Thursday, May 8, 2025

Welcome to TC PM! Today we have the details on Clay's employee tender offer; we learn that the FDA and OpenAI are discussing AI's role in drug evaluations; and we have an update on Starlink in India. Log in!

TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: Luis Nieto Dickens

💰 Clay cashes in: Sales automation startup Clay is running a tender offer to give employees the ability to sell shares to existing investor Sequoia. While that type of secondaries sale is common, what's unusual is that the company is giving the option to anyone who has been at the company for at least a year.

⏰ The clock is ticking: Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates announced today that The Gates Foundation now has 20 years to donate all of its cash and wind down. He expects that the foundation will give $200 billion in that time. Yeesh, they should hire MacKenzie Scott to keep pace.

🤖 Amazon AI: Amazon announced that it is releasing a new generative AI tool called Enhance My Listing to help merchants keep their listings up-to-date. This tool will suggest things like product titles and descriptions, and merchants can choose to accept, reject, or modify these recommendations.

Afternoon must-reads

Image Credits: Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket / Getty Images

🚦 Internet in India: India has given Elon Musk's Starlink the green light to start on its next step toward bringing satellite internet service to the country. Now Starlink needs to start submitting documentation that shows it complies with the necessary licensing requirements.

🛑 Stopping scams: Google announced that it is rolling out AI-powered features on Chrome meant to stop scams. These features include new AI-powered warnings of scams and increased back-end scam detection thanks to Gemini Nano, Google's on-device LLM.

🚌 Education extortion: Remember the PowerSchool data breach from earlier this year that exposed student data from some of the thousands of schools that use the K-12 software? The company paid the hackers a ransom to delete the data, but now some schools are being extorted.

⚖️ Fergus to FAIR: Former Google DeepMind researcher Robert Fergus has been named the head of Meta's Fair AI Research (FAIR) lab. This will be a boomerang move for Fergus, who previously worked at Meta prior to DeepMind.

🧐 Oh, great: OpenAI has reportedly met up with the Food and Drug Administration to discuss the agency's use of AI to speed up drug evaluations. The two entities are considering launching a project together. Yes, of course DOGE is involved.

Around the web

🚨 Not your average crypto con: Jeffy Yu, a crypto founder who developed crypto token Zerebro, posted a video of himself allegedly taking his own life. But he was found quite alive and well on Wednesday. So, what was the motive? It seems to be financial.

🦿 Uh-oh, the robots: The escalating trade tensions between the U.S. and China affect many industries, but it's massively affecting one that's not being talked about as much: humanoid robots. While America excels on the software side, China excels on the hardware side.