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During the Android Show on Tuesday, leading up to Google I/O, Google announced that it’s bringing Gemini to Wear OS smartwatches and Google TV. The announcement is part of Google’s plans to replace Google Assistant with Gemini across all of its devices and platforms. Tuesday’s announcement doesn’t come as a surprise, as users have been expecting Google to bring its AI assistant to Wear OS smartwatches and Google TV. The tech giant says this expansion will make its AI assistant accessible beyond phones to allow people to use it when they’re doing things like going on a run or relaxing on the couch. Wear OS smartwatch users will get access to Gemini on their wrist, which Google says will be useful in situations where you can’t use your phone, like when you’re covered in flour while cooking or in the middle of a bike ride. Google notes that you can talk to Gemini naturally, which means that you don’t have to get the words exactly right. Image Credits:Google For example, if you’re in a locker room at your gym and you already put your phone away, you can use Gemini on your smartwatch to set reminders, like “Remember, I’m using locker 43 today.” Plus, since Gemini can connect to your apps, you can ask about the restaurant that your friend just emailed you about, without having to pause your workout or use your phone. Gemini is coming to Wear OS smartwatches in coming months. Google says Gemini on Google TV will allow users to do things like get personalized recommendations for content, like asking for a list of action movies that are age-appropriate for kids, for example. Techcrunch event Join us at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot for our leading AI industry event with speakers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere. For a limited time, tickets are just $292 for an entire day of expert talks, workshops, and potent networking. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 REGISTER NOW Image Credits:Google Gemini will also be able to answer questions. For example, your kids can ask the assistant about the solar system, after which Gemini could pull up the perfect educational YouTube video to help them learn more about their various interests. Gemini will launch on Google TV later this year. The company is also integrating Gemini to Android XR, its new platform for Extended Reality (XR) devices like headsets and glasses. Google announced back in December that Android XR will first launch with the Samsung-built Project Moohan headset, which will be available for purchase sometime this year. Image Credits:Google It’s not surprising that Google is bringing Gemini to Android XR, as the company already previously said that users will be able to control the headset with Gemini and ask questions about the app and content that they are looking at. “When the first headset launches later this year, Gemini can help you do things like planning a vacation by surrounding you with videos, maps and local tips, and this helps you create an entire itinerary in minutes within this very rich, immersive experience,” said Guemmy Kim, senior director of product and user experience on the Android team, in a briefing with reporters. As part of Tuesday’s announcement, Google shared that Gemini is coming to Android Auto in the coming months. This expansion will allow users to do things like ask Gemini to find a charging station that’s, for example, on the way to the post office that’s also near a park. Plus, you can ask it to summarize the messages you receive or give you a rundown of the news.

At the Android Show on Tuesday, ahead of Google I/O, Google announced new security and privacy features for Android. These new features include new protections for calls, screen sharing, messages, device access, and system-level permissions. With these features, Google aims to protect users from falling for a scam, keep their details secure in case a device is stolen or taken over by an attacker, and enhance device-level security for various attacks. Phone scammers often ask users to take actions like tapping on unsafe links or downloading unknown apps. In order to protect users, Google is blocking some actions and warning users of a potential scam while they are on a call with someone not in their contact list. Image Credits:Google For Android 16, these actions include side-loading an app for the first time from a web browser, messaging app, or other sources that have not been verified by Google, and granting accessibility permission to an app so that a scammer can take control of the device. The company is also preventing users running Android 6 or later from disabling Google Play Protect, which scans the device for harmful apps while they are on a call. Google is adding screen-sharing protection as well by reminding users to stop sharing the screen after a call ends. The company is also testing a new warning screen with select banks in the U.K. to prevent fraud through screen-sharing. When users on devices running Android 11 or later open a partner bank’s app while sharing the screen while on a call with an unknown number, the device will show them a new warning screen about a possible scam with a button to quickly end the screen sharing. Image Credits:Google Messages protection Google is enhancing protection against scams in Google Messages after launching the feature in March. The feature uses on-device AI to alert users of a potential scam based on the conversation. The company is now bolstering user security by having the tool to detect more types of fraud, including crypto, gift card, toll road, and other billing fees, financial impersonation, and technical support. Image Credits:Google What’s more, the company is adding verification keys to the Google Contacts app, which will help users authenticate that the person on the other end is the intended receiver. Users can verify their contacts by having them scan a QR code or match numbers displayed on the screen. Techcrunch event Join us at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot for our leading AI industry event with speakers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere. For a limited time, tickets are just $292 for an entire day of expert talks, workshops, and potent networking. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 REGISTER NOW Verified keys mean that your conversation with your contact on Google Messages is end-to-end encrypted and secured. Google said that if an attacker starts controlling a phone number through a SIM swap attack and messages you through a new device, the Google Contacts app will show the verification status as unverified. This feature will be available for Google Messages later this summer for users running Android 10 or later versions. Image Credits:Google Theft protection measures Earlier this year, Google rolled out Identity Check protection to Pixel and Samsung devices with OneUI 7. The feature requires users to use biometric authentication to change critical settings like changing your device PIN or biometrics, disabling theft protection, or accessing Passkeys when the user is not at one of the trusted locations they have added. The company is now making this feature available to other device makers with Android 16. Later this year, Google will add better protection for Factory Reset, restricting all kinds of functions on the device that are reset without authorization of the previous lock pattern/PIN or Google account credentials. This essentially makes a stolen device hard to use. Image Credits:Google To prevent someone from locking your device remotely, the company is adding a security challenge question to prevent unauthorized access. With Android 16, the company will also hide one-time passwords if the device is not connected to Wi-Fi and hasn’t been unlocked recently. Image Credits:Google Additional protections The company is adding new features to its Google Play Protect live detection program as well, by detecting unsafe apps that have hidden or changed icons. This feature will be available in the coming months for users running Android 6 and later versions. The company said it is now applying a new set of on-device rules to catch more categories of malicious apps. Google is adding new measures to bolster its Advanced Protection Mode, to protect public figures with new on-device features. The company is also debuting a new Find My Hub to keep track of items, friends, and family.

Apple Music is introducing a new “audio wellness” collection of songs called Sound Therapy. Designed in partnership with Universal Music Group (UMG), the feature combines songs that subscribers already know with other sound waves that promote focusing, relaxing, or sleeping. Songs may include auditory beats or colored noise, sound waves where the intensity varies at different frequencies that are categorized by colors. For instance, pink noise — a variation akin to rain or wind — can be combined with delta waves to promote sleep. Image Credits:Apple The Focus category in Sound Therapy, meanwhile, leverages gamma auditory beats combined with white noise. And songs in the Relax group use theta auditory beats to promote winding down and letting go. The collection features songs that listeners already know, like those from artists such as Imagine Dragons, Katy Perry, Kacey Musgraves, Ludovico Einaudi, AURORA, Jhené Aiko, Chelsea Cutler, and Jeremy Zucker. These tracks were turned into extended, instrumental versions by producers and audio engineers at UMG’s music wellness venture called Sollos, based in London. The addition joins the recently launched Apple Music Chill radio station, offering sounds that are also interspersed with mindful moments and calming stories.

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 with Apple for its generative AI offering, Apple Intelligence, the release of GPT-4o with voice capabilities, and the highly-anticipated launch of its text-to-video model Sora. OpenAI also faced its share of internal drama, including the notable exits of high-level execs like co-founder and longtime chief scientist Ilya Sutskever and CTO Mira Murati. OpenAI has also been hit with lawsuits from Alden Global Capital-owned newspapers alleging copyright infringement, as well as an injunction from Elon Musk to halt OpenAI’s transition to a for-profit. In 2025, OpenAI is battling the perception that it’s ceding ground in the AI race to Chinese rivals like DeepSeek. The company has been trying to shore up its relationship with Washington as it simultaneously pursues an ambitious data center project, and as it reportedly lays the groundwork for one of the largest funding rounds in history. Below, you’ll find a timeline of ChatGPT product updates and releases, starting with the latest, which we’ve been updating throughout the year. If you have any other questions, check out our ChatGPT FAQ here. To see a list of 2024 updates, go here. Timeline of the most recent ChatGPT updates May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 ChatGPT FAQs Techcrunch event Join us at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot for our leading AI industry event with speakers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere. For a limited time, tickets are just $292 for an entire day of expert talks, workshops, and potent networking. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 REGISTER NOW May 2025 ChatGPT deep research now connects with GitHub (in beta) to answer code-related questions OpenAI has launched a new feature for ChatGPT deep research to analyze code repositories on GitHub. The ChatGPT deep research feature is in beta and lets developers connect with GitHub to ask questions about codebases and engineering documents. The connector will soon be available for ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Team users, with support for Enterprise and Education coming shortly, per an OpenAI spokesperson. OpenAI launches a new data residency program in Asia After introducing a data residency program in Europe in February, OpenAI has now launched a similar program in Asian countries including India, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea. The new program will be accessible to users of ChatGPT Enterprise, ChatGPT Edu, and API. It will help organizations in Asia meet their local data sovereignty requirements when using OpenAI’s products. OpenAI to introduce a program to grow AI infrastructure OpenAI is unveiling a program called OpenAI for Countries, which aims to develop the necessary local infrastructure to serve international AI clients better. The AI startup will work with governments to assist with increasing data center capacity and customizing OpenAI’s products to meet specific language and local needs. OpenAI for Countries is part of efforts to support the company’s expansion of its AI data center Project Stargate to new locations outside the U.S., per Bloomberg. OpenAI promises to make changes to prevent future ChatGPT sycophancy OpenAI has announced its plan to make changes to its procedures for updating the AI models that power ChatGPT, following an update that caused the platform to become overly sycophantic for many users. April 2025 OpenAI clarifies the reason ChatGPT became overly flattering and agreeable OpenAI has released a post on the recent sycophancy issues with the default AI model powering ChatGPT, GPT-4o, leading the company to revert an update to the model released last week. CEO Sam Altman acknowledged the issue on Sunday and confirmed two days later that the GPT-4o update was being rolled back. OpenAI is working on “additional fixes” to the model’s personality. Over the weekend, users on social media criticized the new model for making ChatGPT too validating and agreeable. It became a popular meme fast. OpenAI is working to fix a “bug” that let minors engage in inappropriate conversations An issue within OpenAI’s ChatGPT enabled the chatbot to create graphic erotic content for accounts registered by users under the age of 18, as demonstrated by TechCrunch’s testing, a fact later confirmed by OpenAI. “Protecting younger users is a top priority, and our Model Spec, which guides model behavior, clearly restricts sensitive content like erotica to narrow contexts such as scientific, historical, or news reporting,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch via email. “In this case, a bug allowed responses outside those guidelines, and we are actively deploying a fix to limit these generations.” ChatGPT helps users by giving recommendations, showing images, and reviewing products for online shopping OpenAI has added a few features to its ChatGPT search, its web search tool in ChatGPT, to give users an improved online shopping experience. The company says people can ask super-specific questions using natural language and receive customized results. The chatbot provides recommendations, images, and reviews of products in various categories such as fashion, beauty, home goods, and electronics. OpenAI wants its AI model to access cloud models for assistance OpenAI leaders have been talking about allowing the open model to link up with OpenAI’s cloud-hosted models to improve its ability to respond to intricate questions, two sources familiar with the situation told TechCrunch. OpenAI aims to make its new “open” AI model the best on the market OpenAI is preparing to launch an AI system that will be openly accessible, allowing users to download it for free without any API restrictions. Aidan Clark, OpenAI’s VP of research, is spearheading the development of the open model, which is in the very early stages, sources familiar with the situation told TechCrunch. OpenAI’s GPT-4.1 may be less aligned than earlier models OpenAI released a new AI model called GPT-4.1 in mid-April. However, multiple independent tests indicate that the model is less reliable than previous OpenAI releases. The company skipped that step — sending safety cards for GPT-4.1 — claiming in a statement to TechCrunch that “GPT-4.1 is not a frontier model, so there won’t be a separate system card released for it.” OpenAI’s o3 AI model scored lower than expected on a benchmark Questions have been raised regarding OpenAI’s transparency and procedures for testing models after a difference in benchmark outcomes was detected by first- and third-party benchmark results for the o3 AI model. OpenAI introduced o3 in December, stating that the model could solve approximately 25% of questions on FrontierMath, a difficult math problem set. Epoch AI, the research institute behind FrontierMath, discovered that o3 achieved a score of approximately 10%, which was significantly lower than OpenAI’s top-reported score. OpenAI unveils Flex processing for cheaper, slower AI tasks OpenAI has launched a new API feature called Flex processing that allows users to use AI models at a lower cost but with slower response times and occasional resource unavailability. Flex processing is available in beta on the o3 and o4-mini reasoning models for non-production tasks like model evaluations, data enrichment, and asynchronous workloads. OpenAI’s latest AI models now have a safeguard against biorisks OpenAI has rolled out a new system to monitor its AI reasoning models, o3 and o4 mini, for biological and chemical threats. The system is designed to prevent models from giving advice that could potentially lead to harmful attacks, as stated in OpenAI’s safety report. OpenAI launches its latest reasoning models, o3 and o4-mini OpenAI has released two new reasoning models, o3 and o4 mini, just two days after launching GPT-4.1. The company claims o3 is the most advanced reasoning model it has developed, while o4-mini is said to provide a balance of price, speed, and performance. The new models stand out from previous reasoning models because they can use ChatGPT features like web browsing, coding, and image processing and generation. But they hallucinate more than several of OpenAI’s previous models. OpenAI has added a new section to ChatGPT to offer easier access to AI-generated images for all user tiers Open AI introduced a new section called “library” to make it easier for users to create images on mobile and web platforms, per the company’s X post. All of your image creations, all in one place. Introducing the new library for your ChatGPT image creations—rolling out now to all Free, Plus, and Pro users on mobile and https://t.co/nYW5KO1aIg. pic.twitter.com/ADWuf5fPbj — OpenAI (@OpenAI) April 15, 2025 OpenAI could “adjust” its safeguards if rivals release “high-risk” AI OpenAI said on Tuesday that it might revise its safety standards if “another frontier AI developer releases a high-risk system without comparable safeguards.” The move shows how commercial AI developers face more pressure to rapidly implement models due to the increased competition. OpenAI is building its own social media network OpenAI is currently in the early stages of developing its own social media platform to compete with Elon Musk’s X and Mark Zuckerberg’s Instagram and Threads, according to The Verge. It is unclear whether OpenAI intends to launch the social network as a standalone application or incorporate it into ChatGPT. OpenAI will remove its largest AI model, GPT-4.5, from the API, in July OpenAI will discontinue its largest AI model, GPT-4.5, from its API even though it was just launched in late February. GPT-4.5 will be available in a research preview for paying customers. Developers can use GPT-4.5 through OpenAI’s API until July 14; then, they will need to switch to GPT-4.1, which was released on April 14. OpenAI unveils GPT-4.1 AI models that focus on coding capabilities OpenAI has launched three members of the GPT-4.1 model — GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and GPT-4.1 nano — with a specific focus on coding capabilities. It’s accessible via the OpenAI API but not ChatGPT. In the competition to develop advanced programming models, GPT-4.1 will rival AI models such as Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet, and DeepSeek’s upgraded V3. OpenAI will discontinue ChatGPT’s GPT-4 at the end of April OpenAI plans to sunset GPT-4, an AI model introduced more than two years ago, and replace it with GPT-4o, the current default model, per changelog. It will take effect on April 30. GPT-4 will remain available via OpenAI’s API. OpenAI could release GPT-4.1 soon OpenAI may launch several new AI models, including GPT-4.1, soon, The Verge reported, citing anonymous sources. GPT-4.1 would be an update of OpenAI’s GPT-4o, which was released last year. On the list of upcoming models are GPT-4.1 and smaller versions like GPT-4.1 mini and nano, per the report. OpenAI has updated ChatGPT to use information from your previous conversations OpenAI started updating ChatGPT to enable the chatbot to remember previous conversations with a user and customize its responses based on that context. This feature is rolling out to ChatGPT Pro and Plus users first, excluding those in the U.K., EU, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland. OpenAI is working on watermarks for images made with ChatGPT It looks like OpenAI is working on a watermarking feature for images generated using GPT-4o. AI researcher Tibor Blaho spotted a new “ImageGen” watermark feature in the new beta of ChatGPT’s Android app. Blaho also found mentions of other tools: “Structured Thoughts,” “Reasoning Recap,” “CoT Search Tool,” and “l1239dk1.” OpenAI offers ChatGPT Plus for free to U.S., Canadian college students OpenAI is offering its $20-per-month ChatGPT Plus subscription tier for free to all college students in the U.S. and Canada through the end of May. The offer will let millions of students use OpenAI’s premium service, which offers access to the company’s GPT-4o model, image generation, voice interaction, and research tools that are not available in the free version. ChatGPT users have generated over 700M images so far More than 130 million users have created over 700 million images since ChatGPT got the upgraded image generator on March 25, according to COO of OpenAI Brad Lightcap. The image generator was made available to all ChatGPT users on March 31, and went viral for being able to create Ghibli-style photos. OpenAI’s o3 model could cost more to run than initial estimate The Arc Prize Foundation, which develops the AI benchmark tool ARC-AGI, has updated the estimated computing costs for OpenAI’s o3 “reasoning” model managed by ARC-AGI. The organization originally estimated that the best-performing configuration of o3 it tested, o3 high, would cost approximately $3,000 to address a single problem. The Foundation now thinks the cost could be much higher, possibly around $30,000 per task. OpenAI CEO says capacity issues will cause product delays In a series of posts on X, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company’s new image-generation tool’s popularity may cause product releases to be delayed. “We are getting things under control, but you should expect new releases from OpenAI to be delayed, stuff to break, and for service to sometimes be slow as we deal with capacity challenges,” he wrote. March 2025 OpenAI plans to release a new ‘open’ AI language model OpeanAI intends to release its “first” open language model since GPT-2 “in the coming months.” The company plans to host developer events to gather feedback and eventually showcase prototypes of the model. The first developer event is to be held in San Francisco, with sessions to follow in Europe and Asia. OpenAI removes ChatGPT’s restrictions on image generation OpenAI made a notable change to its content moderation policies after the success of its new image generator in ChatGPT, which went viral for being able to create Studio Ghibli-style images. The company has updated its policies to allow ChatGPT to generate images of public figures, hateful symbols, and racial features when requested. OpenAI had previously declined such prompts due to the potential controversy or harm they may cause. However, the company has now “evolved” its approach, as stated in a blog post published by Joanne Jang, the lead for OpenAI’s model behavior. OpenAI adopts Anthropic’s standard for linking AI models with data OpenAI wants to incorporate Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) into all of its products, including the ChatGPT desktop app. MCP, an open-source standard, helps AI models generate more accurate and suitable responses to specific queries, and lets developers create bidirectional links between data sources and AI applications like chatbots. The protocol is currently available in the Agents SDK, and support for the ChatGPT desktop app and Responses API will be coming soon, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said. OpenAI’s viral Studio Ghibli-style images could raise AI copyright concerns The latest update of the image generator on OpenAI’s ChatGPT has triggered a flood of AI-generated memes in the style of Studio Ghibli, the Japanese animation studio behind blockbuster films like “My Neighbor Totoro” and “Spirited Away.” The burgeoning mass of Ghibli-esque images have sparked concerns about whether OpenAI has violated copyright laws, especially since the company is already facing legal action for using source material without authorization. OpenAI expects revenue to triple to $12.7 billion this year OpenAI expects its revenue to triple to $12.7 billion in 2025, fueled by the performance of its paid AI software, Bloomberg reported, citing an anonymous source. While the startup doesn’t expect to reach positive cash flow until 2029, it expects revenue to increase significantly in 2026 to surpass $29.4 billion, the report said. ChatGPT has upgraded its image-generation feature OpenAI on Tuesday rolled out a major upgrade to ChatGPT’s image-generation capabilities: ChatGPT can now use the GPT-4o model to generate and edit images and photos directly. The feature went live earlier this week in ChatGPT and Sora, OpenAI’s AI video-generation tool, for subscribers of the company’s Pro plan, priced at $200 a month, and will be available soon to ChatGPT Plus subscribers and developers using the company’s API service. The company’s CEO Sam Altman said on Wednesday, however, that the release of the image generation feature to free users would be delayed due to higher demand than the company expected. OpenAI announces leadership updates Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s chief operating officer, will lead the company’s global expansion and manage corporate partnerships as CEO Sam Altman shifts his focus to research and products, according to a blog post from OpenAI. Lightcap, who previously worked with Altman at Y Combinator, joined the Microsoft-backed startup in 2018. OpenAI also said Mark Chen would step into the expanded role of chief research officer, and Julia Villagra will take on the role of chief people officer. OpenAI’s AI voice assistant now has advanced feature OpenAI has updated its AI voice assistant with improved chatting capabilities, according to a video posted on Monday (March 24) to the company’s official media channels. The update enables real-time conversations, and the AI assistant is said to be more personable and interrupts users less often. Users on ChatGPT’s free tier can now access the new version of Advanced Voice Mode, while paying users will receive answers that are “more direct, engaging, concise, specific, and creative,” a spokesperson from OpenAI told TechCrunch. OpenAI, Meta in talks with Reliance in India OpenAI and Meta have separately engaged in discussions with Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries regarding potential collaborations to enhance their AI services in the country, per a report by The Information. One key topic being discussed is Reliance Jio distributing OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Reliance has proposed selling OpenAI’s models to businesses in India through an application programming interface (API) so they can incorporate AI into their operations. Meta also plans to bolster its presence in India by constructing a large 3GW data center in Jamnagar, Gujarat. OpenAI, Meta, and Reliance have not yet officially announced these plans. OpenAI faces privacy complaint in Europe for chatbot’s defamatory hallucinations Noyb, a privacy rights advocacy group, is supporting an individual in Norway who was shocked to discover that ChatGPT was providing false information about him, stating that he had been found guilty of killing two of his children and trying to harm the third. “The GDPR is clear. Personal data has to be accurate,” said Joakim Söderberg, data protection lawyer at Noyb, in a statement. “If it’s not, users have the right to have it changed to reflect the truth. Showing ChatGPT users a tiny disclaimer that the chatbot can make mistakes clearly isn’t enough. You can’t just spread false information and in the end add a small disclaimer saying that everything you said may just not be true.” OpenAI upgrades its transcription and voice-generating AI models OpenAI has added new transcription and voice-generating AI models to its APIs: a text-to-speech model, “gpt-4o-mini-tts,” that delivers more nuanced and realistic sounding speech, as well as two speech-to-text models called “gpt-4o-transcribe” and “gpt-4o-mini-transcribe”. The company claims they are improved versions of what was already there and that they hallucinate less. OpenAI has launched o1-pro, a more powerful version of its o1 OpenAI has introduced o1-pro in its developer API. OpenAI says its o1-pro uses more computing than its o1 “reasoning” AI model to deliver “consistently better responses.” It’s only accessible to select developers who have spent at least $5 on OpenAI API services. OpenAI charges $150 for every million tokens (about 750,000 words) input into the model and $600 for every million tokens the model produces. It costs twice as much as OpenAI’s GPT-4.5 for input and 10 times the price of regular o1. OpenAI research lead Noam Brown thinks AI “reasoning” models could’ve arrived decades ago Noam Brown, who heads AI reasoning research at OpenAI, thinks that certain types of AI models for “reasoning” could have been developed 20 years ago if researchers had understood the correct approach and algorithms. OpenAI says it has trained an AI that’s “really good” at creative writing OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said, in a post on X, that the company has trained a “new model” that’s “really good” at creative writing. He posted a lengthy sample from the model given the prompt “Please write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief.” OpenAI has not extensively explored the use of AI for writing fiction. The company has mostly concentrated on challenges in rigid, predictable areas such as math and programming. And it turns out that it might not be that great at creative writing at all. we trained a new model that is good at creative writing (not sure yet how/when it will get released). this is the first time i have been really struck by something written by AI; it got the vibe of metafiction so right. PROMPT: Please write a metafictional literary short story… — Sam Altman (@sama) March 11, 2025 OpenAI launches new tools to help businesses build AI agents OpenAI rolled out new tools designed to help developers and businesses build AI agents — automated systems that can independently accomplish tasks — using the company’s own AI models and frameworks. The tools are part of OpenAI’s new Responses API, which enables enterprises to develop customized AI agents that can perform web searches, scan through company files, and navigate websites, similar to OpenAI’s Operator product. The Responses API effectively replaces OpenAI’s Assistants API, which the company plans to discontinue in the first half of 2026. OpenAI reportedly plans to charge up to $20,000 a month for specialized AI ‘agents’ OpenAI intends to release several “agent” products tailored for different applications, including sorting and ranking sales leads and software engineering, according to a report from The Information. One, a “high-income knowledge worker” agent, will reportedly be priced at $2,000 a month. Another, a software developer agent, is said to cost $10,000 a month. The most expensive rumored agents, which are said to be aimed at supporting “PhD-level research,” are expected to cost $20,000 per month. The jaw-dropping figure is indicative of how much cash OpenAI needs right now: The company lost roughly $5 billion last year after paying for costs related to running its services and other expenses. It’s unclear when these agentic tools might launch or which customers will be eligible to buy them. ChatGPT can directly edit your code The latest version of the macOS ChatGPT app allows users to edit code directly in supported developer tools, including Xcode, VS Code, and JetBrains. ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Team subscribers can use the feature now, and the company plans to roll it out to more users like Enterprise, Edu, and free users. ChatGPT’s weekly active users doubled in less than 6 months, thanks to new releases According to a new report from VC firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), OpenAI’s AI chatbot, ChatGPT, experienced solid growth in the second half of 2024. It took ChatGPT nine months to increase its weekly active users from 100 million in November 2023 to 200 million in August 2024, but it only took less than six months to double that number once more, according to the report. ChatGPT’s weekly active users increased to 300 million by December 2024 and 400 million by February 2025. ChatGPT has experienced significant growth recently due to the launch of new models and features, such as GPT-4o, with multimodal capabilities. ChatGPT usage spiked from April to May 2024, shortly after that model’s launch. February 2025 OpenAI cancels its o3 AI model in favor of a ‘unified’ next-gen release OpenAI has effectively canceled the release of o3 in favor of what CEO Sam Altman is calling a “simplified” product offering. In a post on X, Altman said that, in the coming months, OpenAI will release a model called GPT-5 that “integrates a lot of [OpenAI’s] technology,” including o3, in ChatGPT and its API. As a result of that roadmap decision, OpenAI no longer plans to release o3 as a standalone model. ChatGPT may not be as power-hungry as once assumed A commonly cited stat is that ChatGPT requires around 3 watt-hours of power to answer a single question. Using OpenAI’s latest default model for ChatGPT, GPT-4o, as a reference, nonprofit AI research institute Epoch AI found the average ChatGPT query consumes around 0.3 watt-hours. However, the analysis doesn’t consider the additional energy costs incurred by ChatGPT with features like image generation or input processing. OpenAI now reveals more of its o3-mini model’s thought process In response to pressure from rivals like DeepSeek, OpenAI is changing the way its o3-mini model communicates its step-by-step “thought” process. ChatGPT users will see an updated “chain of thought” that shows more of the model’s “reasoning” steps and how it arrived at answers to questions. You can now use ChatGPT web search without logging in OpenAI is now allowing anyone to use ChatGPT web search without having to log in. While OpenAI had previously allowed users to ask ChatGPT questions without signing in, responses were restricted to the chatbot’s last training update. This only applies through ChatGPT.com, however. To use ChatGPT in any form through the native mobile app, you will still need to be logged in. OpenAI unveils a new ChatGPT agent for ‘deep research’ OpenAI announced a new AI “agent” called deep research that’s designed to help people conduct in-depth, complex research using ChatGPT. OpenAI says the “agent” is intended for instances where you don’t just want a quick answer or summary, but instead need to assiduously consider information from multiple websites and other sources. January 2025 OpenAI used a subreddit to test AI persuasion OpenAI used the subreddit r/ChangeMyView to measure the persuasive abilities of its AI reasoning models. OpenAI says it collects user posts from the subreddit and asks its AI models to write replies, in a closed environment, that would change the Reddit user’s mind on a subject. The company then shows the responses to testers, who assess how persuasive the argument is, and finally OpenAI compares the AI models’ responses to human replies for that same post. OpenAI launches o3-mini, its latest ‘reasoning’ model OpenAI launched a new AI “reasoning” model, o3-mini, the newest in the company’s o family of models. OpenAI first previewed the model in December alongside a more capable system called o3. OpenAI is pitching its new model as both “powerful” and “affordable.” ChatGPT’s mobile users are 85% male, report says A new report from app analytics firm Appfigures found that over half of ChatGPT’s mobile users are under age 25, with users between ages 50 and 64 making up the second largest age demographic. The gender gap among ChatGPT users is even more significant. Appfigures estimates that across age groups, men make up 84.5% of all users. OpenAI launches ChatGPT plan for US government agencies OpenAI launched ChatGPT Gov designed to provide U.S. government agencies an additional way to access the tech. ChatGPT Gov includes many of the capabilities found in OpenAI’s corporate-focused tier, ChatGPT Enterprise. OpenAI says that ChatGPT Gov enables agencies to more easily manage their own security, privacy, and compliance, and could expedite internal authorization of OpenAI’s tools for the handling of non-public sensitive data. More teens report using ChatGPT for schoolwork, despite the tech’s faults Younger Gen Zers are embracing ChatGPT, for schoolwork, according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center. In a follow-up to its 2023 poll on ChatGPT usage among young people, Pew asked ~1,400 U.S.-based teens ages 13 to 17 whether they’ve used ChatGPT for homework or other school-related assignments. Twenty-six percent said that they had, double the number two years ago. Just over half of teens responding to the poll said they think it’s acceptable to use ChatGPT for researching new subjects. But considering the ways ChatGPT can fall short, the results are possibly cause for alarm. OpenAI says it may store deleted Operator data for up to 90 days OpenAI says that it might store chats and associated screenshots from customers who use Operator, the company’s AI “agent” tool, for up to 90 days — even after a user manually deletes them. While OpenAI has a similar deleted data retention policy for ChatGPT, the retention period for ChatGPT is only 30 days, which is 60 days shorter than Operator’s. OpenAI launches Operator, an AI agent that performs tasks autonomously OpenAI is launching a research preview of Operator, a general-purpose AI agent that can take control of a web browser and independently perform certain actions. Operator promises to automate tasks such as booking travel accommodations, making restaurant reservations, and shopping online. OpenAI may preview its agent tool for users on the $200-per-month Pro plan Operator, OpenAI’s agent tool, could be released sooner rather than later. Changes to ChatGPT’s code base suggest that Operator will be available as an early research preview to users on the $200 Pro subscription plan. The changes aren’t yet publicly visible, but a user on X who goes by Choi spotted these updates in ChatGPT’s client-side code. TechCrunch separately identified the same references to Operator on OpenAI’s website. OpenAI tests phone number-only ChatGPT signups OpenAI has begun testing a feature that lets new ChatGPT users sign up with only a phone number — no email required. The feature is currently in beta in the U.S. and India. However, users who create an account using their number can’t upgrade to one of OpenAI’s paid plans without verifying their account via an email. Multi-factor authentication also isn’t supported without a valid email. ChatGPT now lets you schedule reminders and recurring tasks ChatGPT’s new beta feature, called tasks, allows users to set simple reminders. For example, you can ask ChatGPT to remind you when your passport expires in six months, and the AI assistant will follow up with a push notification on whatever platform you have tasks enabled. The feature will start rolling out to ChatGPT Plus, Team, and Pro users around the globe this week. New ChatGPT feature lets users assign it traits like ‘chatty’ and ‘Gen Z’ OpenAI is introducing a new way for users to customize their interactions with ChatGPT. Some users found they can specify a preferred name or nickname and “traits” they’d like the chatbot to have. OpenAI suggests traits like “Chatty,” “Encouraging,” and “Gen Z.” However, some users reported that the new options have disappeared, so it’s possible they went live prematurely. FAQs: What is ChatGPT? How does it work? ChatGPT is a general-purpose chatbot that uses artificial intelligence to generate text after a user enters a prompt, developed by tech startup OpenAI. The chatbot uses GPT-4, a large language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text. When did ChatGPT get released? November 30, 2022 is when ChatGPT was released for public use. What is the latest version of ChatGPT? Both the free version of ChatGPT and the paid ChatGPT Plus are regularly updated with new GPT models. The most recent model is GPT-4o. Can I use ChatGPT for free? There is a free version of ChatGPT that only requires a sign-in in addition to the paid version, ChatGPT Plus. Who uses ChatGPT? Anyone can use ChatGPT! More and more tech companies and search engines are utilizing the chatbot to automate text or quickly answer user questions/concerns. What companies use ChatGPT? Multiple enterprises utilize ChatGPT, although others may limit the use of the AI-powered tool. Most recently, Microsoft announced at its 2023 Build conference that it is integrating its ChatGPT-based Bing experience into Windows 11. A Brooklyn-based 3D display startup Looking Glass utilizes ChatGPT to produce holograms you can communicate with by using ChatGPT. And nonprofit organization Solana officially integrated the chatbot into its network with a ChatGPT plug-in geared toward end users to help onboard into the web3 space. What does GPT mean in ChatGPT? GPT stands for Generative Pre-Trained Transformer. What is the difference between ChatGPT and a chatbot? A chatbot can be any software/system that holds dialogue with you/a person but doesn’t necessarily have to be AI-powered. For example, there are chatbots that are rules-based in the sense that they’ll give canned responses to questions. ChatGPT is AI-powered and utilizes LLM technology to generate text after a prompt. Can ChatGPT write essays? Yes. Can ChatGPT commit libel? Due to the nature of how these models work, they don’t know or care whether something is true, only that it looks true. That’s a problem when you’re using it to do your homework, sure, but when it accuses you of a crime you didn’t commit, that may well at this point be libel. We will see how handling troubling statements produced by ChatGPT will play out over the next few months as tech and legal experts attempt to tackle the fastest moving target in the industry. Does ChatGPT have an app? Yes, there is a free ChatGPT mobile app for iOS and Android users. What is the ChatGPT character limit? It’s not documented anywhere that ChatGPT has a character limit. However, users have noted that there are some character limitations after around 500 words. Does ChatGPT have an API? Yes, it was released March 1, 2023. What are some sample everyday uses for ChatGPT? Everyday examples include programming, scripts, email replies, listicles, blog ideas, summarization, etc. What are some advanced uses for ChatGPT? Advanced use examples include debugging code, programming languages, scientific concepts, complex problem solving, etc. How good is ChatGPT at writing code? It depends on the nature of the program. While ChatGPT can write workable Python code, it can’t necessarily program an entire app’s worth of code. That’s because ChatGPT lacks context awareness — in other words, the generated code isn’t always appropriate for the specific context in which it’s being used. Can you save a ChatGPT chat? Yes. OpenAI allows users to save chats in the ChatGPT interface, stored in the sidebar of the screen. There are no built-in sharing features yet. Are there alternatives to ChatGPT? Yes. There are multiple AI-powered chatbot competitors such as Together, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude, and developers are creating open source alternatives. How does ChatGPT handle data privacy? OpenAI has said that individuals in “certain jurisdictions” (such as the EU) can object to the processing of their personal information by its AI models by filling out this form. This includes the ability to make requests for deletion of AI-generated references about you. Although OpenAI notes it may not grant every request since it must balance privacy requests against freedom of expression “in accordance with applicable laws”. The web form for making a deletion of data about you request is entitled “OpenAI Personal Data Removal Request”. In its privacy policy, the ChatGPT maker makes a passing acknowledgement of the objection requirements attached to relying on “legitimate interest” (LI), pointing users towards more information about requesting an opt out — when it writes: “See here for instructions on how you can opt out of our use of your information to train our models.” What controversies have surrounded ChatGPT? Recently, Discord announced that it had integrated OpenAI’s technology into its bot named Clyde where two users tricked Clyde into providing them with instructions for making the illegal drug methamphetamine (meth) and the incendiary mixture napalm. An Australian mayor has publicly announced he may sue OpenAI for defamation due to ChatGPT’s false claims that he had served time in prison for bribery. This would be the first defamation lawsuit against the text-generating service. CNET found itself in the midst of controversy after Futurism reported the publication was publishing articles under a mysterious byline completely generated by AI. The private equity company that owns CNET, Red Ventures, was accused of using ChatGPT for SEO farming, even if the information was incorrect. Several major school systems and colleges, including New York City Public Schools, have banned ChatGPT from their networks and devices. They claim that the AI impedes the learning process by promoting plagiarism and misinformation, a claim that not every educator agrees with. There have also been cases of ChatGPT accusing individuals of false crimes. Where can I find examples of ChatGPT prompts? Several marketplaces host and provide ChatGPT prompts, either for free or for a nominal fee. One is PromptBase. Another is ChatX. More launch every day. Can ChatGPT be detected? Poorly. Several tools claim to detect ChatGPT-generated text, but in our tests, they’re inconsistent at best. Are ChatGPT chats public? No. But OpenAI recently disclosed a bug, since fixed, that exposed the titles of some users’ conversations to other people on the service. What lawsuits are there surrounding ChatGPT? None specifically targeting ChatGPT. But OpenAI is involved in at least one lawsuit that has implications for AI systems trained on publicly available data, which would touch on ChatGPT. Are there issues regarding plagiarism with ChatGPT? Yes. Text-generating AI models like ChatGPT have a tendency to regurgitate content from their training data.

Russia’s war in Ukraine and President Donald Trump’s reluctance to support NATO allies has led to a boost in funding for European defense tech. And across industries, startups are leveraging the opportunity. One such company could be UK-based startup Vertical Aerospace, which is developing eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing) aircraft mainly for air taxi operations. The startup has more than 1,500 pre-orders for its VX4 eVTOL from customers like American Airlines, Japan Airlines, GOL, and Bristow. Now, Vertical is speaking more publicly about the opportunities in defense and logistics. On Monday, the Vertical took its first public step by announcing a plan to develop a hybrid-electric variant of its VX4. “We always knew this aircraft would be defense-capable because of the nature of it,” Vertical Aerospace CEO Stuart Simpson, told TechCrunch, noting the hybrid version of its eVTOL promises a range of up to 1,000 miles. That’s a 10-fold increase on the eVTOL. VTOLs make for good defense aircraft because they have low noise and heat signatures. They can also be deployed autonomously or remotely, capabilities Vertical says its aircraft will one day have. Vertical has partnered with Honeywell, which is developing autonomous aircraft for the U.S. military, to create the flight control and aircraft management systems for its vehicles. Vertical’s hybrid-electric strategy isn’t unique to the startup. In December 2024, California-based Archer Aviation announced a new unit dedicated to defense alongside plans to work with weapons manufacturer Anduril to build a hybrid-electric aircraft for critical military missions. The news garnered Archer another $430 million in equity from existing investors. And while Simpson insists that Vertical isn’t coming out with the news of its hybrid vehicle now out of opportunism – the startup has been working on its hybrid aircraft in stealth for 18 months – it’s certainly good timing. Techcrunch event Join us at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot for our leading AI industry event with speakers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere. For a limited time, tickets are just $292 for an entire day of expert talks, workshops, and potent networking. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 REGISTER NOW The European defense tech landscape has shifted over the past couple of years as the bloc prioritizes home-grown solutions. Last year, $1 billion in VC was invested into the industry for the first time, a fivefold increase since 2018. Specialist defense tech funds have also cropped up, like the €1 billion Nato Innovation Fund and the Estonian SmartCap €100 million defense fund. Lithuania is poised to spend 5% to 6% of its total GDP on defense spending, including into startups via its sovereign VC Coinvest Capital. Against this backdrop, Vertical finds itself basically without European rivals in the eVTOL industry. At the close of 2024, Germany’s Volocopter filed for bankruptcy, and Lilium ceased operations. Vertical says this makes it uniquely positioned to meet the growing defense needs across Europe. And now, with its upcoming hybrid-electric capabilities, it could become a key player amid growing defense budgets and increased focus on sovereign industrial capacity. To properly seize the moment, though, Vertical will likely need to raise more capital. The startup has raised $468.8 million to date, mainly through its reverse merger in 2021 and subsequent PIPEs, according to PitchBook. More recently, in January, Vertical raised $90 million through a second direct public offering. That puts Vertical well below competitors Joby Aviation (raised $2.82 billion to date), Archer Aviation ($3.36 billion raised), and Beta Technologies ($1.15 billion). “We’ve been spending about $100 million a year,” Simpson said. “Our competitors have been spending $400 to $500 million. We’ve been developing, within our $100 million spend envelope, this hybrid. We are incredibly efficient and focused.” Archer’s operating expenses in 2024 did top $500 million, a chunk of which went towards resolving a dispute with Boeing and Wisk Aero. Joby’s operating expenses last year nearly reached $600 million. That said, both Archer and Joby are investing heavily into manufacturing to be able to soon produce their eVTOLs at scale. Simpson said Vertical is not yet working to ramp up manufacturing before it finishes certification, which it expects to complete in 2028. “You can burn a lot of money by going to build and get a load of robots,” Simpson said. “This is not something you want to robotize. These are highly, highly complex. What you need to do is understand how you build them, and then…you build a few hundred of them manually. Then you simplify, standardize, and automate.” Vertical aims to have its first certified pre-prototype for its VX4 eVTOL built next year, with plans to build another handful after that. “The hybrid power train will be integrated into our next generation VX4 variant with flight testing planned to start next year,” Simpson said Tuesday during Vertical’s first-quarter earnings call. Vertical’s flight tests are only done with a pilot due, in part, to the stricter nature of UK flight regulations. Joby and Beta have already done piloted flights, but Archer still hasn’t – though it plans to do so imminently. When it comes to customers for Vertical’s military offerings, the company hasn’t secured any just yet. “We’ve had a lot of deep, meaningful discussions with government agencies and customers,” Simpson said. “But we’re the only European player in the space. So it gives us a really unique position.”

Hasan Piker, one of the most popular left-wing political creators in the U.S., says he was detained and questioned at the Chicago O’Hare Airport upon returning to the U.S. after a trip to France. In a stream in which he addressed the experience, Piker claims that he was questioned about his views on Trump, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. Piker has been outwardly critical of President Donald Trump and the U.S.’s ongoing support of the Israeli military, and he said it was clear to him that the Customs and Border Protection agent knew who he was. “He kept saying stuff like, ‘Do you like Hamas?’” Piker said in a video. “I kept repeating the same statement over and over again… I am on the side of civilians. I want the endless bloodshed to end. I am a pacifist.” Piker said that he felt that the agent who interviewed him was trying to get him to say something incriminating, and that the agent was aware of his online presence. Though Piker is a U.S. citizen, he was concerned about being jailed at the border for his political speech, since some U.S. citizens have been wrongfully detained amid Trump’s crackdown on immigration. According to NBC News, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official said that, in recounting his story online, Piker is “lying for likes.” “Claims that his political beliefs triggered the inspection are baseless,” said Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin in a statement. “Our officers are following the law, not agendas. Upon entering the country, this individual was referred for further inspection — a routine, lawful process that occurs daily, and can apply for any traveler. Once his inspection was complete, he was promptly released.” Techcrunch event Join us at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot for our leading AI industry event with speakers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere. For a limited time, tickets are just $292 for an entire day of expert talks, workshops, and potent networking. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 REGISTER NOW Piker has pushed back against DHS’s response. On X, Piker wrote: “the dhs response is so funny cus they’re not even disputing that it happened, they’re omitting the insane questions that were asked, & instead claiming that i wasn’t targeted for my political beliefs. why’d y’all ask me about trump, israel, houthis, hamas and my twitch bans then?”

Republican leadership in the Ways and Means committee of the U.S. House of Representatives released Monday night a draft of a reconciliation bill that seeks to undo much of the Inflation Reduction Act. The landmark 2022 law implemented a range of incentives that spurred the production of clean energy, electric vehicles, carbon capture, and battery storage. Since the IRA was enacted, the law has spurred more than $275 billion in private investment in the United States. House Republicans’ axe has fallen in places both expected and surprising. Under the “expected” column: Electric vehicle tax credits and the ability to transfer tax credits for clean energy production from one organization to another. The EV tax credit gives consumers up to a $7,500 tax credit on the purchase of an EV; the bill proposes ending the credit in 2026 and reinstating a cap of 200,000 vehicles per manufacturer. Several companies, including Tesla, GM, and Toyota, hit that cap years ago. The transferability clause has spurred an entirely new market, with over $30 billion worth of deals happening in 2024 alone. The provision allows companies and other organizations to take advantage of IRA tax credits even if they have no tax liability. A church, for example, can install solar panels and sell the tax credits to companies that can make use of the incentives. There were more surprising changes, too. Techcrunch event Join us at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot for our leading AI industry event with speakers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere. For a limited time, tickets are just $292 for an entire day of expert talks, workshops, and potent networking. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 REGISTER NOW Nuclear power, normally a favorite of GOP lawmakers, would no longer benefit from tax credits for electricity generation. The law would also end tax-exempt status for environmental groups if the government decides that they have “supported terrorist organizations.” Advanced manufacturing would also see incentives cut back, as would tax credits for carbon capture, something that many large oil companies have publicly supported. Sustainable aviation fuel is among the technologies that might see its incentives spared, as were bonuses for clean energy producers known as “adders.” The House bill also does not seek to claw back funds that have already been spent, contrary to what’s happening at the EPA. The House bill would move up the date for which large projects can qualify for incentives. None of this is set in stone, of course. This is a first draft at a process that’s certain to be drawn out and messy. Lobbyists and political action committees are already rolling out pressure campaigns to dissuade GOP politicians from voting in favor, and they have a chance at succeeding given how many Republican districts have benefited from the IRA in just a few years. Whether such an ambitious repeal of an existing law will pass muster under reconciliation rules also remains an open question. The process allows for a simple majority vote in the Senate provided a reconciliation bill raises revenue or spends it. Repealing the IRA would essentially be doing the opposite.

After a week or so of rumors, the U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC) formally rescinded the Biden Administration’s Artificial Intelligence Diffusion Rule days before it was set to go into effect. The Artificial Intelligence Diffusion Rule, which was introduced by former president Joe Biden in January and set to come into force on May 15, introduced U.S.-made AI chip export limits to many countries for the first time while bolstering existing restrictions. On Tuesday, the DOC announced that it instructed staff not to enforce the Biden-era regulation. The DOC plans to issue a replacement rule in the future, likely focusing on direct negotiations with countries as opposed to blanket restrictions, according to reporting from Bloomberg. Biden’s proposed rule divided the world’s countries into three tiers, with each tier having its own level of restrictions. Tier 1 countries, like Japan and South Korea, would have continued to face no export restrictions, while Tier 2 regions, which included countries like Mexico and Portugal, would have seen chip export limits for the first time. Tier 3 countries, like China and Russia, would have had to contend with tightened controls. In lieu of new regulations, the DOC on Tuesday released some guidance for the industry. It reminded companies that using Huawei’s Ascend AI chips anywhere in the world violates U.S. export rules, warned about the potential consequences of letting U.S. AI chips be used to train AI models in China, and recommended ways to protect chip supply chains from diversion tactics. “The Trump Administration will pursue a bold, inclusive strategy to American AI technology with trusted foreign countries around the world, while keeping the technology out of the hands of our adversaries,” U.S. Secretary of Commerce for Industry and Security Jeffery Kessler said in a statement. “At the same time, we reject the Biden Administration’s attempt to impose its own ill-conceived and counterproductive AI policies on the American people.”

Apple Music is introducing a new “audio wellness” collection of songs called Sound Therapy. Designed in partnership with Universal Music Group (UMG), the feature combines songs that subscribers already know with other sound waves that promote focusing, relaxing, or sleeping. Songs may include auditory beats or colored noise, sound waves where the intensity varies at different frequencies that are categorized by colors. For instance, pink noise — a variation akin to rain or wind — can be combined with delta waves to promote sleep. Image Credits:Apple The Focus category in Sound Therapy, meanwhile, leverages gamma auditory beats combined with white noise. And songs in the Relax group use theta auditory beats to promote winding down and letting go. The collection features songs that listeners already know, like those from artists such as Imagine Dragons, Katy Perry, Kacey Musgraves, Ludovico Einaudi, AURORA, Jhené Aiko, Chelsea Cutler, and Jeremy Zucker. These tracks were turned into extended, instrumental versions by producers and audio engineers at UMG’s music wellness venture called Sollos, based in London. The addition joins the recently launched Apple Music Chill radio station, offering sounds that are also interspersed with mindful moments and calming stories.

Audible, Amazon’s audiobook service, announced on Tuesday that it’s partnering with select publishers to convert print and e-books into AI-narrated audiobooks. This initiative aims to quickly expand its catalog as it competes with Apple, Spotify, and others in the rapidly growing audiobook market. Audible is leveraging Amazon’s AI capabilities to assist publishers in producing audiobooks. Publishers can choose from over 100 AI-generated voices available in English, French, Spanish, and Italian, with multiple accents and dialect options. The company plans to expand these options over time. Additionally, Audible plans to roll out a beta version of AI translation later this year, offering both text-to-text and speech-to-speech translation services. This will support translations from English to Spanish, French, Italian, and German. Publishers will also have the option to get help from “professional linguists” to review these translations for accuracy, according to the company. In 2023, Amazon introduced an invite-only beta virtual voice tool for self-published authors in the U.S., enabling them to convert their e-books into audiobooks using synthetic speech tech. Last year, Audible invited a cohort of audiobook narrators to train AI on their voices. A search for “virtual voice” on Audible reveals over 50,000 titles labeled “Narrated By: Virtual Voice,” indicating that the tech is popular among authors who may not have the resources to produce their own audiobooks. Despite its widespread adoption, the introduction of AI-generated narrations has prompted debate within the publishing community and among listeners. Critics express concerns that these AI recordings might compromise the overall quality of audiobooks. Spotify, the second-largest audiobook provider after Audible, has also recently made efforts to expand its audiobook library by utilizing AI narration tools. The platform partnered with the AI audio provider ElevenLabs in February. Techcrunch event Join us at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot for our leading AI industry event with speakers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere. For a limited time, tickets are just $292 for an entire day of expert talks, workshops, and potent networking. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 REGISTER NOW

An email notification system used by U.S. federal and state government departments to alert residents to important information, has been used to send scam emails, TechCrunch has learned. The U.S. state of Indiana said Tuesday that it is “aware of fraudulent messages purportedly sent by state agencies” to residents about unpaid tolls. TechCrunch has seen one email message sent from an Indiana government department that claimed the recipient had an outstanding toll balance, and contained a disguised link that redirected to a malicious site. A statement from the Indiana Office of Technology said it was “working with the company that was used to deliver those messages to stop any further communication.” Indiana said a contractor’s account was hacked and used to send the scam messages. The state said it was not aware of “any current state systems” being compromised, but did not rule out an earlier breach. The statement said that the contract with the unspecified company, which TechCrunch has learned is govtech giant Granicus, ended in December 2024, but the state claimed that the company “did not remove the state’s account.” When reached for comment, Granicus spokesperson Sharon Rushen told TechCrunch: “We are aware of the recent malicious emails sent via GovDelivery from Indiana’s government domain.” The company confirmed the breach was caused by a compromised user account, but did not comment on Indiana’s claims. “Granicus systems themselves were not breached,” said Rushen. When asked, the company said it does have the technical means to determine how many individuals received the malicious emails, but did not immediately provide a figure of those affected. Fake toll messages are an increasingly common scam, as the Federal Trade Commission warned in January. The scam involves sending text messages and emails that claim the recipients owe money to tolling agencies across the United States. By targeting email systems used by governments to notify the public, scammers are hoping victims would be more likely to open official-looking emails. A person who received the scam message shared the email with TechCrunch. The scam email was sent from an official Indiana government email address associated with the state’s Emergency Operations Center, which coordinates responses and alerts in the event of a natural disaster or other emergency events. The email claimed the recipient had unpaid tolls in Texas, and that “failure to pay may result in penalties or vehicle registration holds.” The scam email contained a link, which appears as an official govdelivery.com web address, but when clicked redirects to a malicious site impersonating the website of state of Texas’ Department of Transport’s road toll collection service, TxTag. The scam website attempted to trick users into turning over their personal information, such as their name, phone number, home address, and their credit card details. The site (and another clone site hosted on a similar domain) appeared to be offline as of Tuesday morning on the U.S. east coast. A spokesperson for the Indiana government did not immediately comment.

In a bid to make its AI DJ feel more interactive, Spotify is updating the feature to allow users to request music or change the mood of a playlist using voice commands. The company is rolling out this feature, initially only supported in English, in over 60 markets for its Premium subscribers. Previously, users could only listen to the AI DJ play songs with added commentary in between certain tracks. Now, the feature is becoming interactive. Users can tell the AI DJ to change the mood or genre, or have it play tracks from specific artists. Image credits: Spotify To use the AI DJ, you can type in “DJ” in the search bar, then hold the DJ button on the bottom right to make requests through voice commands. If you want to change the feel of the playlist without making a specific request, you can quickly press the DJ button. Spotify first launched the AI DJ feature in February 2023 in the U.S. and Canada. The company later rolled it out globally in August 2023. Last year, the music streaming company added support for a Spanish-speaking AI DJ. The company’s other big AI feature lets users create playlists using text prompts.

Amazon will bring ads to movies and shows on Prime Video in India starting June 17, over a year after introducing ads in markets including the U.S., U.K., Germany, and Canada. On Tuesday, Amazon emailed Prime members in India to announce the rollout of “limited advertisements” on content streaming on Prime Video. Amazon originally announced in October that it would serve Prime Video ads in India starting sometime this year, without sharing specifics. A spokesperson told TechCrunch that Amazon is also introducing an ad-free Prime Video add-on at an introductory price of 699 Indian rupees (roughly $8) a year or 129 Indian rupees (roughly $1.52) a month that Prime members will be able to purchase on top of their existing membership. The spokesperson didn’t share additional details, however. Last year, Amazon launched a $3 monthly add-on in the U.S. to offer an ad-free experience to Prime Video viewers. That move reportedly helped the tech giant secure more than $1.8 billion in ad spending commitments for its video streaming service. The company revealed this week that more than 130 million viewers in the U.S. are watching Prime Video with ads, up from 115 million last year. Alongside Prime Video, Amazon has MX Player in India that includes ads to help the company generate additional advertising revenue. The service, which Amazon acquired from Times Internet last year, offers a subscription to limit the ads users see. Amazon Prime in India starts at 299 Indian rupees (roughly $3.50) a month and goes up to 1,499 Indian rupees (roughly $17.57). Similar to Amazon, Netflix and Disney+ also have ad-supported plans in the U.S. and other markets. Techcrunch event Join us at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot for our leading AI industry event with speakers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere. For a limited time, tickets are just $292 for an entire day of expert talks, workshops, and potent networking. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 REGISTER NOW

Meeting transcription space is a hot commodity for all productivity suites. Companies like ClickUp and Zoom have added transcription with an AI summary to take on another upstart in this vertical, including Read AI, Zoom’s assistant, Circleback, Granola, or Otter. The latest entrant in the race to build meeting transcription tools is Notion. The company is rolling out an AI-powered meeting notetaking feature to transcribe meetings and provide a summary of the talk points later. You can also take your notes while Notion’s AI is transcribing the meeting. A functionality that closely resembles Granola. The feature represents another step towards Notion becoming a broader productivity suite that could compete with tech giants like Google and Microsoft. Like many other transcribers, Notion’s tool uses system audio to take notes. According to the support page, the AI note taker is currently available on the Mac (with app version 4.7.0). During our testing, we could only use the feature on the desktop, but Notion said it will be available on its mobile app, as well. Image Credits: Screenshot by TechCrunch To get started with the AI note-taking feature, you’ll go to any page on Notion and type “/meet.” The dialog box encourages you to obtain consent from all participants before allowing the AI tool to transcribe the meeting. Once you’ve done that, you can tap on the “Confirm Consent” button to start the transcription. Techcrunch event Join us at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot for our leading AI industry event with speakers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere. For a limited time, tickets are just $292 for an entire day of expert talks, workshops, and potent networking. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 REGISTER NOW When you click “stop,” the notetaking tool will generate an AI summary. You can click on the three-dot menu and select a formatting option, like Auto, Sales Call, Standup, or Team Meeting. The support page suggests that the feature currently works for over a dozen languages, including English, Chinese, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Thai, Vietnamese, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Dutch, and Swedish. ScreenshotImage Credits:Notion The company is also chasing enterprise customers with other new features launched today, like enterprise search, which allows you to search across Notion and other apps, and research mode, which allows users to research on a topic to create shareable documents through reasoning AI models. The company says you’ll be able to use Notion AI easily to ask questions across your meetings and documents, share the document with others, or paste the meeting block in another work folder. These features follow others designed to make Notion known for more than its flagship notes and docs app. Early last year, the company launched Notion calendar and, last month, it rolled out an AI-powered email client for Gmail that it had previously teased.

If you’re a founder looking to grow your startup, chances are you’re wrestling with more than just product or capital. Talent, scale, and smart execution are the real battlegrounds. That’s exactly what TechCrunch All Stage 2025 is built to address on July 15 at Boston’s SoWa Power Station. See top startup leaders taking the stage to share honest insights, hands-on strategies, and lessons learned in the trenches. Early Bird pricing is still available for All Stage, with Founder passes discounted $210, Investor passes are available at a $200 discount, and students get a chance to attend for just $99. Check out the best option for you and your team right here to learn how to secure VC funding, recruit the right early hires, manage founder finances, and navigate the messy middle of growth. One of the speakers taking part is Rob Biederman, managing partner at Asymmetric Capital Partners and one of the sharpest minds in talent, tech, and scaling strategy. What Biederman brings to TechCrunch All Stage Simply put, he’s built solutions where most startups get stuck and is set on sharing those fixes to those in need. Before launching Asymmetric, Biederman co-founded Catalant Technologies, where he spent eight years as co-CEO turning the company into the market leader for on-demand, high-skill talent. Today, Catalant powers how major companies deploy workforces, connecting them with more than 70,000 consultants and 1,000 boutique firms. He now serves as chairman of Catalant, is the co-author of “Reimagining Work,” and teaches scaling technology ventures at Harvard Business School, where he’s an executive fellow. In short, Biederman doesn’t just talk about scale — he teaches it, builds it, and funds it. Techcrunch event Join us at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot for our leading AI industry event with speakers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere. For a limited time, tickets are just $292 for an entire day of expert talks, workshops, and potent networking. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 REGISTER NOW With a background that includes private equity at Goldman Sachs and Bain Capital, and a Harvard MBA earned with Baker Scholar honors, Biederman brings both operational experience and investment discipline to every conversation. At TechCrunch All Stage, Biederman will break down what most founders overlook when it comes to scaling: how to evolve your thinking about talent, execution, and long-term growth. Join the event where founders go to grow TechCrunch All Stage isn’t just another startup conference — it’s a strategy session for people building real companies. You’ll walk away with tools, frameworks, and stories from top operators who’ve scaled beyond the early-stage maze. And Biederman’s insights on hiring, leadership, and operational leverage could easily reshape how you think about growth. Join us in Boston on July 15 All Stage tickets are going fast, and access to sessions like this won’t last, so it’s time to get your ticket now and be in the room where better companies get built.

General Motors revealed Tuesday a new battery chemistry called lithium-manganese-rich (LMR), which it says should slash costs while delivering driving range that’s just shy of the most advanced batteries on the market. “With LMR, we can deliver over 400-mile range in our in our trucks while significantly reducing our battery costs,” Kurt Kelty, GM’s vice president of battery, propulsion and sustainability, told TechCrunch. LMR will also dramatically reduce the amount of nickel and cobalt compared with GM’s most advanced cells, two critical minerals that aren’t readily available from domestic sources in the United States. Today, the Chevrolet Silverado EV uses nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) cells to drive 492 miles on a full charge. That impressive range comes with a hefty price tag. The electric trucks start at over $73,000 for the general public (a fleet version costs less). GM is planning a version with cheaper lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) cells, which would drop the price by $6,000, but also cuts range to 350 miles. The new technology would preserve the LFP price cuts without sacrificing as much range. GM says the new cells will be cheaper for a few reasons. For one, manganese is cheaper than cobalt or nickel. The LMR chemistry will have zero to 2% cobalt, 30% – 40% nickel, and 60% – 70% manganese. That’s significantly less than today’s leading NMC cells, which are up to 10% cobalt and 80% nickel. Previous attempts at manganese-rich batteries have tended to degrade quickly. GM thinks it has cracked the problem. The automaker experimented with a range of materials and manufacturing processes to arrive at the current formulation. Techcrunch event Join us at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot for our leading AI industry event with speakers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere. For a limited time, tickets are just $292 for an entire day of expert talks, workshops, and potent networking. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 REGISTER NOW LMR battery packs will contain prismatic cells instead of pouches. Today’s Ultium batteries use the latter. Kelty said switching to prismatic cells, which have a rigid shell, will help the company build a battery pack with more than 50% fewer parts. “It’s a huge, huge cost savings we’ll get,” he said. GM has big plans for LMR, with the chemistry potentially spreading throughout the EV lineup. Andy Oury, business planning manager at GM, said that LMR could “take up a huge chunk in the middle” of the market, pushing LFP to entry level vehicles and pricey NMC to applications that need long range and high energy density. The new cells will be made by Ultium Cells, GM’s joint venture with LG Energy Solution. Through Ultium, the two companies have invested billions of dollars in battery manufacturing in the United States. Both have been pursuing LMR for years. GM has more than 50 patents on LMR, though LG has also been working on the technology itself. Kelty acknowledged it’s possible that LG could make it’s own version of LMR cells that don’t infringe on GM’s patents, making the chemistry more widely available. “It’ll be interesting to see how this all plays out,” Kelty said. GM’s LMR research has been underway for a decade. Its efforts kicked into high gear in the last couple years as engineers successfully produced large-format cells similar to those in EVs on the road today. GM has made about 300 large format cells so far, and its testing regime equates to around 1.5 million miles of typical driving, said Kushal Narayanaswamy, director of advanced cell engineering at the automaker. That leaves just a few short years for the company to modify its existing manufacturing plants to accommodate the new chemistry and then scale up production. Scaling, in particular, tripped up the first Ultium cells. Kelty is confident that GM can hit the 2028 target. “It meets all our performance metrics, we have a partner that’s going to manufacture it, and we’ve got a manufacturing location,” he said. “The other thing is, the supply chain is much more local than high-nickel or LFP, so we’re really incentivized to do this. There’s a lot of things coming together here that really make us want to go quickly.”

Apple on Tuesday announced a range of accessibility features coming to its devices later this year. New Accessibility Nutrition Labels will provide more detailed information for apps and games on the App Store, while a new Braille Access tool will turn the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Vision Pro into a braille note taker. Additional enhancements include Accessibility Reader, a system-wide reading mode designed with accessibility in mind; a new Apple TV accessibility app, Assistive Access; shareable accessibility settings; and updates to Live Listen, Background Sounds, Personal Voice, and Vehicle Motion Cues. The upgrades arrive as Apple partners with the startup Synchron to help disabled users navigate its software. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company is also developing a new protocol, Switch Control, to enable people to control their iPhones as well as other devices with neural signals captured by brain implants.

In a bid to make its AI DJ feel more interactive, Spotify is updating the feature to let users request music or change the mood of a playlist using voice commands. The company is rolling out this feature, supported only in English, in over 60 markets for its premium subscribers. Until now, you could only listen to the AI DJ play songs with some commentary in between. The company is now adding an interactive element to the feature. Users can now tell the AI DJ to change the mood or genre, or have it play tracks from specific artists. Image credits: Spotify Users can search for the AI DJ in the search bar and hold the DJ button on the bottom right to make requests through voice commands. If you want to change the feel of the playlist without making a specific request, you can quickly press the DJ button. Spotify first launched the AI DJ feature in February 2023 in the U.S. and Canada. The company later rolled it out globally in August 2023. Last year, the music streaming company added support for a Spanish-speaking AI DJ. The company’s other big AI feature lets users create playlists using text prompts.

Melbourne O’Banion co-founded insurtech Bestow with Jonathan Abelmann in 2017 after struggling to secure his own life insurance policy. His goal was to make it easier for people to obtain life insurance and make the process more tech-enabled. Initially, Bestow operated as a direct-to-consumer insurance provider — selling, underwriting, and servicing life insurance policies. In those first few years, the startup processed over a million applications. Its no-exam underwriting platform gained traction during the COVID pandemic as traditional medical exams were paused. As it grew its D2C business, Bestow in parallel developed software to help modernize the whole process. Recognizing the value in that software, Bestow in 2024 sold its insurance carrier and consumer business to Sammons Financial Group for an undisclosed amount. It switched its focus to providing its software and services to other life insurance companies so those companies could “become more digital” and thus, more efficiently serve their customers. And on Tuesday, the Dallas-based company is announcing that it has raised $120 million in Series D funding to launch new products and underwriting capabilities, it has told TechCrunch exclusively. The fundraise, which O’Banion described as “oversubscribed,” was a mix of $75 million in primary and $45 million in secondary investments. Goldman Sachs Alternatives’ Growth Equity and ex-Salesforce co-CEO Keith Block’s Smith Point Capital co-led the investment. In addition to the equity financing, Bestow also secured a $50 million credit facility from TriplePoint Capital. O’Banion declined to reveal Bestow’s valuation, noting only that it had “approximately doubled” since the company raised $70 million in a Series C round in December 2020. With this latest financing, Bestow has raised more than $300 million in equity funding to date. O’Banion also declined to reveal hard revenue figures, saying that Bestow’s annual recurring revenue grew 3x in 2024, and “10x” over the last two years. Its revenue model is enterprise SaaS (software-as-a-service) and performance-based. The bulk of its revenue comes from usage fees. Ashwin Gupta, a Goldman Sachs Alternatives’ Growth Equity team partner, told TechCrunch that he was attracted to backing Bestow for several reasons. For one, its founders were repeat founders who had “successfully pivoted the business.” (Melbourne also co-founded BeautyBio and is a founding member of Presidio Title. Abelmann co-founded publicly traded Invitation Homes.) Techcrunch event Join us at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot for our leading AI industry event with speakers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere. For a limited time, tickets are just $292 for an entire day of expert talks, workshops, and potent networking. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 REGISTER NOW Gupta also thinks its SaaS model gives it an edge over more legacy competitors. “Bestow has an attractive end market that is large, resilient and relatively underserved by modern technology…,” he said. Gupta, who is joining Bestow’s board as part of the financing, also noted that he was impressed by Bestow’s ability to have won several large customers who were expanding their use of its platform. Its customers include Nationwide, Transamerica, USAA, Sammons Financial Group, and Equitable, among others. Other backers include Breyer Capital, Valar Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Core Innovation Ventures, Morpheus Ventures, and Sammons Financial. Bestow, which has 167 employees, currently operates in the U.S. and is considering an international expansion.

Robinhood revealed Tuesday that it’s acquiring Canadian crypto leader WonderFi for CA$250 million (around $178.56 million) in an all-cash deal as it pushes into Canada’s growing digital asset market. WonderFi operates two regulated crypto platforms, Bitbuy and Coinsquare, with over CA$2.1 billion in assets under custody. The transaction offers WonderFi shareholders CA$0.36 per share, representing a 41% premium over the company’s recent closing price. (WonderFi went public in Canada through a reverse takeover in 2021.) The tie-up follows Robinhood’s $200 million purchase of European exchange Bitstamp last year and reinforces its global expansion strategy. WonderFi’s team, including CEO Dean Skurka, will join Robinhood Crypto, adding to the roughly 140 employees Robinhood already has in Toronto. The deal is expected to close in the second half of this year. TechCrunch talked with Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev in December about his enthusiasm over a new U.S. administration that’s far friendlier to the crypto industry, and about Robinhood’s own growing focus on crypto. “I think crypto is the next in line in a long chain of technology innovations that have changed the underlying infrastructure of the financial system in a positive way,” Tenev said at the time. Techcrunch event Join us at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot for our leading AI industry event with speakers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere. For a limited time, tickets are just $292 for an entire day of expert talks, workshops, and potent networking. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 REGISTER NOW

U.K. retail giant Marks & Spencer has confirmed hackers stole its customers’ personal information during a cyberattack last month. In a brief statement with London’s stock exchange on Tuesday, the retailer said an unspecified amount of customer information was taken in the data breach. The BBC, which first reported the company’s filing, cited a Marks & Spencer online letter as saying that the stolen data includes customer names, dates of birth, home and email addresses, phone numbers, household information and online order histories. The company also said it was resetting the online account passwords of its customers. Marks & Spencer continues to experience disruption and outages across its stores, with some grocery shelves remaining empty after the hack affected the company’s operations. The company’s online ordering system for customers also remains offline. It’s not clear how many individuals’ data was stolen during the hack. When reached by TechCrunch, Marks & Spencer spokesperson Alicia Sanctuary would not say how many individuals are affected and referred TechCrunch to its online statement. Marks & Spencer had 9.4 million online customers as of 30 March 2024, per its most recent annual report. A ransomware and extortion gang called DragonForce reportedly took credit for the cyberattacks on several U.K. retail giants, including Marks & Spencer, per media reports. U.K. retailers the Co-op and Harrods were also targeted by hackers at around the same time as Marks & Spencer was hacked. The Co-op initially said there was no evidence that data was compromised, but later said the hackers had stolen customer data. In an update to its website, the Co-op said customer names, dates of birth, home and email addresses, and phone numbers were exfiltrated. The BBC reported last week that DragonForce claimed it had the private information of 20 million people who signed up to Co-op’s membership program, including current and former members. The U.K. National Cyber Security Centre said last week that it was “working with the victims and law enforcement colleagues” to understand more about the hacks.

Some fusion companies might be hitting a rough patch, but Realta Fusion is bucking the trend with a new fundraising round it says will allow it to finalize the design of its Anvil prototype reactor. “By the end of our Series A investment period, we’ll have said, ‘Hey, we have a design. We’re shovel ready to go and build Anvil,’” Kieran Furlong, co-founder and CEO of Realta, told TechCrunch. The company hopes to make sufficient progress this year and next so it can pitch investors on a Series B, which would go toward building the Anvil prototype, Furlong said. Realta raised $36 million in a round led by Future Ventures with participation from other investors, including Avila VC, GSBackers, Khosla Ventures, Mayfield, SiteGround, TitletownTech, and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. The startup previously raised $9 million in a seed round led by Khosla Ventures. Last summer, it flipped the switch on a pair of magnets and, within two weeks, set a record for a magnetic field confining a plasma. Fusion has long been proposed as a clean energy source, but so far, only one experiment has been able to hit a major milestone known as scientific breakeven, which describes how much energy fusion reactions are expected to release. That result was still far below what scientists expect a commercial fusion power plant to require. Still, many scientists and engineers are optimistic that commercial fusion power plants will be viable sometime in the next decade. Realta’s are among them. Techcrunch event Join us at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot for our leading AI industry event with speakers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere. For a limited time, tickets are just $292 for an entire day of expert talks, workshops, and potent networking. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 REGISTER NOW The startup hopes to build power plants cheaply enough to supply power at $100 per megawatt-hour initially with an eye toward lowering that to $40 per megawatt-hour as it refines its technology. Today, the most efficient natural gas power plants cost around $45 to $105 per megawatt-hour to build and run, according to Lazard. Realta spun out of the University of Wisconsin three years ago. Since then, the team, which is now 18 people, has been working alongside university scientists to develop a reactor concept that’s been debated for decades. The concept, known as a magnetic mirror, confines plasma in a symmetrical bottle shape. Powerful magnets at both ends pinch high-energy particles known as plasma, pushing it back toward the center. The magnetic fields expand as they head toward the center, where weaker magnets help form a plasma cylinder in the middle. To scale the reactor’s output, the company can add more middle sections, which should be cheaper to manufacture because of the less powerful magnets. If the magnets work as expected, the plasma will reach incredibly high temperatures for long enough that the particles will start to fuse, releasing tremendous amounts of energy in the process. Realta is one of a handful of fusion startups that have emerged in Wisconsin in recent years. As energy demands for data centers have ramped up in the region — including a forthcoming Microsoft facility near Foxconn’s infamous project — Badger State politicians have begun mulling legislation to lure the nuclear industry, both fusion and fission. “The state legislature is definitely paying attention,” Furlong said. “We’ve talked to both sides, and we think this is an opportunity for bipartisan work here.” Ultimately, Realta and the rest of the fusion industry need to muscle through the coming years to bring their plans to fruition and, if all goes well, prove that fusion power is viable. “We’ve had the Gartner hype cycle. We’re kind of coming down the other side now,” Furlong said, referring to a tech industry theory that outlines the adoption and reception of new technologies. “What we want to avoid is seeing a few companies blow up spectacularly and spoil it for the rest of the industry,” he said. “We wish everyone success. We all want fusion to succeed. I think we all recognize we’ve got 40 or 50 companies working on it right now. Obviously, not all of them will survive.”

Meta said on Tuesday its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses would be available for sale in India starting May 19 at a starting price of ₹29,990 (about $353). The smart glasses are currently available for pre-order on Ray-Ban’s site, and will be stocked in Ray-Ban stores at launch. Meta said the smart glasses launching in India will support Meta AI, which can answer questions about what’s in front of you, translate both audio and video live, send messages via your phone, make calls for you, and more. The smart glasses currently support live translation for English, French, Italian and Spanish even when users are offline. Notably, Meta hasn’t added support for Indian languages yet. Meta has said it would enable the glasses to connect and play music through apps like Spotify, Amazon Music, Shazam and Apple Music in India. The company has so far sold around 2 million pairs of the glasses since they launched in 2023. Techcrunch event Join us at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot for our leading AI industry event with speakers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere. For a limited time, tickets are just $292 for an entire day of expert talks, workshops, and potent networking. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 REGISTER NOW

Hungry to learn more about Anthropic, directly from Anthropic? You aren’t alone if so, which is why we’re so delighted to announce that Anthropic co-founder and Chief Science Officer Jared Kaplan is joining the main stage at TechCrunch Sessions: AI on June 5 at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall. And TechCrunch Sessions: AI is right around the corner! To celebrate the chance to broaden the AI community, we’re offering a limited-time discount on our tickets. For just $292 you can get access to our entire day of programming and networking — and if you bring a friend, that second ticket will be 50% off. Register now before the deal expires! About Jared Kaplan’s session Kaplan will take TC Sessions: AI attendees behind the scenes on hybrid reasoning models — which balance quick responses to simple queries with deeper processing for complex problems — and share insights into Anthropic‘s risk-governance framework for mitigating potential AI risks. (Kaplan was appointed Anthropic’s responsible scaling officer in October.) Get the details on his session and check out all the AI trailblazers joining us — visit the TC Sessions: AI agenda page. Get to know Kaplan Jared Kaplan has a pretty remarkable résumé. Before co-founding Anthropic, he spent 15 years as a theoretical physicist at Johns Hopkins University, exploring quantum gravity, field theory, and cosmology. Since then, his research on scaling laws has been credited with revolutionizing how the AI industry understands and predicts the behavior of advanced systems. In fact, before Anthropic, Kaplan played a role in developing GPT-3 and Codex at OpenAI; meanwhile, at Anthropic, Kaplan helped develop Claude, the company’s family of AI assistants. It’s been a wild ride for Kaplan and company. Anthropic’s remarkable growth has been fueled by several major developments in just recent months alone, including its launch of Claude 3.7 Sonnet in late February, which the company described as its “most intelligent model yet” and the first hybrid reasoning model that can handle both simple and complex queries with appropriate processing time for each. The company more recently introduced an autonomous research capability and Google Workspace integration, transforming Claude into what Anthropic has characterized as a “true virtual collaborator” for enterprise users. (Anthropic is reportedly developing a voice assistant feature for Claude to compete with similar offerings from other AI companies.) Techcrunch event Join us at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot for our leading AI industry event with speakers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere. For a limited time, tickets are just $292 for an entire day of expert talks, workshops, and potent networking. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 REGISTER NOW Unsurprisingly, investors have noticed. In March, Anthropic announced that it had completed a new fundraising deal that valued the company at $61.5 billion, up from about $16 billion roughly a year earlier. Get the inside track on AI with big ticket savings At TechCrunch Sessions: AI, Kaplan will share his vision for how AI will transform human-computer interaction, work processes, and social dynamics. But beyond the theoretical and technical aspects, Kaplan will offer tactical takeaways for teams of all sizes that are looking to implement AI and maximize its impact. One of AI’s sharpest voices is taking the stage. Lock in your spot here at this must-see session!

An analysis by Epoch AI, a nonprofit AI research institute, suggests the AI industry may not be able to eke massive performance gains out of reasoning AI models for much longer. As soon as within a year, progress from reasoning models could slow down, according to the report’s findings. Reasoning models such as OpenAI’s o3 have led to substantial gains on AI benchmarks in recent months, particularly benchmarks measuring math and programming skills. The models can apply more computing to problems, which can improve their performance, with the downside being that they take longer than conventional models to complete tasks. Reasoning models are developed by first training a conventional model on a massive amount of data, then applying a technique called reinforcement learning, which effectively gives the model “feedback” on its solutions to difficult problems. So far, frontier AI labs like OpenAI haven’t applied an enormous amount of computing power to the reinforcement learning stage of reasoning model training, according to Epoch. That’s changing. OpenAI has said that it applied around 10x more computing to train o3 than its predecessor, o1, and Epoch speculates that most of this computing was devoted to reinforcement learning. And OpenAI researcher Dan Roberts recently revealed that the company’s future plans call for prioritizing reinforcement learning to use far more computing power, even more than for the initial model training. But there’s still an upper bound to how much computing can be applied to reinforcement learning, per Epoch. According to an Epoch AI analysis, reasoning model training scaling may slow down.Image Credits:Epoch AI Josh You, an analyst at Epoch and the author of the analysis, explains that performance gains from standard AI model training are currently quadrupling every year, while performance gains from reinforcement learning are growing tenfold every 3-5 months. The progress of reasoning training will “probably converge with the overall frontier by 2026,” he continues. Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW Epoch’s analysis makes a number of assumptions, and draws in part on public comments from AI company executives. But it also makes the case that scaling reasoning models may prove to be challenging for reasons besides computing, including high overhead costs for research. “If there’s a persistent overhead cost required for research, reasoning models might not scale as far as expected,” writes You. “Rapid compute scaling is potentially a very important ingredient in reasoning model progress, so it’s worth tracking this closely.” Any indication that reasoning models may reach some sort of limit in the near future is likely to worry the AI industry, which has invested enormous resources developing these types of models. Already, studies have shown that reasoning models, which can be incredibly expensive to run, have serious flaws, like a tendency to hallucinate more than certain conventional models.