timef 04/30/2025

Anthropic agrees with the U.S. government that implementing robust export controls on domestic-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 of […]

There’s an unspoken pressure nowadays to share all your special moments online, whether it be birthdays, graduations, or engagements.  However, not everyone has the skills to take high-quality pictures, and often, people find themselves too distracted to snap the perfect shot. While hiring a professional photographer is an option, it may not always be feasible […]

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 […]

TechCrunch All Stage is just around the corner — and you get to help shape the agenda.  From a competitive pool of applicants, two of the six visionary finalists are one step away from leading a roundtable session on July 15 at SoWa Power Station in Boston. Your vote determines who makes it. Audience Choice […]

Did you miss your chance to apply for a Side Event at “TechCrunch Sessions: AI Week?” Don’t worry – we’ve extended the deadline by three more days! You now have until May 2 at 11:59 p.m. PT to submit your proposal. This is your opportunity to connect with attendees of TC Sessions: AI and the […]

Wikipedia on Wednesday revealed its new AI strategy for the next three years — and it’s not replacing the Wikipedia community of editors and volunteers with artificial intelligence, thankfully. Instead, Wikipedia says it will use AI to build new features that “remove technical barriers,” allowing editors, moderators, and patrollers tools that allow them to accomplish what they need […]

Nuvo, a company that has built a social-like platform to facilitate easier purchasing of physical goods between businesses, has raised a $34 million Series A from Sequoia Capital and Spark Capital, it tells TechCrunch exclusively. The San Francisco-based startup previously raised $11 million in an undisclosed seed round led by Founders Fund and Index Ventures […]

You’ve got just 5 days to save up to $210 — plus 50% off your +1 — and get inside the minds of AI’s biggest voices at TechCrunch Sessions: AI. Imagine hearing firsthand from Anthropic’s Jared Kaplan, OpenAI’s startup team, and top voices from firms like Khosla Ventures — all in one day. June 5 […]

The U.K. grocery and retail giant said the unspecified cyber incident is affecting its back office and call centers.

Christoph Schell, Intel’s EVP and chief commercial officer, is leaving the company after two years in the role, according to a filing with the SEC. Schell notified Intel of his decision to leave on Monday, and will resign on June 30 “in order to pursue another career opportunity,” per the filing. It isn’t clear who will replace […]

Supio, a startup that uses AI to automate data collection and analysis for legal teams, has raised $60 million in a funding round led by Sapphire Ventures with participation from Mayfield and Thomson Reuters Ventures. The new capital, which brings Supio’s total raised to $91 million, will be put toward growth, hiring, and go-to-market efforts, […]

Chinese AI lab DeepSeek has quietly updated Prover, its AI system that’s designed to solve math-related proofs and theorems. According to South China Morning Post, DeepSeek uploaded the latest version of Prover, V2, to the AI dev platform Hugging Face late on Wednesday. It appears to be built on top of the startup’s V3 model, […]

The crush of traffic going into training and running AI has quickly turned into a major cost and resource headache for organisations. Today, Cast AI — a startup building tools to ease and optimise AI and other workloads with automation — is raising a major round of funding on the back of its strong growth […]

Kintsugi, a Silicon Valley-based startup that helps companies offload and automate their sales tax compliance, has raised $18 million in new funding led by global indirect tax technology solution provider Vertex. The startup plans to enable more small and medium businesses to use its AI-enabled capabilities for tax calculations and filings. The ongoing growth of […]

X is now allowing select creators to upload videos in 4K resolution, and will roll out the feature to all premium subscribers soon.

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

As part of its Q1 2025 earnings release, Snap said it’s scrapping plans for a simplified version of its app. The news comes seven months after Snapchat began testing a redesigned version of the app without the Snap Map or Stories tabs. The new version consolidated the app’s navigation bar around three icons: chat, camera, […]

Freepik, the online graphic design platform, unveiled a new “open” AI image model on Tuesday that the company says was trained exclusively on commercially licensed, “safe-for-work” images. The model, called F Lite, contains around 10 billion parameters — parameters being the internal components that make up the model. F Lite was developed in partnership with […]

Google Play’s app marketplace is losing apps. From the start of 2024 to present, the Android app marketplace went from hosting about 3.4 million apps worldwide to just around 1.8 million, according to a new analysis by app intelligence provider Appfigures. That’s a decline of about 47%, representing a significant purge of the apps that […]

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Tuesday said that the company is “rolling back” the latest update to the default AI model powering ChatGPT, GPT-4o, after complaints about strange behavior, in particular extreme sycophancy. “[W]e started rolling back the latest update to GPT-4o last night,” Altman wrote in a post on X. “[I]t’s now 100% rolled back for […]

CaaStle, the embattled fashion startup whose board of directors accused its founder, Christine Hunsicke, of financial misconduct, is starting to face lawsuits from a partner and a supplier over missed payments and more allegations of fraud. As first reported by Axios and by suits seen by TechCrunch, CaaStle is being sued by P180, a vehicle […]

In mid-March, Meta said that its “open” AI model family, Llama, hit 1 billion downloads, up from 650 million downloads as of early December 2024. On Tuesday at its inaugural LlamaCon developer conference, Meta revealed that figure has reached 1.2 billion downloads. “We have thousands of developers contributing tens of thousands of derivative models being downloaded […]

The first 27 satellites in Amazon’s effort to create a space-based internet network have finally made it to orbit, paving the way for the company to attempt to compete with Elon Musk’s well-established Starlink service. A United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket lifted off late Monday from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in […]

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 […]

At its inaugural LlamaCon AI developer conference on Tuesday, Meta announced an API for its Llama series of AI models: the Llama API. Available in limited preview, the Llama API lets developers explore and experiment with products powered by different Llama models, per Meta. Paired with Meta’s SDKs, it allows developers to build Llama-driven services, […]

Google on Tuesday is releasing three new AI experiments aimed at helping people learn to speak a new language in a more personalized way. While the experiments are still in the early stages, it’s possible that the company is looking to take on Duolingo with the help of Gemini, Google’s multimodal large language model. The […]

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 […]

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 […]