TechCrunch Industry News

VUZ, a startup known for offering immersive video experiences from red carpets and football stadiums, has raised $12 million as it doubles down on its presence in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, as well as accelerates expansion into Africa, Asia, and the United States Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Chips are a critical component of the AI industry. But new chips don’t hit the market with the same speed as new AI models and products do. Cognichip has a lofty goal of creating a foundational AI model that can help bring new chips to market faster. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman laid out a big vision for the future of ChatGPT at an AI event hosted by VC firm Sequoia earlier this month. When asked by one attendee about how ChatGPT can become more personalized, Altman replied that he eventually wants the model to document and remember everything in a person’s life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As part of a broader app update, Airbnb on Tuesday introduced a new feature that allows travelers to book services and experiences, like getting a message, haircut, or chef-prepared meal, or taking part in some activity. These new offerings can be added to your stay, but they can also be booked independently, Airbnb says. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok appeared to experience a bug on Wednesday that caused it to reply to dozens of posts on X with information about genocide in South Africa, even when the user didn’t ask anything about the subject. The strange responses largely came from the X account for Grok. Also, digital consumer bank Chime has moved forward with its IPO by filing its S-1 paperwork Tuesday. Chime had reportedly filed confidential S-1 paperwork back in December. S-1 filings typically reveal all kinds of information, covering financial, legal, and other risk factors. But Chime’s documents still have a lot of blank spaces. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The decision to reverse course comes after an industry lobby group called for the rule change to be withdrawn. Also, speaking during a business summit in Doha, Trump said he met with Cook and asked him to stop building in India and instead increase production in the US ... and YouTube introduced an interactive product feed for shoppable TV ads Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is using his olive oil inefficiently in an “offense to horticulture,” the Financial Times humorously reports. For its “Lunch with the FT” series, the paper joined Altman in his kitchen. He prepared a garlicky pasta and salad Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Lithium-manganese-rich (LMR) batteries should slash costs without sacrificing much range. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The mobile controller company Backbone unveiled its Backbone Pro controller this week, which brings iOS and Android gaming experiences to the next level. A successor to the Backbone One controller, the Pro features full-size joysticks, re-mappable buttons, and Bluetooth compatibility, making for a more premium gaming setup. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The material has 50% more tensile strength than steel with a strength-to-weight ratio that’s ten-times better. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For millions of movie enthusiasts in the ’90s, Moviefone’s 777-FILM number was the go-to source for obtaining showtimes. Now, under new ownership, Moviefone is trying to make a comeback. On Friday, as part of its 35th anniversary celebration, Moviefone announced the relaunch of its mobile app and a new nationally syndicated broadcast TV series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Microsoft employees aren’t allowed to use DeepSeek due to data security and propaganda concerns, Microsoft vice chairman and president Brad Smith said in a Senate hearing today. “At Microsoft we don’t allow our employees to use the DeepSeek app,” Smith said, referring to DeepSeek’s application service (which is available on both desktop and mobile.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Much of the world isn’t paying close attention to Greece right now. That may be a mistake. Best known for its stunning islands, sun-soaked cities, and deep historical roots, Greece has been quietly laying the foundation for something far less expected: a modern, resilient tech economy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Rubrik co-founder Soham Mazumdar has a new data startup called Wisdom AI. It offers an agentic data analyst that works with structured, unstructured, even “dirty” data. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Employer.com has acquired MainStreet.com for an undisclosed amount, the latest fintech startup to get snapped up by the workforce management company. In a post on X, Employer.com Chairman and co-founder Jesse Tinsley said the two companies were “merging forces to simplify business back office solutions into one powerhouse platform.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Energy Star program's signature yellow labels appear on appliances and electronics for sale throughout the U.S.; Ford is raising the price of the all-electric Mustang Mach-E SUV and popular entry-level Maverick pickup by as much as $2,000 due to the import taxes President Donald Trump is placing on vehicles made in Mexico, according to Reuters. Higher prices could make it harder for traditional automakers like Ford to sell their EVs; Tech executives have long talked about how AI is going to revolutionize the advertising industry. In particularly, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been quite vocal about how exactly he wants his company to lead the transformation Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Cnaught is a market maker seeking to ease the pain of buying carbon credits for companies without dedicated teams. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

While most African digital lenders depend on working capital to fuel growth, MoneyFellows has quietly done what few others have: lend billions of Egyptian pounds with almost no debt or balance sheet exposure. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Pinterest is upgrading its visual search feature with a handful of new capabilities. On Monday, the company announced it’s rolling out new functionality to improve its feature that allows users to search using an image instead of text. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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. Also, Airbnb started rolling out an AI-powered customer service bot in the U.S. last month, CEO Brian Chesky said during the firm’s first-quarter conference call on Thursday. Chesky said 50% of Airbnb’s U.S. users are already using the AI bot for customer service. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

OpenAI says it’ll make changes to the way it updates the AI models that power ChatGPT, following an incident that caused the platform to become overly sycophantic for many users. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Amazon on Thursday released what it claims is the largest, 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The crush of traffic going into training and running AI has quickly turned into a major cost and resource headache for organizations. Cast AI is a startup building tools to ease and optimize AI and other workloads with automation — is raising a major round of funding on the back of its strong growth Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Yelp said on Tuesday that it’s working on deploying AI-powered “voice agents” to help service providers and restaurants handle calls, answer basic questions, and accomplish tasks like adding a customer to a restaurant waitlist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Spotify reported on Tuesday that its premium subscriber base grew by 5 million in the first quarter, representing a 12% increase year-over-year. This brings the total to 268 million, marking the second-highest total ever and the highest net addition of paid subs for a first quarter since 2020. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

AI-based coding has exploded in popularity on the promise that it will make developers’ jobs faster and easier. But it’s also resulted in something else: a vast increase in lines of code, and thus the likelihood of bugs resulting in crashes or other mishaps. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The world has a trash problem. The amount of stuff we throw away is expected to nearly double, to 3.8 billion metric tons, by 2050. Reducing what we use would go a long way to addressing the issue, but let’s face it, we’re not very good at buying less either. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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, Amodei set an ambitious goal for Anthropic to reliably detect most AI model problems by 2027. Amodei acknowledges the challenge ahead. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For years, websites included information about what kind of crawlers were not allowed on their site with a robots.txt file. Adobe, which wants to create a similar standard for images, has added a tool to content credentials with an intention to give them a bit more control over what is used to train AI models. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Volkswagen of America and Uber on Thursday unveiled an ambitious plan to launch a commercial robotaxi service — using autonomous electric VW ID. BUZZ vehicles — in multiple U.S. cities over the next decade. The companies expect to launch a commercial service in Los Angeles, the first city on the list, by late 2026 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Government censorship has found its way to Bluesky, but there’s currently a loophole thanks to how the social network is structured. Earlier this month, Bluesky restricted access to 72 accounts in Turkey at the request of Turkish governmental authorities, according to a recent report by the Freedom of Expression Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Linktree is launching a set of new features aimed at helping creators earn more money directly from its platform. The new tools include the ability to sell courses and digital products, earn from brand-sponsored links, and build shoppable storefronts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Xerion says it has a new technique to produce highly refined cobalt in a single step. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

AI labs are increasingly relying on crowdsourced benchmarking platforms such as Chatbot Arena to probe the strengths and weaknesses of their latest models. But some experts say that there are serious problems with this approach from an ethical and academic perspective. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The tech market doesn’t need to be soaring up and to the right to foster healthy M&A activity. Deals can get done even in down markets. But can M&A thrive in an uncertain market? That’s a harder question. The venture market soured in 2022 as fundraising and exits largely dried up Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A digital rights group blasted the Florida bill, but lawmakers voted to advanced the draft law. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It looks like humanoid robots have a long way to go before catching up with human runners. Beijing’s E-Town tech hub hosted what it described as the first world’s first humanoid half-marathon on Saturday, with 21 humanoid robots competing alongside thousands of humans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Graze, a startup that lets people build and monetize custom feeds for Bluesky’s social network, has attracted new capital. Pre-seed investors, led by Betaworks and Salesforce Ventures, have invested $1 million in the company’s small team, which is working to give users control over their algorithms and social media experiences. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

New York City — where you can get a dollar slice at 2am or a McDonald’s delivery in under 30 minutes, but still spend two hours crawling down the highway to catch a flight. Archer Aviation wants to change that. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As TikTok continues to build out its search experience, the social network is now surfacing reviews for select places right within the comments tab of a video. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You could say that TikTok is ruining our attention spans, and yet, viewers around the world are tuning in to watch a monotonous livestream from a Swedish TV station that they’ve probably never heard of. It’s time for the Great Moose Migration. For thousands of years, moose have crossed the Ångerman River each spring. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Reshma Saujani, founder of the non-profit Girls Who Code, got straight to the point. “If I had applied to be the CEO of Girls Who Code, I wouldn’t have gotten the job,” she told Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, on the latest episode of the duchess’ podcast, “Confessions of a Female Founder.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The science fiction trope of humans superpowered by computer and bionic implants is fast becoming a reality, and today, a startup hoping for a role in how that plays out is announcing some funding. Phantom Neuro, which is developing a wristband-like device that gets implanted under the skin to let a person control prosthetic limbs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Nvidia says it has commissioned more than a million square feet of manufacturing space to build and test AI chips in Arizona and Texas as part of an effort to move a portion of production to the U.S. The chipmaker says that Nvidia Blackwell chips have started production at TSMC’s chip plants in Phoenix, Arizona. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Demand for solar energy in power-starved Nigeria has soared in the last decade thanks to worsening grid reliability and rising fuel costs. That’s drawn investor interest to Arnergy, a cleantech startup meeting that need. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices