timef 05/08/2025

OpenAI is introducing a new data residency program in Asia, the company announced Thursday, following the rollout of its data residency program in Europe in February. The new program, which is available for OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise, ChatGPT Edu, and the OpenAI API, aims to help Asia-based organizations meet local data sovereignty requirements while using the […]

The Gates Foundation is expected to spend $200 billion over the next 20 years to support causes related to health and human development.

Dating app giant Match Group is laying off 13% of its staff as part of a reorganization that aims to reduce costs and simplify its organizational structure.

Amazon said Thursday it is releasing a new generative AI-powered tool to help merchants improve their listings with missing details or attributes. Sellers often have hundreds of products listed on Amazon, and they need to update information related to them from time to time, which can be a cumbersome task. The e-commerce tech giant wants […]

Reddit on Thursday announced profile enhancements for businesses that’ve joined Reddit Pro, the company’s suite of tools designed to help brands discover, join, and contribute to the social network’s communities and conversations. Now, Reddit will now generate suggested profile bios for businesses during Reddit Pro sign-up. Once businesses provide their website, they can choose from […]

Turns out, telling an AI chatbot to be concise could make it hallucinate more than it otherwise would have. That’s according to a new study from Giskard, a Paris-based AI testing company developing a holistic benchmark for AI models. In a blog post detailing their findings, researchers at Giskard say prompts for shorter answers to […]

The venture capital firm has over $90 billion in assets under management, including cybersecurity giants.

Hims & Hers, the telehealth and wellness company, has hired a veteran of the autonomous vehicle industry as its next chief technology officer. The move, according to Hims & Hers co-founder and CEO, Andrew Dudum, was intentional. Hims & Hers on Thursday said its next CTO would be Mo Elshenawy, the former president and CTO […]

Apple is trying to delay a court ruling that forces the company to let iOS app developers accept payments via non-Apple systems and avoid paying a cut.

The venture arm of Bosch has a new $270 million fund that will continue in its tradition of investing in deep-tech startups. And this time, Bosch Ventures plans to put more of its money into North American startups. Bosch Ventures, which launched in 2007, is on its sixth fund. And while the corporate VC is […]

Simo, already a board member at OpenAI, will transition out of Instacart over the next few months and join the AI company full-time as Application CEO.

Tech giants like to boast about trillion-parameter AI models that require massive and expensive GPU clusters. But Fastino is taking a different approach. The Palo Alto-based startup says it’s invented a new kind of AI model architecture that’s intentionally small and task-specific. The models are so small they’re trained with low-end gaming GPUs worth less […]

Fintech giant Stripe announced Wednesday a slew of new product launches at its annual Stripe Sessions user event. The highlights include: a new AI foundation model for payments; stablecoin-powered accounts; a new Orchestration offering, and a recent migration with chip behemoth Nvidia. Stripe’s payments foundation model has been trained on tens of billions of transactions, […]

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

Tesla’s attempt to trademark the term “Robotaxi” in reference to its vehicles has been refused by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for being too generic, according to a new filing. Another application by Tesla to trademark the term “Robotaxi” for its upcoming ride-hailing service is still under examination by the office. In addition, applications […]

OpenAI has met with officials from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to discuss the agency’s use of AI to speed up drug evaluations, Wired reported on Wednesday. According to the report, OpenAI and the FDA have discussed a project called cderGPT, which seems to be an AI tool for the Center for Drug Evaluation […]

On YouTube, hundreds of thousands of viewers around the world are staring at an unmoving broadcast of the Sistine Chapel chimney. Occasionally, a seagull will swoop in and perch atop the roof for a few minutes. But for the most part, nothing happens. On Wednesday, the College of Cardinals started the process of picking the […]

A game emulator called Delta is taking advantage of the recent court decision around Apple’s App Store to be able to support its business by linking to its Patreon membership page. The update, approved Wednesday for release on the U.S. App Store, allows Delta users to join the Delta team’s Patreon directly from the mobile […]

A game emulator called Delta is taking advantage of the recent court decision around Apple’s App Store to support its business by linking to its Patreon membership page. The update, approved Wednesday for release on the U.S. App Store, allows Delta users to join the Delta team’s Patreon directly from the mobile app, without giving […]

A game emulator called Delta is taking advantage of the recent court decision around Apple’s App Store to support its business by linking to its Patreon membership page. The update, approved Wednesday for release on the U.S. App Store, allows Delta users to join the Delta team’s Patreon directly from the mobile app, without giving […]

During his junior year study abroad, Max Morganroth, traveled to 30 countries, primarily flying in business and first class. His jet setting was funded almost entirely by airline points he collected through strategic credit card applications and miles redemptions. Morganroth told TechCrunch that just about everyone he knew was “begging” him to teach them how […]

Tesla’s attempt to trademark the term “Robotaxi” in reference to its vehicles has been refused by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for being too generic, according to a new filing. Another application by Tesla to trademark the term “Robotaxi” for its upcoming ride-hailing service is still under examination by the office. The USPTO issued […]

Anthropic is launching a new API that allows its Claude AI models to search across the web. Developers using it can build Claude-powered apps that deliver up-to-date info, the company said in a press release published Wednesday. The rollout of the API comes as AI companies look to augment their models in various ways that […]

Snapchat announced on Wednesday that Snap Map now has more than 400 million monthly active users, a new milestone for one of the app’s core features. Launched in 2017, Snap Map was originally a way for users to see their friends’ locations and browse public snaps from around the world. Overtime, the feature has evolved […]

Lucid Motors has been working through some quality “hiccups” in the early stages of delivering its long-awaited electric SUV, according to interim CEO Marc Winterhoff. “It is true that we had some technical issues that we had to overcome around software” and the Gravity’s heads-up display, Winterhoff said on a conference call Tuesday. “There have […]

SpaceX’s satellite internet service, Starlink, is directly benefiting from the Trump Administration’s tariff trade war, according to leaked State Department memos obtained by the Washington Post.   The memos show the U.S. pushing countries to adopt Starlink. Some show that countries believe that doing so could help lubricate their U.S. trade and tariff negotiations. One memo […]

Amazon says that it has developed a new warehouse robot, Vulcan, that can “feel” some of the items it touches. The two-armed Vulcan, which can maneuver goods inside the storage compartments Amazon has in its warehouses, uses force sensors to help it know when it makes contact with an object. One arm rearranges items in a […]

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Instagram head Adam Mosseri, and other Meta execs thought that TikTok was beating Meta at its own game. That’s according to a new filing in the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust lawsuit against the tech giant, published on Monday. The document, dated February 2022, includes conversations among a number of Meta […]

A group of investors are considering a plan to inject another $30 million into BluSmart in a bid to revive the Indian cab-hailing startup that abruptly halted operations last month, TechCrunch has learned. The proposal from these existing investors has a catch: its contingent on BluSmart co-founder Anmol Singh Jaggi agreeing to resign. The proposed […]

A group of investors are considering a plan to inject another $30 million into BluSmart in a bid to revive the Indian cab-hailing startup that abruptly halted operations last month, TechCrunch has learned. The proposal from these existing investors has a catch: its contingent on BluSmart co-founder Anmol Singh Jaggi agreeing to resign. The proposed […]

OpenAI is launching a program, OpenAI for Countries, that the company says will enable it to build out the local infrastructure needed to better serve international AI customers. As a part of the new program, OpenAI will partner with governments to assist with efforts like building out data center capacity and customizing OpenAI’s products, including […]

Enterprise workflow management platform ServiceNow on Wednesday announced its second AI-related acquisition this year. ServiceNow said that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Data.World, a cloud-native data catalog and data governance platform. Austin, Texas-based Data.World was founded in 2015, and previously raised more than $130 million in venture financing from firms such as […]

Apple is looking at adding AI search engines from OpenAI, Perplexity, and Anthropic into Safari, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday. Eddy Cue, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Services, made the statement during his testimony in the U.S. Justice Department’s lawsuit against Alphabet. Cue’s disclosure was part of his testimony regarding Apple and Google’s estimated $20 billion-a-year […]

Design company Figma today announced multiple features, including AI-powered site and web app creation, a way for marketers to create assets in bulk, and a new drawing tool. With this launch, the company is taking on other creative solutions such as Canva and Adobe, along with AI-powered website and prototype creators such as WordPress, Wix, […]

In February of 2024, equity management startup Carta revealed that it was getting into the startup winddown business with a new offering called Carta Conclusions. By December, the company had decided to “retire” that offering, according to a blog post. And now, SimpleClosure, a startup that has described itself as “the Turbo Tax of shutting […]

Microsoft says that it’s embracing Google’s recently launched open protocol for allowing AI “agents” to communicate with each other. On Wednesday, Microsoft announced that it would bring support for Google’s Agent2Agent (A2A) spec to two of its AI development platforms, Azure AI Foundry and Copilot Studio. Microsoft has also joined the A2A working group on […]