timef 04/15/2025

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. […]

The application to speak at TechCrunch All Stage closes this Friday, April 18 — don’t miss your chance to share hard-won insights with 1,200+ startup founders and VCs. If you’ve been in the trenches and cracked tough growth problems, now’s the time to step up and share your scaling strategies onstage at TC All Stage, […]

Notion released Notion Mail, an AI-powered email client for Gmail that integrates with the rest of Notion’s workflow management platform, on Tuesday. Notion Mail connects to Notion users’ Gmail accounts and uses AI to help users organize their emails, draft responses, schedule meetings, and search across messages. Any Notion user can sign up, and Notion […]

Looking to position your brand in front of the brightest minds in artificial intelligence? Hosting a Side Event during TechCrunch Sessions: AI Week is your opportunity to do just that. Reach 1,200+ attendees and the surrounding Berkeley tech scene. From June 1 to June 7, TechCrunch invites startups, investors, and builders to bring unique and […]

Lucid has spent years working on its second EV — a plush van-like SUV designed to be the category killer that could take market share from the likes of other luxury EV and internal combustion people haulers like the Rivian R1S, Cadillac Escalade IQ, BMW X7, and Audi Q8. The Saudi-backed company’s aim was to […]

Hexium has emerged from stealth with $8 million in seed funding.

The science fiction trope of humans superpowered by computer and bionic implants is fast becoming a reality, and today, a startup hoping for a role in how that plays out is announcing some funding.  Phantom Neuro, which is developing a wristband-like device that gets implanted under the skin to let a person control prosthetic limbs, […]

In the wake of criticism over the underwhelming performance of its AI products, especially in areas like notification summaries, Apple on Monday detailed how it is trying to improve its AI models by analyzing user data privately with the aid of synthetic data. Using an approach called “differential privacy,” the company said it would first […]

Uber is inviting customers in Atlanta to join a list if they’re interested in hailing a Waymo robotaxi as the companies prepare to launch a commercial service in the city. Uber and Waymo last September announced plans to offer a robotaxi service in Austin and Atlanta in early 2025 as part of an expanded partnership. […]

Reshma Saujani, founder of the non-profit Girls Who Code, got straight to the point.  “If I had applied to be the CEO of Girls Who Code, I wouldn’t have gotten the job,” she told Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, on the latest episode of the duchess’ podcast, “Confessions of a Female Founder.” “I didn’t code,” Saujani […]

U.K. startup Marshmallow has blown up over the years by using innovations in data science to build car insurance policies for immigrants and other consumers who have been overlooked or priced out of traditional insurance. Now, with a million drivers insured and a profitable annual revenue run rate of $500 million, Marshmallow has raised a […]

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 […]

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 […]

Shared micromobility company Lime has reached an agreement to send batteries used in its scooters and e-bikes to Redwood Materials, which will extract and recycle critical minerals such as lithium, cobalt, nickel, and copper. The agreement announced Monday makes Redwood Materials the exclusive battery recycling partner for Lime’s shared scooters and e-bikes located in cities […]

HR tech startup Rippling is trying to serve Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz with papers as part of a blockbuster lawsuit against its competitor. There’s just one problem: French bailiffs hired by Rippling can’t seem to find Bouaziz, Irish newspaper Business Post reports. Rippling sued Deel earlier this year in Ireland alleging the company paid one […]

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 […]

Neptune is one of the newest short-form video apps on the block seeking to compete with major players like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts.  The app, currently in beta, has attracted attention from hundreds of thousands of users, with 970 testers participating and 400,000 people on the waitlist, per the company. Neptune announced Monday […]

The car rental giant attributed the breach to Cleo, whose customers had data stolen by a ransomware gang in 2024.

OpenAI on Monday launched a new family of models called GPT-4.1 . Yes, “4.1” — as if the company’s nomenclature wasn’t confusing enough already. There’s GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and GPT-4.1 nano, all of which OpenAI says “excel” at coding and instruction following. Available through OpenAI’s API but not ChatGPT, the multimodal models have a 1-million-token […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]