timef 04/25/2025

Google started testing AI-summarized results in Google Search, AI Overviews, two years ago, and continues to expand the feature to new regions and languages. By the company’s estimation, it’s been a big success. AI Overviews is now used by more than 1.5 billion users monthly across over 100 countries. AI Overviews compiles results from around […]

We’re thrilled to announce that Roelof Botha, the managing partner of Sequoia Capital and one of the most influential figures in the venture capital world, will join us live onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 at Moscone West in San Francisco, which will take place from October 27 to 29. As part of our ongoing mission […]

This is your last chance to put your brand at the center of the AI conversation during TechCrunch Sessions: AI Week — with applications to host a Side Event closing tonight at 11:59 p.m. PT. From June 1-7, TechCrunch is curating a dynamic weeklong series of Side Events leading up to and following the main […]

Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, walked into the sunlight-lit hotel conference room in Brooklyn on Thursday to meet with a dozen youth leaders working in tech safety, policy, and innovation. The young adults chatted away at black circular tables, many unaware of his presence until he plopped down at a table and started talking with […]

Chinese startup Manus AI, which works on building tools related to AI agents, has picked up $75 million in a funding round led by Benchmark at a roughly $500 million valuation, according to Bloomberg. The company will use the money to expand to new markets, including the U.S., Japan, and the Middle East, Bloomberg noted, […]

Yale New Haven Health is Connecticut's largest healthcare provider.

We’re thrilled to announce that Greece 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Apparently, 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 outage, which it […]

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, he’s set an ambitious goal for Anthropic to reliably detect most model problems by 2027. Amodei acknowledges the challenge ahead. In “The Urgency of Interpretability,” the CEO says Anthropic has made […]

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 […]

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 […]

Perplexity is building its own browser is to collect data on everything users do outside of its own app to sell ads.

Semiconductor giant Intel won’t spin out its venture arm, Intel Capital, after all. Intel’s CEO Lip-Bu Tan said the company has reversed its decision to spin out its 34-year-old venture arm on Intel’s Thursday Q1 earnings call. Instead, the firm will remain internal and continue to invest with Intel’s interests in mind. “We have made […]

Intel says that it’ll require employees to work from the office four days a week, a shift from the company’s old policy. CEO Lip-Bu Tan made the announcement during Intel’s Q1 2025 earnings call on Thursday. Previously, Intel allowed staff to work from home two days a week, but Tan said that adherence to the […]

Individuals, industry groups, and local governments submitted over 10,000 comments to the White House about its work-in-progress national AI policy, also known as the AI Action Plan. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) on Thursday published the text of the submissions in a PDF spanning 18,480 pages. The comments, which touch […]

We are thrilled to announce that Astro Teller, the head honcho of Alphabet’s “moonshot factory,” X, will be joining us as a featured speaker at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, happening from 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 want […]

Evernote founder Phil Libin is ready to liven up your video meetings. The entrepreneur’s video startup, mmhmm, launched in 2020 amid the pandemic, on Thursday unveiled its latest product: a video toolkit for online meetings called Airtime. The suite includes two related tools: a virtual camera that helps you appear more polished on video calls, […]

Former WeWork CEO Adam Neumann has raised over $100 million in capital for his proptech startup, Flow, in a round that values that company at about $2.5 billion, Bloomberg reported on Thursday.  Citing anonymous sources familiar with the deal, Bloomberg reported that existing backer Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) participated in the financing. Neumann told Bloomberg that […]

Former WeWork CEO Adam Neumann has raised over $100 million in capital for his proptech startup, Flow, in a round that values that company at about $2.5 billion, Bloomberg reported on Thursday.  Citing anonymous sources familiar with the deal, Bloomberg reported that existing backer Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) participated in the financing. Neumann told Bloomberg that […]

For the first time in roughly five years, OpenAI is gearing up to release an AI system that’s truly “open,” meaning it’ll be available for download at no cost and not gated behind an API. TechCrunch reported on Wednesday that OpenAI is aiming for an early summer launch, and targeting performance superior to open models […]

OpenAI is reportedly building its own X-like social network. The project is still in the early stages, but there’s an internal prototype focused on ChatGPT’s image generation that contains a social feed, The Verge reports. A social app would give OpenAI its own unique, real-time data that X and Meta already use to help train […]

We’re thrilled to announce that Baiju Bhatt, co-founder of Robinhood and founder and CEO of Aetherflux, will be joining us for a rare, intimate fireside chat as part of TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC evening series on June 18 on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. As with all of our StrictlyVC evenings, the event will feature just […]

We’re thrilled to announce that Baiju Bhatt, co-founder of Robinhood and founder and CEO of Aetherflux, will be joining us for a rare, intimate fireside chat as part of TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC evening series on June 18 on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. As with all of our StrictlyVC evenings, the event will feature just […]

Meta laid off employees on Thursday in its Reality Labs division, which encompasses various virtual and augmented reality projects. The cuts impact employees within Oculus Studios, which develops apps and games for Meta’s Quest headsets. Meta did not specify how many people were impacted by the layoffs, but said that the cuts impacted people working […]

Meta may have managed to kill a bipartisan bill to protect children online, but parents of children who have suffered from online harm are still putting pressure on social media companies to step up. On Thursday, 45 families who lost children to online harms – from sextortion to cyberbullying – held a vigil outside of […]

Instagram Threads, Meta’s newest social network and X competitor, is officially relocating from the website Threads.net to Threads.com. The transition will coincide with a handful of quality-of-life improvements for the Threads web app, including features to more easily access custom feeds, saved posts, and likes, as well as other tools for creating new columns, copying […]

The funeral of Pope Francis will be livestreamed on YouTube on Saturday. Pope Francis passed away earlier this week at age 88 due to a stroke and cardiac arrest. Vatican News’ YouTube channel will begin coverage of the funeral at 10 AM CET/4 AM ET, with availability in English, Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and German. […]

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 […]

Data centers to train and run AI may soon contain millions of chips, cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and require power equivalent to a large city’s electricity grid, if the current trends hold. That’s according to a new study from researchers at Georgetown, Epoch AI, and Rand, which looked at the growth trajectory of […]

In an ongoing antitrust case, the Federal Trade Commission says that Meta has a monopoly on “personal social networking services” and should have to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp. Throughout the proceedings, there have been several internal messages and plans that have come to light. In one, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg considered wiping all Facebook […]

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 […]

Chess.com reaches a new membership milestone as it nears its 20th birthday. Chess.com, the online chess platform that was founded in 2005 and launched in 2007, has surpassed 200 million members. Of those 200 million members, 1.5 million are paying users. More than 6 million games of chess are played every day on the platform. […]

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.” […]

TikTok is rolling out support for ALT text for photo posts to make content more accessible for users with visual and cognitive impairments. 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 can add ALT […]

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.” […]