April 21, 2025

Tech & AI

Tech & AI

Startups Weekly: Mixed messages from venture capital

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. This week brought us mixed messages. A fresh IPO filing, but a bleak outlook for exits overall. New funding rounds, but founders frustrated over lack of capital.

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Tech & AI

OpenAI’s New AI Models o3 and o4-mini Can Now ‘Think With Images’

OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman. Image: Creative Commons OpenAI has rolled out two new AI models, o3 and o4‑mini, that can literally “think with images,” marking a big step forward in how machines understand pictures. These models, announced in an OpenAI press release, can reason about images the same way they do about text — cropping,

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Tech & AI

NYT Strands hints, answers for April 18

If you’re reading this, you’re looking for a little help playing Strands, the New York Times‘ elevated word-search game. Strands requires the player to perform a twist on the classic word search. Words can be made from linked letters — up, down, left, right, or diagonal, but words can also change direction, resulting in quirky

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Tech & AI

ICE Is Paying Palantir $30 Million to Build ‘ImmigrationOS’ Surveillance Platform

“No other vendor could meet these timeframes of having the infrastructure in place to meet this urgent requirement and deliver a prototype in less than six months,” ICE says in the document. ICE’s document does not specify the data sources Palantir would pull from to power ImmigrationOS. However, it says that Palantir could “configure” the

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Tech & AI

Last day to apply to speak at All Stage

Today’s the day! The application to speak at TechCrunch All Stage closes tonight at 11:59 p.m. PT — this is your final chance to share real-world insights with 1,200+ startup founders and VCs attending the event. Whether you’ve built or backed startups, battled bottlenecks, or cracked the code on growth, the stage is yours. TC

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Tech & AI

Network Security at the Edge for AI-ready Enterprise

Modern enterprises are adopting AI applications, particularly generative AI (GenAI), at a rapid rate. This adds new network security challenges to already complex enterprise workloads spanning data centers, campuses, cloud, branches, and remote user locations. Network data is being reshaped by the rapid adoption of AI products. By 2026, it is estimated that over 80%

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Tech & AI

NYT Connections hints and answers for April 18: Tips to solve ‘Connections’ #677.

Connections is the one of the most popular New York Times word games that’s captured the public’s attention. The game is all about finding the “common threads between words.” And just like Wordle, Connections resets after midnight and each new set of words gets trickier and trickier—so we’ve served up some hints and tips to

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Tech & AI

Apple iPad (A16, 2025) Review: Brilliantly Basic

My best friend recently called my 13-inch iPad Air the “giant-ass iPad.” All my friends know how much I rely on Apple’s slate, and that’s because my only hobby outside of reading is binge-watching everything and anything. (Someone get me on Summer House.) But I also review iPads for my job, and have the entire

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Tech & AI

OpenAI launches Flex processing for cheaper, slower AI tasks

In a bid to more aggressively compete with rival AI companies like Google, OpenAI is launching Flex processing, an API option that provides lower AI model usage prices in exchange for slower response times and “occasional resource unavailability.” Flex processing, available in beta for OpenAI’s recently released o3 and o4-mini reasoning models, is aimed at

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Tech & AI

What You’ve Missed So Far

Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. Image: Meta Meta was summoned to Washington to defend its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp in a trial brought by the US Federal Trade Commission, which alleges the deals were part of a monopolistic strategy. The FTC wants Meta to divest these platforms to create a more level playing field in the

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