TechCrunch Industry News
TechCrunch
Listen to articles handpicked by our editors, and stay updated on top technology news from TechCrunch.
Episodes
Mentioned books
May 8, 2025 • 7min
Energy Star program getting scrapped, Ford raising prices due to tariffs, and Mark Zuckerberg’s AI ad tool sounds like a social media nightmare
The Energy Star program's signature yellow labels appear on appliances and electronics for sale throughout the U.S.; Ford is raising the price of the all-electric Mustang Mach-E SUV and popular entry-level Maverick pickup by as much as $2,000 due to the import taxes President Donald Trump is placing on vehicles made in Mexico, according to Reuters. Higher prices could make it harder for traditional automakers like Ford to sell their EVs; Tech executives have long talked about how AI is going to revolutionize the advertising industry. In particularly, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been quite vocal about how exactly he wants his company to lead the transformation Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
May 8, 2025 • 4min
Cnaught wants to make carbon credits easy for businesses small and large
Cnaught is a market maker seeking to ease the pain of buying carbon credits for companies without dedicated teams. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
May 7, 2025 • 8min
MoneyFellows raises $13M to take its group savings model outside Egypt
While most African digital lenders depend on working capital to fuel growth, MoneyFellows has quietly done what few others have: lend billions of Egyptian pounds with almost no debt or balance sheet exposure. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
May 7, 2025 • 3min
Pinterest updates visual search with more AI-powered features
Pinterest is upgrading its visual search feature with a handful of new capabilities. On Monday, the company announced it’s rolling out new functionality to improve its feature that allows users to search using an image instead of text. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
May 6, 2025 • 4min
Tinder and Visa to bring ID-verifying tech to more places and Airbnb rolled out an AI customer service bot in the US
World, the biometric ID company best known for its eyeball-scanning Orb devices, at an event late on Wednesday announced several partnerships aimed at driving sign-ups and demonstrating the applications of its tech. World is partnering with Match Group, the dating app conglomerate, to verify the IDs of Tinder users in Japan. Also, Airbnb started rolling out an AI-powered customer service bot in the U.S. last month, CEO Brian Chesky said during the firm’s first-quarter conference call on Thursday. Chesky said 50% of Airbnb’s U.S. users are already using the AI bot for customer service. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
May 6, 2025 • 4min
OpenAI pledges to make changes to prevent future ChatGPT sycophancy
OpenAI says it’ll make changes to the way it updates the AI models that power ChatGPT, following an incident that caused the platform to become overly sycophantic for many users. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
May 5, 2025 • 3min
Meta forecasted it would make $1.4T in revenue from generative AI by 2035
Meta made a prediction last year its generative AI products would rake in $2 billion to $3 billion in revenue in 2025, and between $460 billion and $1.4 trillion by 2035, according to court documents unsealed Wednesday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
May 5, 2025 • 3min
Amazon launches Nova Premier, its largest AI model yet
Amazon on Thursday released what it claims is the largest, most capable AI model in its Nova family, Nova Premier. Nova Premier, which can process text, images, and videos (but not audio), is available in Amazon Bedrock, the company’s AI model development platform. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
May 2, 2025 • 6min
Cast AI raises $108M to get the max out of AI, Kubernetes and other workloads
The crush of traffic going into training and running AI has quickly turned into a major cost and resource headache for organizations. Cast AI is a startup building tools to ease and optimize AI and other workloads with automation — is raising a major round of funding on the back of its strong growth Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
May 2, 2025 • 3min
JetBrains releases Mellum, an ‘open’ AI coding model
JetBrains, the company behind a range of popular app development tools, has released its first “open” AI model for coding. On Wednesday, JetBrains made Mellum, a code-generating model the company released for its various software development suites last year, openly available on the AI dev platform Hugging Face. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
