<p>Applications are almost closed, and you have until 11:59 p.m. PT tonight to reserve your exhibitor table at TechCrunch Sessions: AI, our premiere industry event that’s happening at UC Berkeley&#8217;s Zellerbach Hall on June 5. Imagine walking into a room filled with 1,200+ investors, founders, enterprise leaders, and journalists — all hunting for the next [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Microsoft employees aren’t allowed to use DeepSeek due to data security and propaganda concerns, Microsoft Vice Chairman and President Brad Smith said in a Senate hearing today. “At Microsoft we don&#8217;t allow our employees to use the DeepSeek app,” Smith said, referring to DeepSeek’s application service (which is available on both desktop and mobile). Smith [&hellip;]</p>

<p>OpenAI is enhancing its AI-powered &#8220;deep research&#8221; feature with the ability to analyze codebases on GitHub. On Thursday, OpenAI announced what it&#8217;s calling the first &#8220;connector&#8221; for ChatGPT deep research, the company&#8217;s tool that searches across the web and other sources to compile thorough research reports on a topic. Now, ChatGPT deep research can link [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Sankaet Pathak’s last startup, fintech Synapse, filed for bankruptcy in 2024 amid issues with partner Evolve Bank &amp; Trust. Tens of millions of dollars in deposits made by consumers, mostly customers of fintechs that worked with Synapse, remain unaccounted for. Yet according to The Information, Pathak is reportedly moving full steam ahead on attempts to [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Meta has chosen Robert Fergus to lead its Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) lab, according to Bloomberg. Fergus had been working at Google DeepMind as a research director for roughly five years, per his LinkedIn. Prior to Google, he worked as a researcher scientist at Meta. Meta&#8217;s FAIR, which has been around since 2013, has faced [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Google is rolling out a feature in its Gemini API that the company claims will make its latest AI models cheaper for third-party developers. Google calls the feature &#8220;implicit caching&#8221; and says it can deliver 75% savings on &#8220;repetitive context&#8221; passed to models via the Gemini API. It supports Google&#8217;s Gemini 2.5 Pro and 2.5 [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Google announced on Thursday that it&#8217;s rolling out new AI-powered defenses to help combat scams on Chrome. The tech giant will begin using Gemini Nano, its on-device large language model (LLM), on desktop to protect users against online scams. It&#8217;s also launching new AI-powered warnings for Chrome on Android to help users be aware of [&hellip;]</p>

<p>It took seven years of hard work for Kareem Amin, co-founder and CEO of sales automation startup Clay, to see the company&#8217;s product finally take off in 2022. Since then, the startup has experienced explosive growth, reached a valuation exceeding a billion dollars, and expanded its employee count from low double digits to over 150. [&hellip;]</p>

<p>OpenAI is introducing a new data residency program in Asia, the company announced Thursday, following the rollout of its data residency program in Europe in February. The new program, which is available for OpenAI&#8217;s ChatGPT Enterprise, ChatGPT Edu, and the OpenAI API, aims to help Asia-based organizations meet local data sovereignty requirements while using the [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Amazon said Thursday it is releasing a new generative AI-powered tool to help merchants improve their listings with missing details or attributes. Sellers often have hundreds of products listed on Amazon, and they need to update information related to them from time to time, which can be a cumbersome task. The e-commerce tech giant wants [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Turns out, telling an AI chatbot to be concise could make it hallucinate more than it otherwise would have. That&#8217;s according to a new study from Giskard, a Paris-based AI testing company developing a holistic benchmark for AI models. In a blog post detailing their findings, researchers at Giskard say prompts for shorter answers to [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Hims &amp; Hers, the telehealth and wellness company, has hired a veteran of the autonomous vehicle industry as its next chief technology officer. The move, according to Hims &amp; Hers co-founder and CEO Andrew Dudum, was intentional. Hims &amp; Hers on Thursday said its next CTO would be Mo Elshenawy, the former president and CTO [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Simo, already a board member at OpenAI, will transition out of Instacart over the next few months and join the AI company full-time as Application CEO.</p>

<p>Tech giants like to boast about trillion-parameter AI models that require massive and expensive GPU clusters. But Fastino is taking a different approach. The Palo Alto-based startup says it has invented a new kind of AI model architecture that’s intentionally small and task-specific. The models are so small they’re trained with low-end gaming GPUs worth [&hellip;]</p>

<p>OpenAI has met with officials from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to discuss the agency&#8217;s use of AI to speed up drug evaluations, Wired reported on Wednesday. According to the report, OpenAI and the FDA have discussed a project called cderGPT, which seems to be an AI tool for the Center for Drug [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Anthropic is launching a new API that allows its Claude AI models to search across the web. Developers using it can build Claude-powered apps that deliver up-to-date info, the company said in a press release published Wednesday. The rollout of the API comes as AI companies look to augment their models in various ways that [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Amazon says that it has developed a new warehouse robot, Vulcan, that can &#8220;feel&#8221; some of the items it touches. The two-armed Vulcan, which can maneuver goods inside the storage compartments Amazon has in its warehouses, uses&nbsp;force sensors to help it know when it makes contact with an object. One arm rearranges items in a [&hellip;]</p>

<p>OpenAI is launching a program, OpenAI for Countries, that the company says will enable it to build out the local infrastructure needed to better serve international AI customers. As a part of the new program, OpenAI will partner with governments to assist with efforts like building out data center capacity and customizing OpenAI&#8217;s products, including [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Enterprise workflow management platform ServiceNow on Wednesday announced its second AI-related acquisition this year. ServiceNow said that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Data.World, a cloud-native data catalog and data governance platform. Austin, Texas-based Data.World was founded in 2015 and previously raised more than $130 million in venture financing from firms such as [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Apple is looking to add AI search engines from OpenAI, Perplexity, and Anthropic to Safari, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday. Eddy Cue, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Services, made the statement during his testimony in the U.S. Justice Department’s lawsuit against Alphabet. Cue&#8217;s disclosure was part of his testimony regarding Apple and Google’s estimated $20 billion-a-year [&hellip;]</p>