As we count down the final days to TechCrunch Sessions: AI on June 5 at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, we’re offering one last chance to score a special deal. We’ve launched the TC Sessions: AI Trivia Countdown — your shot to show off your AI knowledge and win big. Just answer a few short AI-specific…
Misfits Market, the online platform that delivers imperfect groceries to help minimize waste, announced the acquisition of household restocking service The Rounds on Friday. As a result of the deal, Misfits Market plans to take on over 250 items from The Rounds’ inventory. This allows the company to diversify into additional categories, such as household…
It appears the Trump administration has imposed new export controls on chip design software as it seeks to further undermine China’s ability to make and use advanced AI chips. Siemens EDA, Cadence Design Systems and Synopsys all confirmed that they have received notices from the U.S. Commerce Department about new export controls on electronic automation…
AI tools are touted as capable helpers that can easily help you research, code, summarize, write and bring you knowledge of any kind. But sometimes simple questions befuddle them. Google’s AI Overviews, for example, is confused what year it is. Several users reported over the past few days that when they asked Google what year…
DeepSeek’s updated R1 reasoning AI model might be getting the bulk of the AI community’s attention this week. But the Chinese AI lab also released a smaller, “distilled” version of its new R1, DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B, that DeepSeek claims beats comparably sized models on certain benchmarks. The smaller updated R1, which was built using the Qwen3-8B model…
YouTube announced on Thursday that it’s bringing Google Lens to YouTube Shorts in the coming weeks. With this integration, viewers will soon be able to use Google Lens to search what they see while watching Shorts. For example, if you’re watching a Short filmed in a location that you’re interested in visiting, you can select…
On Thursday, Anduril and Meta announced news that feels like a fairy tale ending for Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey. The two companies are working together to build extended reality (XR) devices for the U.S. military, Anduril announced in a blog post. “I am glad to be working with Meta once again,” Luckey is quoted as…
Heron Power, the electrical grid-focused startup founded by former Tesla executive Drew Baglino, announced Thursday it has raised $38 million in a Series A funding round. Heron Power is developing solid-state transformers, which promise to be more compact and responsive than the century-old analog models. Transformers are key parts of the electrical grid, stepping voltage…
Delaware’s attorney general is hiring an investment bank to advise on OpenAI’s for-profit conversion, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday. The independent evaluation could prolong the transition, or gum up OpenAI’s plans even further. OpenAI’s conversion will help it attract new investment and eventually go public, but first, the startup needs to secure approvals…
Tinder is leaning into dating apps’ reputation for superficiality with the launch of a new feature that lets paid subscribers add their height preferences to their profiles. After a Reddit user posted a photo of the new height setting in the Tinder app, a company spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that the discovery setting has been…
