The Trump administration has begun taking direct equity stakes in American companies, not as temporary crisis measures, as in 2008, but as permanent fixtures of industrial policy. The moves raise interesting questions, including what happens when the White House appears on your cap table. At TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco last week, Sequoia Capital’s global…
Google says it has removed Gemma from its AI Studio after a U.S. senator accused the AI model of fabricating accusations of sexual misconduct against her. In a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Senator Marsha Blackburn — a Republican from Tennessee — said that when Gemma was asked, “Has Marsha Blackburn been accused of…
In the midst of an unprecedented AI buildout, Meta is spending more than most. The company is building two massive data centers, and reporting indicates there will be as much as $600 billion in spending on U.S. infrastructure over the next three years. Those figures might not raise eyebrows in Silicon Valley, but they’re…
Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. To get this in your inbox, sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! We’re mixing things up a bit this week to focus on what was said on, and off, the stage at TechCrunch…
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently said that the company is doing “well more” than $13 billion in annual revenue — and he sounded a little testy when pressed on how it will pay for its massive spending commitments. His comments came up during a joint interview on the Bg2 podcast between Altman and Microsoft CEO…
How do you design a single model that can listen, see, read and respond in real time across text, image, video and audio without losing the efficiency? Meituan’s LongCat team has released LongCat Flash Omni, an open source omni modal model with 560 billion parameters and about 27 billion active per token, built on the…
The White House released more details Saturday about a trade deal reached between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in a meeting earlier this week. Among other things, the White House said China will suspend the restrictions on exporting rare earth minerals that it announced in October, and it will resume issuing…
Optical character recognition has moved from plain text extraction to document intelligence. Modern systems must read scanned and digital PDFs in one pass, preserve layout, detect tables, extract key value pairs, and work with more than one language. Many teams now also want OCR that can feed RAG and agent pipelines directly. In 2025, 6…
In this tutorial, we develop a comprehensive benchmarking framework to evaluate various types of agentic AI systems on real-world enterprise software tasks. We design a suite of diverse challenges, from data transformation and API integration to workflow automation and performance optimization, and assess how various agents, including rule-based, LLM-powered, and hybrid ones, perform across these…
Canva has launched its new Creative Operating System, representing the company’s largest platform upgrade to date. Alongside it, Canva introduced the all-new Affinity design suite, now available for free to all users – marking a major leap toward unifying creative tools across professional and everyday workflows. With 260 million monthly active users, over $3.5 billion…
