<p>A team at AI dev platform Hugging Face has released what they&#8217;re claiming are the smallest AI models that can analyze images, short videos, and text. The models, SmolVLM-256M and SmolVLM-500M, are designed to work well on &#8220;constrained devices&#8221; like laptops with less than around 1GB of RAM. The team says that they&#8217;re also ideal [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Hiya, folks, welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. If you want this in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up&nbsp;here. OpenAI is making gains at the expense of its chief rivals. On Tuesday, the company announced the Stargate Project, a new joint venture involving Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, Oracle, and others to build AI infrastructure for OpenAI in [&hellip;]</p>

<p>This month, drama unfolded across mainstream social media platforms like TikTok, which briefly went dark in the U.S. before a rapid return. Instagram recently faced backlash after ending its third-party fact-checking program.&nbsp; At the same time, startups like Favorited are attracting attention from investors, creators, and viewers. On Wednesday, the livestream app announced its $1.3 [&hellip;]</p>

<p>As enterprises look at how they can best leverage AI to increase their employees&#8217; productivity, search is an obvious use case. In most companies, after all, data lives in multiple disconnected silos and the combination of large language models, retrieval augmented generation (RAG), and enterprise-grade integration services now makes it easier than ever to not [&hellip;]</p>

<p>President Trump on Tuesday pardoned Ross Ulbricht, the creator of the infamous dark web exchange Silk Road, which was best known as a once-thriving online marketplace for illegal drugs. Trump announced the news in a Truth Social post, saying the pardon was in honor of Ulbricht&#8217;s mother and the Libertarian movement. In 2015, a federal [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech!&nbsp; This week, we’re looking at just how much fintech startups raised in 2024, a slew of fundraising deals, Plaid’s reported revenue growth last year, and more! To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important fintech stories delivered to your inbox every Tuesday at 8:00 a.m. PT, subscribe here. The [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Friend, a startup creating a $99, AI-powered necklace designed to be treated as a digital companion, has delayed its first batch of shipments until Q3. Friend had planned to ship devices to preorder customers in Q1. But according to co-founder and CEO Avi Schiffmann, that&#8217;s no longer feasible. &#8220;As much as I would like to [&hellip;]</p>

<p>At a recent investor meeting, early-stage African investor Oui Capital informed limited partners that it had returned its $4 million debut fund following the sale of some shares in the business banking platform Moniepoint. The African fintech unicorn has so far proven to be a standout investment for five-year-old Oui Capital. When it launched its [&hellip;]</p>

Instabase, a company that creates software for extracting and processing unstructured data from myriad document types, has raised $100 million in a Series D round of funding. The announcement comes as companies struggle under a deluge of data &#8212; data that can unlock key business insights. Indeed, most of the data that companies generate is

A new AI orchestration startup from the founders of Lithuanian unicorn Nord Security is setting out to help enterprises put their AI projects into production, with an initial focus on bringing greater visibility, security, and adaptability to large language models (LLMs). Nexos.ai, as the startup is called, is the handiwork of Tomas Okmanas

<p>Goldman Sachs is one of the biggest investment banker “book runners” for IPOs &#8212; where banks are paid many millions of dollars for each listing they underwrite. Yet CEO David Solomon told attendees of the Cisco AI Summit in Palo Alto that startups should reconsider the idea of going public, reports Financial Times.  Solomon said [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Google has agreed to purchase 100,000 tons of carbon dioxide removal credits from Indian startup Varaha.</p>

François Chollet, an influential AI researcher, is launching a new startup that aims to build frontier AI systems with novel designs. The startup, Ndea, will consist of an AI research and science lab. It's looking to develop and operationalize AGI. AGI, which stands for artificial general intelligence, typically refers to AI that can perform any

<p>The white cane for the 21st century. While many tech companies have increasingly worked to make technology more accessible for the blind and visually impaired, canes haven’t benefited much from these advances. London-born WeWalk takes a more traditional approach to the white cane. Beyond the bulkier handle, not much sets the company’s product apart visually [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Agriculture, which consumes about 70% of global freshwater, is grappling with increased water scarcity and inefficient irrigation systems. Traditional methods of irrigation not only lead to wasted water and nutrients, but also contribute to lower crop yields, food insecurity, and unnecessary carbon emissions.&nbsp; Hong-Kong based agriculture technology startup Full Nature Farms thinks there’s a better [&hellip;]</p>

Accel has maintained its India fund size at $650 million for its eighth vehicle, even as other venture firms in the region are racing to raise increasingly larger pools of capital. The firm had ample opportunity to raise multi-billion dollars,said Shekhar Kirani, partner at Accel, in an interview with

<p>Opsera, a DevOps platform geared toward enterprise clients, today announced that it raised $12 million in a funding round &#8212; a tranche smaller than Opsera&#8217;s previous raise &#8212; led by Taiwania Capital with participation from Clear Ventures, Felicis Ventures and others. Bringing the company&#8217;s total raised to $31.3 million, the new cash will be put [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Technical debt is often the unsung villain of the enterprise, crippling companies seeking to modernize as they realize just how much &#8220;legacy&#8221; lives in their stack. And as with most kinds of debt, there is usually interest to pay, too. This is something that fledgling U.K. startup AppFactor is setting out to solve, with a [&hellip;]</p>

<p>DevOps has changed the game for how developers build, deploy, update and monitor applications across their network. Now, an eponymous startup called DataOps.live &#8212; which has built a DataOps platform based on the learnings of DevOps, but targeted at the world of data science &#8212; is announcing a round of funding on the heels of [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Generative AI isn&#8217;t just about creative endeavors and parlor tricks.</p>