Author: GT

Meta has released a new collection of AI models, Llama 4, in its Llama family — on a Saturday, no less. There are four new models in total: Llama 4 Scout, Llama 4 Maverick, and Llama 4 Behemoth. All were trained on “large amounts of unlabeled text, image, and video data” to give them “broad visual understanding,” Meta says. The success of open models from Chinese AI lab DeepSeek, which perform on par or better than Meta’s previous flagship Llama models, reportedly kicked Llama development into overdrive. Meta is said to have scrambled war rooms to decipher how DeepSeek lowered…

Rippling’s latest lawsuit reads less like a legal filing and more like the plot of a corporate espionage thriller, complete with secret crypto payments, an alleged mole, and a fake Slack channel trap. This week, the HR tech startup publicly named the employee at the center of its case against its rival Deel, claiming the company paid him not-exactly-life-changing sums to spy from the inside. Deel, for its part, has denied the claims, calling this a dramatic distraction from Rippling’s own legal troubles. Today, on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, hosts Max Zeff and Anthony Ha are catching us up on the…

For its 50th birthday, Microsoft is teaching its AI-powered Copilot chatbot a few new tricks. Copilot can now take action on “most websites,” Microsoft says, enabling it to book tickets, reserve restaurants, and more. The bot has gained the ability to remember specific things about you, similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, like your favorite food and films. And it can now analyze real-time video from your phone, answering questions in the context of what it “sees.” The upgrades come as Microsoft is reportedly mulling a revamp of Copilot, which has historically been powered by AI models from OpenAI, with more of…

On Friday, Google released API pricing for Gemini 2.5 Pro, an AI reasoning model with industry-leading performance on several benchmarks measuring coding, reasoning, and math. For prompts up to 200,000 tokens, Gemini 2.5 Pro costs $1.25 per million input tokens (roughly 750,000 words, longer than the entire “Lord of The Rings” series) and $10 per million output tokens. For prompts greater than 200,000 tokens (which most of Google’s competitors don’t support), Gemini 2.5 Pro costs $2.50 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens. That pricing makes Gemini 2.5 Pro more expensive for developers than any other AI…

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. This week reminded us that different startups share a different approach to news: Some choose to remain quiet for a very long time, even about their acquisition details. Others, however, are as loud as can be about their rivalries. Most interesting startup stories from the week Rippling CEO Parker Conrad.Image Credits:Haje Kamps / TechCrunch Founders aren’t always reliable when they claim there’s nothing to worry about — or when they hint at…

Staff at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) are reviewing past crypto-related guidance to determine whether it still reflects the agency’s current priorities, according to a statement from acting chairman Mark Uyeda, posted on social media platform X. Among several key documents, the SEC staff’s statement on funds registered under the Investment Company Act Investing in the bitcoin futures market is under review, according to the X post. Other documents include digital assets “investment contracts,” and custody frameworks. The reviews could result in more clarification for regulatory frameworks around the digital assets sector. The request from Uyeda is related…

A protester interrupted Microsoft’s Copilot-focused keynote Friday afternoon, calling attention to the company’s reported dealings with the Israeli military. “Shame on you,” the protester said. “You claim that you care about using AI for good, but Microsoft sells AI weapons to the Israeli military … All of Microsoft has blood on its hands.” Microsoft Head of Consumer AI Mustafa Suleyman, whose portion of the keynote was interrupted by the protester, several times responded, “I hear your protest, thank you.” In February, the Associated Press reported that sophisticated AI models from Microsoft and OpenAI, Microsoft’s close collaborator, had been used as part…

A year ago, Bluesky was opening up to the public and was known as one of the many X competitors that emerged after Elon Musk acquired the network formerly known as Twitter. Today, Bluesky’s social network has grown to over 33 million users, while the technology it’s built upon — the AT Protocol (or ATProto for short) — is being used to develop dozens more applications designed to work together as part of an open social web. The developers behind many of these apps attended the first conference dedicated to the AT Protocol, ATmosphere, held in Seattle last weekend. There,…

President Donald Trump has extended the deadline for the TikTok ban by 75 days. Trump shared a post on Truth Social on Friday stating that he is signing an executive order to allow more time to finalize a deal. The announcement comes just one day before the ban was set to go into effect. “My Administration has been working very hard on a Deal to SAVE TIKTOK, and we have made tremendous progress,” Trump wrote. “The Deal requires more work to ensure all necessary approvals are signed, which is why I am signing an Executive Order to keep TikTok up…

GitHub Copilot, Microsoft-owned GitHub’s AI coding assistant, could soon become costlier for some users. On Friday, GitHub announced “premium requests” for GitHub Copilot, a new system that imposes rate limits when users switch to AI models other than the base model for tasks such as “agentic” coding and multi-file edits. While GitHub Copilot subscribers can still take unlimited actions with the base model (OpenAI’s GPT-4o), tasks and actions with newer models, like Anthropic’s 3.7 Sonnet, will now be capped. Customers on the Copilot Pro ($20 per month) tier will receive 300 monthly premium requests beginning on May 5, GitHub said…