

In the battle between two “agentic” coding tools — Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex CLI — the latter appears to be fostering more developer goodwill than the former. That’s at least partly because Anthropic has issued takedown notices to a developer trying to reverse-engineer Claude Code, which is under a more restrictive usage license […]

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TechCrunch StrictlyVC in Athens in May will feature a special guest: Greece’s prime minister

We’re thrilled to announce that Greece’s prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, will be joining us at our upcoming StrictlyVC event in Athens, co-hosted with Endeavor, on Thursday night, May 8, at the stunning Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center. For those who might not be familiar with his background, Mitsotakis brings a fascinating blend of experiences to […]

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Startups Weekly: Tech IPOs and deals proceed, but price matters

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. This week confirmed that deals can still happen in a troubled world, but price considerations and adjustments are now part of the picture. Most interesting startup stories […]

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ChatGPT: Everything you need to know about the AI-powered chatbot

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm since its launch in November 2022. What started as a tool to supercharge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved into a behemoth with 300 million weekly active users. 2024 was a big year for OpenAI, from its partnership […]

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An OpenAI researcher who worked on GPT-4.5 had their green card denied

Kai Chen, a Canadian AI researcher working at OpenAI who’s lived in the U.S. for 12 years, was denied a green card, according to Noam Brown, a leading research scientist at the company. In a post on X, Brown said that Chen learned of the decision Friday and must soon leave the country. “It’s deeply […]

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Thursday, April 24, 2025

Bezos-backed Slate Auto debuts analog EV pickup truck that is decidedly anti-Tesla

A new American electric vehicle startup called Slate Auto has made its debut, and it’s about as anti-Tesla as it gets. It’s affordable, deeply customizable, and very analog. It has manual windows and it doesn’t come with a main infotainment screen. Heck, it isn’t even painted. It can also transform from a two-seater pickup to […]

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Faraday Future founder named co-CEO three years after being sidelined by internal probe

Troubled electric vehicle startup Faraday Future’s board of directors has appointed founder Jia Yueting as the company’s co-CEO, three years after he was sidelined following an internal probe into allegations of fraud — a probe that led to a investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission that remains ongoing. Jia will serve alongside current CEO […]

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Wait, how did a decentralized service like Bluesky go down?

It turns out that decentralized social networks can go down, too. On Thursday evening, the decentralized social network Bluesky experienced a significant outage, leaving users unable to load the app on both the web and mobile devices for roughly an hour. According to a message on Bluesky’s status page, the company was aware of the […]

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Anthropic CEO wants to open the black box of AI models by 2027

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay Thursday highlighting how little researchers understand about the inner workings of the world’s leading AI models. To address that, Amodei set an ambitious goal for Anthropic to reliably detect most AI model problems by 2027. Amodei acknowledges the challenge ahead. In “The Urgency of Interpretability,” the CEO says Anthropic has […]

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How do you define cheating in the age of AI?

This AI startup raised $5.3M to help people “cheat on everything.” But in the age of AI, how do you define cheating? Columbia University recently suspended student Roy Lee for building a tool to help people cheat on engineering interviews. He’s been making waves on X after posting a long thread detailing the saga and how […]

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OpenAI rolls out a ‘lightweight’ version of its ChatGPT deep research tool

OpenAI is bringing a new “lightweight” version of its ChatGPT deep research tool, which scours the web to compile research reports on a topic, to ChatGPT Plus, Team, and Pro users, the company announced Thursday. The new lightweight deep research, which will also come to free ChatGPT users starting today, is powered by a version […]

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Astro Teller is joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 in October

We are thrilled to announce that Astro Teller, the head honcho of Alphabet’s X, the Moonshot Factory, will be joining us as a featured speaker at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, happening October 27-29 at Moscone West in San Francisco. The whole affair promises to be fun filled and rife with intel and insights that you won’t […]

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Flex acquires a16z-backed Maza for $40M as fintech M&A heats up

Flex, a startup that offers personal finance software for business owners, has acquired Maza, a finance app aimed at Spanish speakers in the U.S., for $40 million, the companies told TechCrunch exclusively. At first glance, the pairing may seem a bit curious. Flex’s software and payments infrastructure is to help business owners have a single […]

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Netflix now offers dialogue-only subtitles

Netflix just introduced a new way to experience subtitles that eliminates the need to read audio cues like “door slams” or “phone rings.”  Announced on Thursday, Netflix’s new dialogue-only subtitles can be enabled by going to “Navigate to Audio” and then “Subtitles.” Users will see an option labeled “English” instead of “English (CC),” indicating that […]

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Facebook cracks down on spammy content by cutting reach and monetization

Facebook will begin lowering the reach of accounts sharing spammy content and making them ineligible for monetization, Meta announced on Thursday. The company is also increasing efforts to remove Facebook accounts that coordinate fake engagement and impersonate others, it says. The move comes as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has promised a return to “OG Facebook.” […]

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TikTok adds support for ALT text for photos

TikTok is rolling out support for ALT text for photo posts to make content more accessible for users with visual and cognitive impairments. The company says creators can now provide descriptive text for photos to help users with screen readers understand the visual content through spoken descriptions. TikTok told TechCrunch in an email that creators […]

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Anthropic is launching a new program to study AI ‘model welfare’

Could future AIs be “conscious,” and experience the world similarly to the way humans do? There’s no strong evidence that they will, but Anthropic isn’t ruling out the possibility. On Thursday, the AI lab announced that it has started a research program to investigate — and prepare to navigate — what it’s calling “model welfare.” […]

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Spotify’s AI playlist rolls out to Asia and more markets

Spotify announced on Thursday that it expanded the availability of its AI Playlist feature to over 40 additional markets, including countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Caribbean.  The AI-powered tool, currently in beta on Android and iOS devices, lets listeners create personalized playlists based on written prompts, such as “workout music to make my […]

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Speak at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025: Applications now open

TechCrunch Disrupt returns October 27–29 to Moscone West in San Francisco — and we’re inviting thought leaders, founders, VCs, and tech experts to apply for a chance to take the stage at one of the most anticipated tech events of the year. Applications are now open to speak at Disrupt 2025, where over 10,000+ tech […]

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Adobe releases new Firefly image generation models and a redesigned Firefly web app

Adobe on Thursday launched the latest iteration of its Firefly family of image generation AI models, a model for generating vectors, and a redesigned web app that houses all its AI models, plus some from its competitors. There’s also a mobile app for Firefly in the works. The new Firefly Image Model 4, Adobe says, […]

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Wednesday, April 23, 2025

Mystery will may reveal Zappos founder’s final wishes

According to the WSJ, a recently discovered will suggests late Zappos co-founder Tony Hsieh had concrete plans for his fortune despite previous beliefs that he died without leaving instructions for an estate that’s estimated to be worth $1.2 billion. Among other things, the document, signed in 2015 and included in a recent court filing, contains […]

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IBM affected by DOGE cuts, downplays impact during Q1 earnings call

Tech and consulting giant IBM was not immune to the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) cuts. IBM had 15 of its federal contracts cancelled due to DOGE-related cuts during the first quarter of 2025, according to reporting from Reuters and Bloomberg. These cuts amount to $100 million in future payments, per Bloomberg. Federal contracts represent […]

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OpenAI’s GPT-4.1 may be less aligned than the company’s previous AI models

In mid-April, OpenAI launched a powerful new AI model, GPT-4.1, that the company claimed “excelled” at following instructions. But the results of several independent tests suggest the model is less aligned — that is to say, less reliable — than previous OpenAI releases. When OpenAI launches a new model, it typically publishes a detailed technical […]

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DOJ reportedly probes Disney-FuboTV deal over competition concerns

The U.S. Department of Justice is probing Disney’s deal to take a controlling stake in FuboTV, Bloomberg reports. Fubo is a live TV streaming service known for its extensive sports coverage. Officials are examining whether the deal would create a concentration of power in the sports streaming market. In January, Disney announced that it was going […]

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Anti-Musk protests are now an official risk to Tesla’s business

Protests against Elon Musk and Tesla have been spreading around the world thanks to the CEO’s involvement in the Trump administration. Now those protests are listed in an official “risk factor” in paperwork Tesla is required to file with federal regulators. The new language, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday morning, shows […]

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Google Gemini has 350M monthly users, reveals court hearing

Gemini, Google’s AI chatbot, had 350 million monthly active users around the globe as of March, according to internal data revealed in Google’s ongoing antitrust suit. The Information first reported the stat. Usage of Google’s AI offerings has exploded in the last year. Gemini had just 9 million daily active users in October 2024, but […]

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Bring a +1 to TechCrunch Sessions: AI and save 50% on their ticket through May 4

You’re not the only one thinking about where AI is headed. So why come alone? From now through May 4, buy your Early Bird ticket to TechCrunch Sessions: AI and save up to $210—plus get 50% off a second ticket for your colleague, co-founder, collaborator, friend, or whoever you want to bring. It’s your opportunity […]

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Meta’s Threads opens up ads to global advertisers

Months after first testing ads in select markets, including the U.S., Meta on Wednesday announced that its Instagram Threads app would now expand ads to all advertisers worldwide. The expansion will allow eligible advertisers to reach Threads’ over 320 million monthly active users, and it will include access to an inventory filter to control the sensitivity level […]

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Tuesday, April 22, 2025

Noxtua raises $92M for its sovereign AI tuned for the German legal system

Back in 2020, Xayn was a privacy-based, on-device AI startup designed specifically for smartphones. But that early experience eventually saw the company pivot into developing sovereign AI for the legal sphere. Now Xayn has rebranded as Noxtua and raised a $92.2 million (roughly €81.2 million) Series B round. The round was led by strategic investor […]

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Meta’s Oversight Board seeks details on the company’s new hate speech policies

Meta’s Oversight Board, the independent group created to help Meta with content moderation decisions, on Tuesday issued its response to the social media company’s new hate speech policies announced in January. The Board says that Meta’s new policies were “announced hastily, in a departure from regular procedure,” and called on the company to provide more […]

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Intel reportedly plans to lay off over 21,000 employees

Intel is set to cut over 21,000 people, or roughly 20% of its workforce, with an announcement due this week, according to a Bloomberg report.  The news comes ahead of Intel’s Q1 earnings call helmed by recently appointed CEO Lip-Bu Tan, who replaced longtime chief Pat Gelsinger last year.  With the layoffs, Tan aims to […]

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StrictlyVC heads to Athens for in-depth conversations on European innovation and investment

StrictlyVC is turning up the heat in 2025 — and we’re going international! First stop: Athens, May 8. Get ready for sharp, unfiltered conversations onstage — and your chance to jump into the dialogue. This isn’t just an event; it’s a forum where every attendee has a voice with some of Europe’s most influential tech […]

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xAI’s Grok chatbot can now ‘see’ the world around it

xAI’s Grok chatbot can now answer questions about what’s in view of your smartphone’s camera, similar to real-time vision features available for Google’s Gemini and ChatGPT. On Tuesday, xAI announced the launch of Grok Vision, which lets users point their phone at objects like products, signs, and documents and ask questions about them. Grok Vision […]

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Tesla profits drop 71% on weak sales and anti-Elon Musk sentiment

Tesla’s flailing sales figures have put the company closer to the red than it has been in years, according to financial results released Tuesday, threatening one of its biggest advantages over other EV players. The electric automaker reported $409 million in net income on $19.3 billion in revenue after delivering almost 337,000 EVs in the […]

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Why OpenAI wanted to buy Cursor but opted for the fast-growing Windsurf

Anysphere, maker of AI coding assistant Cursor, is growing so quickly, it’s not in the market to be sold, even to OpenAI, a source close to the company tells TechCrunch. It’s been a hot target. Cursor is one of the most popular AI-powered coding tools and its revenue has been growing astronomically – doubling on […]

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ChatGPT’s responses will now include Washington Post articles

OpenAI and The Washington Post just announced a new content partnership which will see ChatGPT summarize and link to the Post’s original reporting in its answers. This is OpenAI’s latest media partnership, with the AI giant inking deals with over 20 news publishers so far, including outlets like The Guardian and Axios. The Washington Post […]

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Burning questions (and some answers) about Bluesky’s new verification system

Bluesky’s launch of a verification system has raised a slew of questions among its user base, from who will be picked — and why — to what outside organizations might be involved and whether the self-verification process will end. TechCrunch has some answers. After a leak last week, Bluesky officially announced Monday the arrival of […]

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Meta releases its CapCut rival Edits globally

Meta announced on Tuesday that it’s officially launching Edits, its CapCut-like video creation app. Releasing globally, Edits will allow creators to do things like keep track of video ideas, get inspiration for new content, and create videos with effects and AI tools. The app is available on iOS and Android. All of the app’s features […]

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Ex-Meta engineer raises $14M for Lace AI, a revenue generation software startup

As an AI engineer at Meta, Boris Valkov helped build PyTorch, one of the world’s largest machine learning libraries. During his time there, Valkov realized that artificial intelligence “was about to unlock capabilities…in the application layer in the software stack.” He left Meta in late 2021 to start Lace AI, a startup that has developed […]

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India’s EV startup Ather cuts IPO size to $308M, seeking $1.4B post-money valuation

Ather Energy, the Indian startup manufacturing electric two-wheelers, has cut the size of its initial public offer by 18% to 26.26 billion Indian rupees ($308.3M), according to a new draft prospectus filed Tuesday. The Bengaluru-based startup confirmed to TechCrunch it’s targeting a post-money valuation of $1.4 billion. Last September, the startup sought a valuation of […]

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Two undergrads built an AI speech model to rival NotebookLM

A pair of undergrads, neither with extensive AI expertise, say that they’ve created an openly available AI model that can generate podcast-style clips similar to Google’s NotebookLM. The market for synthetic speech tools is vast and growing. ElevenLabs is one of the largest players, but there’s no shortage of challengers (see PlayAI, Sesame, and so […]

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Monday, April 21, 2025

Rivian elects Cohere’s CEO to its board in latest signal the EV maker is bullish on AI

Aidan Gomez, the co-founder and CEO of generative AI startup Cohere, has joined the board of EV maker Rivian, according to a regulatory filing. The appointment is the latest sign that Rivian sees promises in applying AI to its own venture while positioning itself as a software leader — and even provider — within the […]

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Tomorrow: Join Ali Ghodsi and Dario Amodei for a fireside chat

Join this free virtual event, featuring Ali Ghodsi, the trailblazing co-founder and CEO of Databricks, alongside Dario Amodei, the pioneering co-founder and CEO of Anthropic. Uncover how their revolutionary collaboration is poised to fast-track the advancement of domain-specific AI agents. Not only will you experience an engaging exchange between the visionary leaders of two AI […]

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A16z acqui-hires VC tech podcaster Erik Torenberg, who joins as new partner

Andreessen Horowitz’s hiring spree continues. On Monday, Erik Torenberg announced that the giant VC firm had acquired his Turpentine podcast, with him joining as a general partner. Torenberg’s podcast focuses mostly on interviewing VCs at a variety of firms about their approach to investing. Recent guests include Accel’s Andrew Braccia, Seven Seven Six’s Alexis Ohanian, […]

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Bluesky launches blue check verification

Bluesky announced on Monday that it is rolling out blue check verification, confirming previous rumors that this feature was on its way to the platform. Like Twitter’s original blue check (RIP), Bluesky’s blue check will verify that notable accounts are legitimate, making it easy for users to trust that an account’s posts are real. In […]

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Reddit briefly down for users worldwide

Popular social network and forum site Reddit reported significant outages on Monday morning.  The connection errors started at around 11:20 a.m. ET, according to the website Downdetector, which collects anecdotal reports from impacted users globally. At its peak, more than 90,000 users logged an outage report with the downtime tracking website.  At 11:52 a.m. ET, […]

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An AI doctoral candidate in California says they had their student visa revoked

An AI doctoral student in California had their SEVIS record — the digital proof of their valid student visa — terminated, putting their immigration status at risk. Speaking to TechCrunch, the student, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal, said they were notified via their college’s international student center that they’d been identified in a criminal records […]

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20 new tech unicorns were minted in 2025 so far

Despite a still tight venture capital market, new unicorns are still being created every month. Using data from Crunchbase and PitchBook, TechCrunch tracked down the newly VC-backed startup minted unicorns so far this year (as of the end of January). These include healthcare companies like Hippocratic AI and satellite space companies like Loft Orbital.  This […]

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Instagram is using AI to find teens lying about their age and restricting their accounts

Meta is using AI technology to search for kids who are lying about their age on Instagram in order to bypass safeguards, the company announced on Monday. When Meta finds an account that it suspects belongs to a teen, the platform will enroll them into a restricted Teen Account, even if the account lists an […]

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Airbnb will now show users the total cost of their stay right away

One of the chief complaints of Airbnb users over the years has been not being able to tell right away how much they would pay for their stay, including charges such as cleaning fees. Airbnb is now fixing that by showing the total cost for a given property, including all charges, automatically. Users across the […]

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Tesla reportedly delays launch of new low-cost model by months

Tesla is pushing back the promised launch of a more affordable EV by months, according to a report from Reuters. The new model, which is supposedly a very stripped-down Model Y, was supposed to debut in the first half of this year but now might not come until late 2025 or early 2026, states the […]

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Sunday, April 20, 2025

Palantir exec defends company’s immigration surveillance work

One of the founders of startup accelerator Y Combinator offered unsparing criticism this weekend of the controversial data analytics company Palantir, leading a company executive to offer an extensive defense of Palantir’s work. The back-and-forth came after federal filings showed that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — tasked with carrying out the Trump administration’s […]

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OpenAI’s o3 AI model scores lower on a benchmark than the company initially implied

A discrepancy between first- and third-party benchmark results for OpenAI’s o3 AI model is raising questions about the company’s transparency and model testing practices. When OpenAI unveiled o3 in December, the company claimed the model could answer just over a fourth of questions on FrontierMath, a challenging set of math problems. That score blew the […]

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Kids sure love video game movies

“A Minecraft Movie” isn’t just a hit — after three weekends in theaters, the film is estimated to have grossed $344 million domestically and $720 million worldwide. That makes it the biggest movie of an admittedly underwhelming year at the box office (so far), and the second biggest video game movie of all time. Coming […]

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Your politeness could be costly for OpenAI

“I wonder how much money OpenAI has lost in electricity costs from people saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to their models.” It was a seemingly random question posed by a user on X (formerly Twitter), but OpenAI CEO Sam Altman jumped in to reply that typing those words has added up to “tens of millions […]

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Uncovered emails showed how Meta struggled to keep Facebook culturally relevant

With the first week of Meta’s antitrust trial behind us, documents shared by the U.S Federal Trade Commission (FTC) offered more insight into Meta’s internal struggles to keep Facebook relevant. In emails from 2022, Meta executives mulled different visions for Facebook’s future to boost its success, acknowledging that its cultural relevance was decreasing.  Fast-forward to […]

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Saturday, April 19, 2025

Congress has questions about 23andMe bankruptcy

3The leaders of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce said they are investigating how 23andMe’s bankruptcy might affect customers’ data. Representatives Brett Guthrie, Gus Bilirakis, and Gary Palmer (all Republicans) sent a letter Thursday to the genetic testing company’s interim CEO Joe Selsavage asking a number of questions about how 23andMe will handle customer […]

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Robots run a half marathon, slowly

It looks like humanoid robots have a long way to go before catching up with human runners. Beijing’s E-Town tech hub hosted what it described as the first world’s first humanoid half-marathon on Saturday, with 21 humanoid robots competing alongside thousands of humans. Bloomberg reports that the winning robot, Tiangong Ultra, was built by the […]

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Week in Review: Google loses a major antitrust case

Welcome back to Week in Review! We’ve got tons of stuff for you this week: antitrust lawsuits against Google and Meta; Grok can now remember; Bolt CEO Ryan Breslow wants to make his mark; and much, much more. Have a great weekend! It’s over: Google violated antitrust laws in the ad tech market, a judge […]

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Famed AI researcher launches controversial startup to replace all human workers everywhere

Every now and then, a Silicon Valley startup launches with such an “absurdly” described mission that it’s difficult to discern if the startup is for real or just satire. Such is the case with Mechanize, a startup whose founder – and the non-profit AI research organization he founded called Epoch – is being skewered on […]

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Friday, April 18, 2025

ChatGPT is referring to users by their names unprompted, and some find it ‘creepy’

Some ChatGPT users have noticed a strange phenomenon recently: occasionally, the chatbot refers to them by name as it reasons through problems. That wasn’t the default behavior previously, and several users claim ChatGPT is mentioning their names despite never having been told what to call them. Reviews are mixed. One user, software developer and AI […]

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From Bogotá to the Battlefield: LatAm startups are winning big in TechCrunch Startup Battlefield

For startups around the world, the TechCrunch Startup Battlefield program offers unmatched exposure, credibility, and connections to scale their businesses. TechCrunch has long been committed to spotlighting companies solving real-world problems in scalable and sustainable ways — making it a powerful launchpad for startups both in and outside the U.S. Several Latin American startups have […]

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Startups Weekly: Mixed messages from venture capital

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. This week brought us mixed messages. A fresh IPO filing, but a bleak outlook for exits overall. New funding rounds, but founders frustrated over lack of capital. […]

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TikToker sues Roblox over her Charli XCX ‘Apple’ dance

TikTok content creator Kelley Heyer sued the video game Roblox for using her dance to Charli XCX’s “Apple” without permission. Heyer posted the viral dance in June 2024, which fed off of the hype of Charli XCX’s hit summer album Brat. The dance became so popular that Charli XCX incorporated it into her live show […]

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ChatGPT will now use its ‘memory’ to personalize web searches

OpenAI is upgrading ChatGPT’s “memory” again. In a changelog and support pages on OpenAI’s website Thursday, the company quietly announced “Memory with Search,” a feature that lets ChatGPT draw on memories — details from past conversations, such as your favorite foods — to inform queries when the bot searches the web. ChatGPT release notes were […]

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Thursday, April 17, 2025

OpenAI pursued Cursor maker before entering into talks to buy Windsurf for $3B

When news broke that OpenAI was in talks to acquire AI coding company Windsurf for $3 billion, one of the first questions on the mind of anyone following the space was likely: “Why not buy Cursor creator Anysphere instead?” After all, OpenAI Startup Fund has been an investor in Anysphere, the maker of Cursor, since the […]

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AI benchmarking platform Chatbot Arena forms a new company

Chatbot Arena, the crowdsourced benchmarking project major AI labs rely on to test and market their AI models, is forming a company called Arena Intelligence Inc., reports Bloomberg. In a blog post published Thursday, Chatbot Arena said that the company will “give [it] the resources to improve [its platform] significantly over what it is today.” […]

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Instagram’s new Blend feature creates a custom reels feed for you and your friends

Instagram on Thursday announced that it’s rolling out Blend, a new feature that lets you create a custom, personalized reels feed for you and your friends. Blends are invite-only and can be created with a singular friend or with a group chat. The custom feeds are refreshed with new content each day. The launch doesn’t […]

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Here are all the tech companies rolling back DEI or still committed to it — so far

Companies around America have started cutting DEI programs and eliminating DEI commitments from public documents in response to legal and political threats from the Trump administration. Just a few weeks ago, Attorney General Pam Bondi instructed the Department of Justice to “investigate, eliminate, and penalize,” DEI programs deemed illegal in private sector companies that receive […]

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The latest viral ChatGPT trend is doing ‘reverse location search’ from photos

There’s a somewhat concerning new trend going viral: people are using ChatGPT to figure out the location shown in pictures. This week, OpenAI released its newest AI models, o3 and o4-mini, both of which can uniquely “reason” through uploaded images. In practice, the models can crop, rotate and zoom in on photos — even blurry […]

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OpenAI’s Stargate project sets its sights on international expansion

Stargate, a $500 billion project headed up by OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank to build AI data centers and other AI infrastructure in the U.S., is considering investments in the U.K. and elsewhere overseas, according to a Financial Times report.  While Stargate was initially launched as a way to boost U.S. AI infrastructure, the project is […]

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Wednesday, April 16, 2025

xAI adds a ‘memory’ feature to Grok

Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, is slowly bringing its Grok chatbot to parity with top rivals like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. Wednesday night, xAI announced a “memory” feature for Grok that enables the bot to remember details from past conversations. Now, if you ask Grok for recommendations, it’ll give more personalized responses — assuming you’ve […]

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Zoom restores service after an hours-long outage

Zoom says its platform is back online after suffering an outage for much of Wednesday afternoon. “Service has now been restored after the earlier outage, and we sincerely appreciate your patience and understanding,” Zoom said in a post on X at around 2 p.m. Pacific. The trouble began around 11:40 a.m., according to The Verge, […]

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Chapter, a Medicare startup with links to Vance, Thiel and Ramaswamy, just raised a round at $1.5B valuation

Chapter, a Medicare advisory startup co-founded by former Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy, has closed a $75 million funding round at a valuation of $1.5 billion led by private equity and venture firm Stripes. The startup helps seniors choose Medicare health plans analyzing doctors, hospitals, and prescription drug coverage. Unlike many other Medicare insurance brokers, […]

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Trump administration reportedly considers a US DeepSeek ban

The Trump administration is considering new restrictions on the Chinese AI lab DeepSeek that would limit it from buying Nvidia’s AI chips, and potentially bar Americans from accessing its AI services, The New York Times reported on Wednesday. The restrictions are part of the Trump administration’s effort to compete with China on AI. Months after […]

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Rippling wants UK fintech Revolut to reveal who paid off Deel’s alleged ‘spy’

Another highly-valued startup has just been added to the mix in the ongoing legal drama between Rippling and Deel: U.K. fintech giant Revolut. In his blockbuster affidavit that reads like it’s straight out of a movie, Irish Rippling employee Keith O’Brien claimed that he was paid about $6,000 a month to spy on Rippling. He […]

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OpenAI launches a pair of AI reasoning models, o3 and o4-mini

OpenAI announced on Thursday the launch of o3 and o4-mini, new AI reasoning models designed to pause and work through questions before responding. The company calls o3 its most advanced reasoning model ever, outperforming the company’s previous models on tests measuring math, coding, reasoning, science, and visual understanding capabilities. Meanwhile, o4-mini offers what OpenAI says […]

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Startup funding hit records in Q1. But the outlook for 2025 is still awful.

Startups attracted $91.5 billion in venture capital funding in Q1, according to the latest report from data provider PitchBook. This figure not only exceeds the previous quarter’s allocation by 18.5% but also represents the second-highest quarterly investment in the last decade. Despite this seemingly positive news, Kyle Stanford, lead U.S. venture capital analyst at PitchBook, […]

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Microsoft researchers say they’ve developed a hyper-efficient AI model that can run on CPUs

Microsoft researchers claim they’ve developed the largest-scale 1-bit AI model, also known as a “bitnet,” to date. Called BitNet b1.58 2B4T, it’s openly available under an MIT license and can run on CPUs, including Apple’s M2. Bitnets are essentially compressed models designed to run on lightweight hardware. In standard models, weights, the values that define […]

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TechCrunch All Stage: Full agenda revealed

The ultimate founder summit returns — now bigger than ever! Formerly TechCrunch Early Stage, TC All Stage is bringing together founders and VCs from every stage, not just early stage. We’re thrilled to unveil the full breakout session lineup at TC All Stage. Packed with scaling pioneers and top-tier VCs, these sessions are designed for […]

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As Deezer approaches profitability, it rolls out a custom algorithm and other new features

Last month, Deezer reported its first positive cash flow in 2024, marking a significant milestone in its history. As the music streaming platform nears profitability, it’s launching new features to differentiate itself in the highly competitive market. On Wednesday, Deezer announced several features aimed at providing listeners with a more personalized experience. These include a […]

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Tuesday, April 15, 2025

Grok gains a canvas-like tool for creating docs and apps

Grok, the chatbot from Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, has gained a canvas-like feature for editing and creating documents and basic apps. Called Grok Studio, the feature was announced on X late Tuesday. It’s available for both free and paying Grok users on Grok.com “Grok can now generate documents, code, reports, and browser games,” wrote […]

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US government imposes license requirement on Nvidia H20 exports

Semiconductor giant Nvidia is facing unexpected new U.S. export controls on its H20 chips. In a filing Tuesday, Nvidia said it was informed by the U.S. government that it will need a license to export its H20 AI chips to China. This license will be required indefinitely, according to the filing — the U.S. government […]

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Figma ignores the fear, files paperwork for an IPO

Design software startup Figma announced Tuesday it has filed its confidential paperwork for an IPO. We won’t know more until that paperwork becomes public, which, best-case scenario would be in about a month. However, with the stock market in groundhog mode — seeing its shadow with every new gyration of the Trump administration’s trade policies […]

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Anthropic’s Claude can now read your Gmail

Anthropic announced on Tuesday that its AI chatbot, Claude, now integrates with Google Workspace, allowing it to search and reference your emails in Gmail, scheduled events in Google Calendar, and documents in Google Docs. The integration is rolling out in beta first to subscribers to Anthropic’s Max, Team, Enterprise, and Pro plans. Administrators managing multi-user […]

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Publishing platform Medium says it’s sticking with DEI

Publishing platform Medium says it’s still committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), even as many other U.S. tech companies have scaled back their efforts in this space to appease the Trump administration. In a blog post published on Monday, Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine backed the company’s diverse community, saying that businesses shouldn’t have to […]

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Witness a dynamic dialogue between two visionary CEOs

Step into an extraordinary fireside chat featuring Ali Ghodsi, the visionary co-founder and CEO of Databricks, alongside Dario Amodei, the innovative co-founder and CEO of Anthropic. Discover how their groundbreaking partnership is set to accelerate the evolution of domain-specific AI agents. During this free, virtual event, you’ll also gain exclusive access to three additional sessions […]

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Deel’s CEO is now in Dubai, complicating Rippling’s lawsuit

Rippling’s efforts to serve Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz have been significantly complicated by the fact that Bouaziz and his lawyer are now in Dubai, according to internal correspondence seen by TechCrunch. The UAE is a country with a reputation of being a safe haven for those wanting to avoid extradition. Rippling is trying to serve […]

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Founders Fund’s new $4.6B fund indicates an era of big VC spending

Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund has completed the raise of its third growth fund, according to an SEC filing. Beyond the sum — which is a big step up from its last previous $3.4 billion growth fund closed in early 2022 — there’s a couple of other interesting things to note about this raise. For one, it’s more […]

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Former Tesla supply chain leaders create Atomic, an AI inventory solution

Tesla famously struggled to scale up production of the Model 3 sedan in 2018 — so much so that CEO Elon Musk said his company was weeks away from collapsing. That near-death experience helped spawn a whole new company called Atomic that’s built around using AI to streamline supply chains. Co-founded by former Tesla employees […]

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Mark Zuckerberg once considered deleting all your Facebook friends

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg once considered deleting everyone’s Facebook friends in an effort to boost the social network’s cultural relevance. This “potentially crazy idea,” as the exec called it at the time, was revealed on Monday as a part of the evidence introduced during the first day of the U.S. government’s antitrust trial against Meta. […]

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Monday, April 14, 2025

RLWRLD raises $14.8M to build a foundational model for robotics

As robotics has advanced, industry has steadily adopted more robots to automate away many kinds of grunt work. More than 540,000 new industrial robots were installed worldwide in 2023, taking the number of total industrial robots active to above 4 million, per IFR. Industrial robots typically excel at repetitive tasks, but they find it challenging […]

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Debates over AI benchmarking have reached Pokémon

Not even Pokémon is safe from AI benchmarking controversy. Last week, a post on X went viral, claiming that Google’s latest Gemini model surpassed Anthropic’s flagship Claude model in the original Pokémon video game trilogy. Reportedly, Gemini had reached Lavendar Town in a developer’s Twitch stream; Claude was stuck at Mount Moon as of late […]

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Chinese marketplace DHgate becomes a top US app as trade war intensifies

The Trump trade war has gone viral on TikTok, pushing a Chinese e-commerce app, DHgate, to the top of the Apple App Store in the U.S. After Trump increased U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports by 145%, numerous Chinese suppliers and manufacturers began making TikTok videos explaining to consumers how the global luxury goods market actually […]

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OpenAI plans to phase out GPT-4.5, its largest-ever AI model, from its API

OpenAI said on Monday that it would soon wind down the availability of GPT-4.5, its largest-ever AI model, via its API. GPT-4.5 was released only in late February. Developers will have access to GPT-4.5 via OpenAI’s API until July 14, after which they’ll have to transition to another model in OpenAI’s catalog, the company says. […]

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Google’s newest AI model is designed to help study dolphin ‘speech’

Google’s AI research lab, Google DeepMind, says that it has created an AI model that can help decipher dolphin vocalizations, supporting research efforts to better understand how dolphins communicate. The model, called DolphinGemma, was trained using data from the Wild Dolphin Project (WDP), a nonprofit that studies Atlantic spotted dolphins and their behaviors. Built on […]

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Google Classroom gives teachers an AI feature for quiz questions

Google Classroom introduced a new AI-powered feature designed to help teachers generate questions. Launched on Monday, this tool lets educators create a list of questions based on specific text input. Using this text-dependent question generation tool, which utilizes Gemini, teachers can either upload files from Google Drive or manually enter text for the AI to […]

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Blue Origin’s all-female crew, including Katy Perry, successfully launched

Jeff Bezos’ space company, Blue Origin, successfully launched its New Shepard rocket at around 9:30 a.m. ET on Monday, as it seeks to challenge Elon Musk’s SpaceX in the space tourism industry.  What stands out most about this mission is that it featured the first all-female space crew since 1963, when Soviet astronaut Valentina Tereshkova […]

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Intel agrees to sell controlling stake in Altera chip business

Intel on Monday announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to sell 51% of its Altera semiconductor business to Silver Lake, a private equity firm. The deal, which values Altera at $8.75 billion, will make Altera “operationally independent,” Intel said in a press release. Intel will retain 49% ownership in Altera, which will […]

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Bill Gates-backed Arnergy to expand solar access in Nigeria with $18M as demand surges

Demand for solar energy in power-starved Nigeria has soared in the last decade thanks to worsening grid reliability and rising fuel costs. That’s drawn investor interest to Arnergy, a cleantech startup meeting that need. The company just raised a $15 million Series B extension (on top of a $3 million B1 round last year), bringing […]

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Sunday, April 13, 2025

UK founders grow frustrated over dearth of funding: ‘the problem is getting worse’

According to Dealroom data cited by the Financial Times, British start-ups raised just £16.2 billion last year, far less than the more than £65 billion raised by their counterparts in Silicon Valley during the same period. In fact, the U.S. appears to be pulling further ahead each year. In 2024, 57% of global venture capital […]

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Access to future AI models in OpenAI’s API may require a verified ID

OpenAI may soon require organizations to complete an ID verification process in order to access certain future AI models, according to a support page published to the company’s website last week. The verification process, called Verified Organization, is “a new way for developers to unlock access to the most advanced models and capabilities on the […]

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Apple reportedly working on a Vision Pro that plugs into your Mac

Apple isn’t giving up on its mixed reality headset the Vision Pro, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. The company has been debating the best direction forward for the product after disappointing sales, Gurman says, but is now moving forward with two different models. One would address probably the two biggest complaints about the initial product […]

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Tech tariff exemptions are only temporary, according to Trump’s commerce secretary

The tech industry may not be safe from new tariffs, according to U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. The Trump administration announced Friday evening that consumer electronics such as laptops and smartphones would be exempt from the tariffs it unveiled earlier this month. (While Trump delayed many of those tariffs this week, he left a 10% […]

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Tech tariff exemptions are only temporary, according to Trump’s commerce secretary

The tech industry may not be safe from new tariffs, according to U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. The Trump administration announced Friday evening that consumer electronics such as laptops and smartphones would be exempt from the tariffs it unveiled earlier this month. (While Trump delayed many of those tariffs this week, he left a 10% […]

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Jim Zemlin on taking a ‘portfolio approach’ to Linux Foundation projects

The Linux Foundation has become something of a misnomer through the years. It has extended far beyond its roots as the steward of the Linux kernel, emerging as a sprawling umbrella outfit for a thousand open source projects spanning cloud infrastructure, security, digital wallets, enterprise search, fintech, maps, and more. Last month, the OpenInfra Foundation […]

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Saturday, April 12, 2025

Could an Amazon driver could be the one who saves your life?

In a quiet transformation from merchandising giant to (also) healthcare giant, Amazon may be positioning its sprawling logistics network and growing medical footprint to potentially save lives, starting with your front door. According to Bloomberg, back in 2023, Amazon piloted a several months-long pilot program called Project Pulse, equipping delivery vans with defibrillators and training […]

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Apple’s ‘Mythic Quest’ is ending with an updated Season 4 finale

“Mythic Quest,” the Apple TV+ workplace comedy about the making of a popular online roleplaying game, is ending after four seasons. A new version of the show’s fourth season finale — first aired on March 26, and now the de facto series finale — will premiere on Apple TV+ next week, with a new ending. […]

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Cofertility’s radical model for women: Freeze your eggs for free by donating half of them

In recent years, focus on career and delayed marriage age is driving some women to consider preserving their fertility through egg freezing. But the steep cost of the procedure, estimated at $10,000 to $15,000 per attempt, means many women can’t afford it during their most fertile years: 20s and early 30s. Cofertility, a startup founded […]

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OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence reportedly valued at $32B

Safe Superintelligence (SSI), the AI startup led by OpenAI’s co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, has raised an additional $2 billion in funding at a $32 billion valuation, according to the Financial Times. The startup had already raised $1 billion, and there were reports that an additional $1 billion round was in the works. […]

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Trump exempts smartphones, laptops, and semiconductors from new tariffs

The Trump administration is carving out big tariff exemptions for the tech industry. While President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he would delay many of the market-shaking tariffs that he’d announced the previous week, he kept a universal baseline 10% tariff in place, while also increasing tariffs on Chinese goods to 125% (on top of […]

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Week in Review: Jeff Bezos’ secret EV startup

Welcome back to Week in Review! We’ve got tons of cool stuff for your reading pleasure this week: Jeff Bezos backs EV startup Slate; a Meta whistleblower accuses the company of collusion; Waymo may use interior camera data; and much more. Let’s get to it! I want this: Slate, an EV startup, has the ambitious […]

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Friday, April 11, 2025

Forerunner’s long game: As startups stall before IPO, all options are on the table

Thirteen years ago, Forerunner Ventures began helping to usher in a new era of consumer startups, including Warby Parker, Bonobos, and Glossier. None has gone through a traditional IPO process. Warby Parker was taken public through a special purpose acquisition vehicle. Bonobos was acquired by Walmart. Glossier is still privately held, along with many other […]

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Meta’s vanilla Maverick AI model ranks below rivals on a popular chat benchmark

Earlier this week, Meta landed in hot water for using an experimental, unreleased version of its Llama 4 Maverick model to achieve a high score on a crowdsourced benchmark, LM Arena. The incident prompted the maintainers of LM Arena to apologize, change their policies, and score the unmodified, vanilla Maverick. Turns out, it’s not very […]

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GM cuts 500 jobs because of weak demand for BrightDrop electric vans

General Motors is laying off 500 workers at a factory in Canada because of weak demand for its all-electric BrightDrop vans, according to CNBC. GM told CNBC that the cuts were not related to the ongoing trade war being waged by President Donald Trump. The company is cutting one of the two shifts at the […]

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Ireland’s data regulator investigates X’s use of European user data to train Grok

Ireland’s data regulator, the Data Protection Commission (DPC), said Friday that it has opened an investigation into Elon Musk’s X over the social media platform’s use of personal data collected from European users to train Grok. The DPC will investigate how X processes personal data “comprised” in publicly accessible posts by European users for the […]

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Hacked documents reveal guide to serving Elon Musk on private jets

A recent breach of Berkshire Hathaway-owned private jet company NetJets has revealed a guide for flight attendants serving Elon Musk, per a Bloomberg report. The memo offers an interesting glimpse into the personal preferences of the world’s richest man. Some of the preferences are surprising for the CEO of Tesla, a company dedicated to sustainability. […]

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Less than a month to get your exhibit table for TechCrunch Sessions: AI

TechCrunch Sessions: AI is fast approaching. So, what does that mean for you? It means exhibit tables are nearly gone — and now’s your chance to grab one before they’re all sold out. If you’ve got a game-changing product to showcase to the AI world, don’t keep it quiet. Exhibit your brand in front of […]

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Spotify invests over $1M to grow its catalog of non-English audiobooks

Spotify announced on Friday that it plans to invest €1 million–or approximately $1.1 million — to boost audiobook production in languages other than English, beginning with French and Dutch. The investment indicates that Spotify is eager for more non-English titles in its limited library as it tries to compete with major players like Audible in […]

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Thursday, April 10, 2025

Lucid Motors wins bankruptcy auction for Nikola’s Arizona factory and other assets

EV startup Lucid Motors has emerged as a surprise winner in the bankruptcy auction for electric trucking company Nikola’s Arizona factory and other assets, according a late Thursday court filing. Lucid committed around $30 million in cash and non-cash considerations in exchange for the factory, Nikola’s lease on its Phoenix headquarters, and “certain machinery, equipment […]

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Tesla used car listings skyrocketed in March

A growing number of Tesla owners are putting their used vehicles up for sale, as consumers react to Elon Musk’s political activities and the global protests they have fueled. In March, the number of used Tesla vehicles listed for sale on Autotrader.com skyrocketed, Sherwood News reported, citing data from Autotrader parent company Cox Automotive. The […]

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Stripe CEO says he ensures his top leaders interview a customer twice a month

Digital payments platform Stripe invites customers to join its management team meetings on a bi-weekly basis so it can get “candid feedback,” according to co-founder Patrick Collison. In an April 8 post on X, the fintech giant’s CEO said the company has a customer join for the first 30 minutes of the meeting, which is […]

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Netflix’s latest season of ‘Black Mirror’ comes with a mobile game

Season 7 of “Black Mirror” premiered on Thursday, introducing a new mobile game connected to one of its episodes. The game, titled “Thronglets,” from Netflix’s own Night School Studio, serves as a companion to the episode called “Plaything.” Players interact with virtual yellow pets and strive to keep them alive. If players are successful in […]

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LiveKit’s tools power real-time communications, including OpenAI’s Voice Mode

A challenge for many tech companies is delivering high-bandwidth, multimodal data — for example, simultaneous audio and video — to users in real time without interruptions. Some firms build solutions in-house, but these often require a lot of upkeep and maintenance. To ease the burden, Russ d’Sa and David Zhao created LiveKit, an open-source software […]

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Sydney Thomas’s Symphonic Capital raises $13.5M for inaugural fund 

Symphonic Capital announced today in a blog post that it raised $13.5 million for its inaugural fund to invest in early-stage companies.  Sydney Thomas launched the firm in 2022 after leaving Charles Hudson’s Percursor Ventures, where she was the first hire.  Thomas said her fund will focus on founders outside of the Bay who are […]

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YouTube rolls out a free AI music-making tool for creators

YouTube is launching a new feature that will allow creators to use AI technology to generate instrumental backing music that can be added to their videos. In an update published to its Creator Insider channel this week, the company shared that it’s beginning to roll out an update to its Creator Music marketplace that will […]

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Rebooted Digg launches early-access community with $5 fee

The reboot of early-internet social news site Digg is underway. Original founder Kevin Rose and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian have launched an early-access community for some of the first people who signed up after last month’s announcement that the pair had bought Digg and planned to relaunch it as something new. The early-access program is […]

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