timef 04/19/2025

The first week of the Meta antitrust trial brought new revelations about how the company formerly known as Facebook approached the competitive threat posed by Instagram in the early 2010s. The U.S. government is accusing Meta of violating competition laws by acquiring companies like Instagram and WhatsApp that threatened the Facebook monopoly. If lawyers for […]

A complete list of all the known layoffs in tech, from Big Tech to startups, broken down by month throughout 2024.

A new animated kids’ series expected to premiere this year won’t be headed for a TV network. Or a streaming service. Instead, the founders of production studio We Ghosted Media plan to launch on a decentralized web platform that uses blockchain technology. And yes, a crypto wallet will be involved.  We Ghosted Media — founded by […]

Techstars, a nearly 20-year-old startup accelerator, announced new terms for startups that enter its three-month program. The organization will now invest $220,000, which is $100,000 more than it offered previously, in companies starting with its fall 2025 batch. The capital will be divided into two components. The group is offering companies $20,000 in exchange for […]

OpenAI’s recently launched o3 and o4-mini AI models are state-of-the-art in many respects. However, the new models still hallucinate, or make things up — in fact, they hallucinate more than several of OpenAI’s older models. Hallucinations have proven to be one of the biggest and most difficult problems to solve in AI, impacting even today’s […]

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 […]

Bluesky may soon get a new blue checkmark verification system, according to changes to the app’s public GitHub repository spotted Friday by reverse engineer alice.mosphere.at. The blue checks may have a similar look to the system pioneered by Twitter, now X, but Bluesky’s version seems like it will work quite differently. Bluesky’s blue check system […]

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! Enough with my typical small talk. Let’s jump into the news right away this week. And there’s plenty of it, including Lyft’s entry into Europe, AV startup […]

The government-run website covid.gov used to host information about COVID-19 vaccines, testing, and treatment. Now, under President Trump’s purview, the page redirects to a White House website espousing the unproven theory that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese laboratory. The theory, which has been opposed by many virologists, was espoused in a report by House Republicans […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]