timef 05/01/2025

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 […]

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 […]

TechCrunch Sessions: AI is just over a month away! We’re doing a last call for exceptional volunteers to join us in bringing this event to life. If you’ve ever wondered about the inner workings of tech events, now’s your chance to get involved. Volunteer spots are limited, so don’t miss out. Apply before the May […]

Microsoft announced price increases on Thursday for its Xbox consoles, controllers, and some games. The affected consoles, which include Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S models, will increase in price between $80 and $100 each, depending on the console. These consoles were first released almost five years ago, with the basic Xbox Series S […]

Grocery-delivery giant Instacart announced Thursday the acquisition of Wynshop, a provider of cloud-based e-commerce solutions for grocers. The deal will help Instacart improve its enterprise solutions, enabling retailers to enhance their online experiences. The company didn’t disclose deal terms.  Wynshop launched its platform in 2020 and provides online storefronts for grocers, working with clients such […]

Epic Games’ mega-popular Fortnite is returning to the US iOS App Store next week after a surprising ruling in a years-long legal battle with Apple. The dispute between Epic and Apple began in 2020, when Apple removed Epic Games from the iOS store. Because Apple takes 30% of all in-app purchases, Epic had introduced support […]

Autonomous vehicle technology startup Aurora Innovation says it has successfully launched a self-driving truck service in Texas, making it the first company to deploy driverless, heavy-duty trucks for commercial use on public roads in the U.S.  The launch comes just as Aurora hits its deadline: in October, the company delayed its planned 2024 debut to […]

MoviePass, the startup that made its mark with its movie theater subscription service, has always been known for shaking things up, and its latest venture is no exception.  The company announced on Thursday the beta launch of Mogul, a new daily fantasy entertainment platform designed specifically for the Hollywood industry.  To understand what Mogul is, […]

Google’s AdSense advertising network started supporting ads inside users’ chats with some third-party AI chatbots earlier this year, Bloomberg reported. The company is rolling out the feature following tests with AI search startups iAsk and Liner, the report said, citing anonymous sources familiar with the matter. “AdSense for Search is available for websites that want […]

WhatsApp now has more than 3 billion people using it every month, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg noted during the company’s Q1 results conference call on Wednesday. Founded in 2009 and acquired by Facebook for $19 billion in 2014, WhatsApp remains free to use and doesn’t serve any ads. The app reached the 2 billion monthly […]

In 2013, Tatyana Marynich and Anastasiya Khamiankova opened the doors to Imaguru, a startup hub in Minsk, Belarus that would go on to launch some of Eastern Europe’s most prominent tech success stories. A decade later, they’ve been sentenced ‘in absentia’ to a combined 23 years in prison by Belarusian authorities. Their property has been […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

Epic Games has notched a win in an ongoing legal dispute with Apple, as a result of which Fortnite could return to the U.S. iOS App Store as early as next week. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said in a ruling on Wednesday that Apple was in “willful violation” of a 2021 injunction that prohibited the […]

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 […]

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, […]

Microsoft customers could encounter service disruptions when using AI services due to demand outpacing the company’s ability to bring data centers online, an executive warned during the company’s earnings call Microsoft’s EVP and CFO Amy Hood said during the company’s fiscal 2025 third-quarter earnings call Wednesday the company may face AI capacity constraints as early […]

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

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 […]

Artificial intelligence is not just infiltrating the startup world. Now, credit card giants Visa and Mastercard are getting into the AI game. Visa announced on Wednesday “Intelligent Commerce,” which it says enables AI “to find and buy.” AI agents will be able to shop and make purchases on behalf of consumers, based on preselected preferences. […]

Instagram Threads, Meta’s X competitor, has now grown to over 350 million monthly active users, CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed during the company’s Q1 2025 earnings call on Wednesday. That’s an increase of 30 million users since the prior quarter, where Meta reported that Threads had 320 million users. The new figure represents increased growth, as […]

Pinterest says it’s finally going to do something about the AI slop that’s taken over its platform. After an increasing volume of complaints, the social networking and image pinboarding site announced Wednesday a plan to begin labeling AI-generated and AI-modified images. It will also introduce a new option that allows users to reduce the number […]

Amazon wants companies to build public-facing chatbots using its Q Business assistant. On Wednesday, the company announced that Q Business, its AWS-hosted AI assistant that can answer questions, provide summaries, and complete tasks, now supports anonymous user access. This effectively means that AWS users can now create Q Business chatbots for websites, support portals, and […]

Rivian built up a stockpile of batteries for its trucks, SUVs, and commercial vans before and after the election of Donald Trump, a strategy used to soften the blow of the president’s tariffs, according to Bloomberg News. The company apparently bought an undisclosed number of lithium iron phosphate batteries from Chinese firm Gotion before the […]

Meta has updated the privacy policy for its AI glasses, Ray-Ban Meta, giving the tech giant more power over what data it can store and use to train its AI models. The company emailed Ray-Ban Meta owners on Tuesday with a notice that AI features will now be enabled on the glasses by default, according […]

Two alleged victims came forward claiming they received a spyware notification from Apple.

Companies of all sizes are recognizing the game-changing possibilities of AI. Despite the excitement about the new technology, most of their pilot projects don’t make it into production. Gruve.ai, a startup founded by the team behind Rahi Systems aims to help enterprises get AI solutions out of testing phase and into real-world application by using […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]