Friday, May 2, 2025

Welcome to TC PM! Today we have the details on the upcoming app launch for Google's NotebookLM; we dig into an oversubscribed climate fund; and we learn that Apple and Anthropic may be teaming up. Have a great weekend!

TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: Sean Gallup / Getty Images

📝 App time: Google is launching iOS and Android apps for its NotebookLM AI note-taking and research assistant. The apps will be available on May 20. Until now, the popular program has only been available on desktop since it launched in 2023.

🎶 Move over, Apple: Spotify announced today Apple approved its app update, which will allow users to access pricing information and external payment links. The company said this will allow Spotify to offer users more choice and lower prices.

💡 An amazing idea: OpenAI said it is going to change how it updates its models after some people complained that ChatGPT had become too sycophantic. One of the changes involves allowing some ChatGPT users to test models early.

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Afternoon must-reads

Image Credits: Hal Bergman / Getty Images

🎙️ Chattin' Cluely: On today's episode of Equity, the hosts look at the viral AI startup Cluely that claims it can help users cheat on anything. Also on this episode: Sam Altman's World event last week, what's up with the Shein IPO, and more.

🏭 Fresh funds: Ara Partners just raised an $800 million fund to invest in companies helping reduce emissions in industries that have been hard to decarbonize. The firm originally set out to raise $500 million, so this close shows that there is absolutely still LP interest in climate funds despite current market rhetoric.

💔 Welp: Raw is a dating app that helps foster more genuine interactions, according to its website. The company claims that its app uses end-to-end encryption, but a quick vibe check from TechCrunch found that it was quite easy to access private data on its users, including their location. The company says it has now fixed that glaring security nightmare.

⚠️ Off the rails: Google reported that its Gemini 2.5 Flash Model is more likely to generate text that violates the company's safety guidelines. These results come as AI companies are looking to make their models more permissive and come a few days after OpenAI had a safety incident of its own.

🤝 Apple and Anthropic: Building an AI coding platform seems to be the new trendy thing to do in Silicon Valley. Apple and Anthropic are reportedly teaming up to build "vibe coding" software that uses generative AI to generate code.

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Around the web

🏆 A true disruptor: India's Namma Yatri offers a different business model for ride-share drivers that involves them paying a subscription to the company in exchange for keeping the entirety of ride fares. This has caused legacy players like Uber to quickly innovate their offers.

💼 Oh, good: Anthony Jancso, an early recruiter for DOGE, has a new startup called AccelerateX. The govtech company is trying to hire for a project that aims to replace the work of tens of thousands of federal employees with AI agents.

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By Rebecca Bellan

Friday, May 2, 2025

Welcome to TechCrunch AM! This morning, we have notes on Airbnb using AI for customer service, Apple's tariff impact, and Reddit's AI answers chatbot. We've also got details of a rising star in defense; drama at Bench; the beginnings of an "AI scientist"; Stripe taking advantage of Apple's big L; yet another small AI model, and more. Let's go! – Rebecca

TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: Mach Industries

1. There's always money in defense: TC has exclusively learned that Mach Industries, a rising star in the defense tech space, is about to close a fresh $100 million round co-led by new investor Khosla Ventures and existing investor Bedrock Capital. Read More

2. Ye old headcount and budget imbalance: When Employer.com swooped in to save tax startup Bench from collapse, it looked like the company might survive. But the turmoil continues — TC has learned that Bench has laid off swathes of employees, only to keep many of them on as independent contractors. Read More

3. No middleman: Stripe is helping iOS app developers bypass Apple's cut of App Store transactions after a ruling in the Apple-Epic antitrust trial. The company "cooked up a quick guide" to let developers accept payments using Stripe outside of their apps. Read More

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Morning Must-Reads

Image Credits: stockcam / Getty Images

👀 Catering to the guests: Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says there are two types of Reddit users: Scrollers, who come for community engagement, and Seekers, who want answers to specific questions. The latter is who the company built Reddit Answers, its AI chatbot, for, and it's already seeing 1 million weekly active users. Read More

🧪 Lab-tested: Eric Schmidt-backed nonprofit FutureHouse has taken a step towards its aim to build an "AI scientist" within the next decade. It's launched a platform and API with AI-powered tools designed to support scientific work, and its CEO says its new agents can perform a variety of tasks "better than humans." Read More

🗣️ Alexa, play Plastic Love: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the company's upgraded Alexa+ AI assistant has been rolled out to over 100,000 users. The new Alexa can apparently chat in a more natural way, rather than using canned responses like it did previously. Read More

📲 Taking it on the chin: Apple is among the companies most exposed to Trump's tariffs, which it expects to add $900 million to its Q3 costs. Apple isn't planning to hike prices of its products just yet, but I'd buy any new Apple products sooner rather than later just in case. Read More

🥷 Keeping it low key: Airbnb started quietly rolling out an AI-powered customer service bot in the U.S. last month, and the company says roughly 50% of its users are already using it. Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said it has already led to a 15% reduction in people needing to contact human personnel. Read More

A Message from TechCrunch Events

3 days left — Buy 1, 2nd 50% off to TC Sessions: AI

Last 3 days for Early Bird deals for TechCrunch Sessions: AI! Buy 1 ticket, get the 2nd 50% off — or go solo and save up to $210. Join us June 5 in Berkeley for AI deep dives with leaders from DeepMind, Anthropic, OpenAI, Twelve Labs, Google Ventures, and more. Connect with other AI leaders in unmatched networking. Offer ends May 4 at 11:59 p.m. PT.

Around the Web

✍️ Who could've seen this coming? A new study from Cornell shows that the use of AI writing assistants is making everyone's writing feel generic and Western-coded. Not great if you're a thinking human, and doubly not so if you're from the Global South and don't want to sound American. Read More

😣 Knowledge is free, infrastructure is not: The Wikimedia projects are the largest collection of openly available knowledge in the world, but the organization says it's being pushed to its limits by automatic scraping bots that are causing "a significant load on the underlying infrastructure that keeps our sites available for everyone." Read More

🤦 Amateur hour: Mike Waltz, who just got booted as National Security Advisor, inadvertently revealed that he uses an obscure and unofficial version of Signal designed to archive messages, raising more questions about what classification of information officials discuss on the app and how that data is secured, reports 404Media. Read More

Before You Go

🤏 Fun-sized: Seems like everybody is coming out with their small AI models this week. Today we have nonprofit AI research institute Ai2's Olmo 2 1B, which is supposedly beating similarly sized models from Google, Meta and Alibaba on several benchmarks. Read More