Startup Baseten is reportedly close to finalizing a $1.5 billion round at a $13 billion as the “inference gold rush" marches on.

The Snapchat maker is spinning off yet another internal unit. Dotmo will be comprised of current Snap staff who are leaving the social media company to focus on AI video development.

OpenAI is bulking up before its IPO, landing Transformer co-inventor Noam Shazeer from Google DeepMind and former Trump AI policy official Dean Ball in the same week.

TechCrunch spoke to investors to find the hottest startups in the Spring 2026 YC batch. Some of them commanded valuations of over $175 million, VCs said.

Plaintiffs in the class action complaint allege Rivian falsely promised for years it would bring hands-free driving to its first-generation R1 vehicles.

About 47% of singles look negatively at the use of AI in dating -- but, many dating app users are open to AI helping with profile punch-ups and conversation starters.

AWS is in talks to sell its chips to other data centers. CEO Andy Jassy has said this represents a $50 billion opportunity for the company.

Doomscrolling on social media is a very common problem and can feel like an endless loop of constantly losing track of time. Instead of tackling this issue with strict limits, a new mindful screen time app called Mivo Scrolling is trying to shake things up. Launched last month, Mivo doesn’t look super different from other […]

FERC told grid operators to give data centers a fast lane for interconnections, but it failed to address electricity supply shortages.

“People just really want to take back control of their time, their lives, their attention... They’re down for whatever helps them do that.”

A data breach involving government-issued ID documents affects over three million people in Texas.

Karamo Brown, famous for his pep talks on Netflix’s “Queer Eye,” has jumped into the wellness and AI space with his new app, Kē. After spending a year and a half focusing on his own journey—from fitness and nutrition to meditation, sobriety, relationships, and personal growth—Brown wants to help others do the same.  Kē offers […]

Apple’s grip on iPhone app distribution is loosening in another major market: Brazil.

MapTap is a phone game that will make you feel smarter after you play it.

The startup trains embodied AI and world models using Medal’s dataset of 2 billion videos per year from 10 million monthly active users.

Guardrails positions itself as a populist political movement that runs on small donations from people in the trenches of the AI boom.

Spotify is launching "Reserved," a new system that will hold two concert tickets for an artist's superfans before they're on sale to the public.

Adobe is updating its Firefly AI assistant with new chops, and adding it to Premiere, Illustrator, InDesign and Frame.io.

Forget stickers, GIFs, and emoji reactions. Pixi is betting that the next evolution of messaging is interactive augmented reality (AR).

The company has identified at least 13 instances where its robotaxis drove into highway sections closed for construction.

Relativity Space—a rocket maker acquired by former Google executive chair Eric Schmidt last year after stumbling on the path to orbit—might just beat SpaceX to Mars.

Here's what you need to do to get those pesky "write with Gemini" pop-ups to go away.

CEO Tim Cook said in a recent interview that the situation is "unsustainable."

Chi-Hua Chien has spent more than two decades as a venture capitalist, but he thinks like a cultural anthropologist.

The former Sequoia Capital leader is filling an "existing vacancy" on SpaceX's board, days after the company went public in the largest IPO ever.

Snap's long-awaited smart glasses debut hasn't exactly done wonders for the company's stock.

Tokenmaxxing was the hottest trend in Silicon Valley earlier this year, with CEOs encouraging employees to push AI usage as far as it would go. Then the bill came due. Uber reportedly blew through its annual AI budget in a few months, some companies cut Claude licenses for parts of their org, and Meta killed its internal leaderboard.  This tension between […]

A new FTC lawsuit reveals how sophisticated subscription app operators can allegedly use shell companies and payment infrastructure to stay active on app stores despite mounting consumer complaints.

French President Macron and Indian PM Modi raised alarms at the G7 summit that the U.S. could cut off access to American AI overnight — a fear the Anthropic blackout just made real.

Anthropic has joined the Frontier coalition, which received another $915M in pledges to fund carbon removal projects.

An alleged Russian-speaking group of cybercriminals is reportedly compromising and targeting several major companies that use Fortinet Firewalls and VPNs through previously known passwords.

Social media feeds are becoming more customizable as platforms like Threads, Instagram, and TikTok introduce tools that let users directly influence the algorithms powering their recommendations.

World models are the next big thing in AI beyond LLMs and, with this round, Odyssey has cemented itself as one of the startups to watch.

Mastodon’s newly launched newsletter feature lets anyone subscribe to creators by email, even without a Mastodon account.

Although Wall Street loves AI, every day Americans are significantly less optimistic about the industry, a new report from Pew Research shows.

Clair Health will track inflammation and bloating markers, energy levels, and cycle phase classification to give insights into cycle irregularities and perimenopause, as well as hormonal fluctuations, and how to navigate those changes.

Google is betting generative AI can breathe new life into the smart speaker. The company's new $99.99 Google Home Speaker replaces the rigid commands of the Google Assistant era with more conversational Gemini interactions.

The corporate venture arm ends after 10 years and 80 investments.

If physical AI is going to match the accomplishments of LLMs, there's a data problem that needs to be solved.

Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch:

This week, Apple announced a series of discovery features that will personalize app recommendations based on users’ interests and behavior, providing a new way for developers to have their app discovered.

At Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), the iPhone maker introduced Personalized Collections in the App Store, which will showcase recommendations tailored to the individual. These will also include new “App Notes” that explain why the specific apps were recommended to you. Starting this week, you’ll find these new personalized suggestions in various places in the App Store, including the Apps or Games tab or on the Search tab.

Security research critics Mysk, posting on Twitter/X (XCancel link), report that the App Store app seemingly sends analytics usage data to Apple with everything you do in the App Store app, including exactly what you type, character-by-character — and that this isn’t for search suggestions, but for analytics. (Via Michael Tsai.)

Julie Bort, TechCrunch:

But the most telling detail wasn’t what Apple announced. It was how it chose to show some things off. Many of the Apple Intelligence demoes featured someone standing, phone in hand, pressing buttons or using voice commands in real time, while another camera showed off the phone’s response.

These weren’t live onstage, anything-could-go wrong demos; they were pre-taped. But they looked far more like proof of working features than what Apple showed at WWDC 2024, when the company unveiled Apple Intelligence and a new Siri to the world through slickly produced videos that turned out to be more promise than product.

The demos were all shot in single takes, with no editing. In fact, I think most of them were single takes of multiple demos back-to-back. That’s the way it should be, even when they feel a little slow. When a demo feels slow, the solution isn’t to edit the video — it’s to make the feature work faster.