TechCrunch
April 2026
Keeping your team motivated when FDA approval isn’t guaranteed
Meta says its business AI now facilitates 10 million conversations a week
The growth comes as the company recently expanded the beta program of its business AI assistant in the U.S., EMEA, APAC, and LATAM
Business AIs today are currently free for most businesses on our messaging apps, but as we make more progress, we expect that we will also work towards establishing a longer-term monetization model,
Usage of our ad creative tools is also scaling, with more than 8 million advertisers using at least one of our GenAI ad creative tools, and particularly strong adoption among small and medium-sized businesses. These tools are benefiting performance as well, with advertisers using our video generation feature seeing more than 3% higher conversion rates in tests,
Spotify introduces verified artist badges to help distinguish humans from AI
Profiles that primarily represent AI-generated music or AI-persona artists are not eligible for verification
We’ve designed this new verification program thoughtfully with listeners and artists in mind, and we’ll continue to evolve this program over time,
SpaceX backer 137 Ventures raises $700M for two growth-stage funds
Bloomberg reported that 137 Ventures first backed SpaceX in 2010 and has since cut the company around two dozen checks
X announces a rebuilt ad platform powered by AI
Salesforce is crowdsourcing its AI roadmap — with customers
Salesforce is certainly not the only company to work intimately with its customers for feedback on its products
The innovation that we’ve brought, they are direct result of us working with a vast number of these customers and then classifying the problems they see in the real world,
As the technology changes, we never know what’s going to come out a month from now,
If somebody is willing to actually help curate and build products that we need, they can help us better and really understand our problem and how they can solve it,
We can’t wait three months or six months to get feedback, and then go figure out another six months of work,
We invest our time, energy into the platforms that are more strategic, and we obviously spend a lot more time on this relationship,
The 18,000 customers are a wellspring of information and a wealth of information that is really needed to get to customer success,
FDA approval, fundraising, and the reality of building in healthcare according to BioticsAI founder
Making sure everyone is completely aligned, even if it’s outside of their technical scope,
Google’s Gemini AI assistant is hitting the road in millions of vehicles
Elon Musk testifies that xAI trained Grok on OpenAI models
Legal AI startup Legora hits $5.6B valuation and its battle with Harvey just got hotter
Foundation models are improving quickly, but the real value is in how they’re applied,
Rivian downsizes DOE loan to $4.5B, while boosting capacity of Georgia factory
Rivian has reworked its loan deal with the Department of Energy and now expects to borrow $4.5 billion to build its new factory in Georgia, down from the original amount of $6.6 billion allocated under the Biden administration
Apple was surprised by AI-driven demand for Macs
The company’s total revenue was $111.2 billion, a 17% increase from the same period last year
Both of these are amazing platforms for AI and agentic tools, and the customer recognition of that is happening faster than what we had predicted, and so we saw higher than expected demand,
We’re not at the point where we’re saying this [constraint] is going to end anytime soon. And it’s not because of a problem, per se, other than we just under-called the demand,
Colby Adcock’s Scout AI raises $100M to train its models for war: We visited its bootcamp
There’s an argument in the AGI community along the lines that you can only get so intelligent by reading the internet, and most intelligence comes with interacting in the world,
If I handed you the controller of a drone right now and I strapped a headset on you, you could learn to fly that thing in minutes,
They start when they’re 18 years old, and sometimes they even start after college, so you want to start with that base level of intelligence,
The AI people don’t want to work with the military,
Go to this waypoint and watch for enemy forces.”
Google Translate now lets you practice pronunciation
The feature is rolling out in the U.S. and India, and currently supports English, Spanish, and Hindi
Sri Lanka discloses another missing payment, days after hackers stole $2.5M from its finance ministry
BMW i Ventures has a new $300M fund and AI is riding shotgun
BMW i Ventures has launched a new $300 million fund with a timely thesis: AI will reshape how the automotive industry operates
We always try to adjust and shift our focus towards what are the new trends, not just for the trend’s sake, but for what will actually determine the future,
Uber is in the hotel business now, thanks in part to AI
Uber customers in the United States can now book hotels directly through the app, one of several new features announced Wednesday that pushes far beyond the company’s original ride-hailing purpose and even deeper into its users’ lives
What we have seen the last few months is a fundamental reset, a new way of building software,
We’re no longer just an app for rides, or even two apps, or [a] family of apps for both rides and eats,
Uber is now an app for everything,
Our problems generally at Uber, it’s not the problem of not having ideas; there’s so many things we want to build,
More Gemini features are coming to Google TV
Within the Gemini tab, a “Create” button lets users experiment with generative AI tools Nano Banana and Veo
Google gains 25M subscriptions in Q1, driven by YouTube and Google One
The lack of solid numbers may suggest that the Gemini chatbot still has more than 750 million users, the same benchmark reported in the prior quarter
Google Cloud surpasses $20B, but says growth was capacity-constrained
Google Cloud, the business under parent company Alphabet that provides enterprise AI solutions, had a blowout first quarter, with revenues topping $20 billion for the time, a 63% increase from the same period last year
Obviously, we are compute constrained in the in the near-term,
And as an example, our cloud revenue would have been higher if we were able to meet that demand. So we are working through that moment, and we are investing, but we have a robust, long-range planning framework…we see extraordinary opportunities ahead,
Sources: Anthropic could raise a new $50B round at a valuation of $900B
On the stand, Elon Musk can’t escape his own tweets
The lawsuit he filed challenging the structure of OpenAI is alleges Sam Altman and the other cofounders tricked him into backing a non-profit, then launched the frontier lab’s for-profit arm and let it come to dominate the organization
We are not pursuing AGI right now,
Meta is still burning money on AR/VR
When Meta released its quarterly earnings report on Wednesday evening, a colleague pointed out how Meta lost $4 billion on Reality Labs, the division responsible for its AR glasses, VR headsets, and VR software
We aren’t providing a specific outlook for 2027 capex, and we are, frankly, undergoing a very dynamic planning process ourselves as we’re working through what our capacity needs will be over the coming years,
We are increasing our infrastructure capex forecast for this year,
Satya Nadella says he’s ready to ‘exploit’ the new OpenAI deal
We have a frontier model, with all the IP rights that we will have access to all the way to ’32 and we fully plan to exploit it.”
We offer the broadest selection of models of any hyperscaler, so customers can choose the right model for the right workload across OpenAI, Anthropic, open source, and more. Over 10,000 customers have used more than one model,
Amazon’s cloud business is surging — and so is its capital spending
Amazon was one of several tech giants that on Wednesday beat Wall Street’s first-quarter earnings expectations, offering more financial evidence that the AI boom continues to reward companies that supply the picks and shovels
It’s very unusual for business to grow this fast on a base this large. The last time we saw growth at this clip, AWS was roughly half the size,
We’ve been through this cycle with the first big AWS growth wave, and like the results. We expect to feel similarly about this next wave with much larger potential downstream revenue and free cash flow,
The faster AWS grows, the more short-term capex we’ll spend,
In times of very high growth like now — where the capex growth meaningfully outpaces the revenue growth — the early years, free cash flow is challenged,