Latest AI News
Snap says its $400M deal with Perplexity ‘amicably ended’
Snap no longer has a deal with Perplexity, the company revealed on Wednesday as part of itsquarterly earnings report. The deal,announcedlast November, would have seen Perplexity’s AI search engine integrated directly into Snapchat. Perplexity was set to pay Snap $400 million in cash and equity over one year as part of the deal. Snap said that the companies “amicably ended the relationship in Q1″ and that its sales guidance “assumes no contribution from Perplexity.” When Snap announced the deal as part of its third-quarter earnings last year, it said it expected revenue from the partnership to begin contributing to its financials in 2026. The deal would have seen Perplexity integrated into Snapchat’s “Chat” interface, allowing users to ask questions and receive conversational answers directly within the app. Although the integration wasbeing testedwith select users, Snapsaid in Februarythat the companies had “yet to mutually agree on a path to a broader roll out.” Snap CEO Evan Spiegelsaid at the timeof the initial announcement that the deal reflected the company’s vision to use AI to enhance discovery on Snapchat, and that Snap was looking forward to “collaborating with more innovative partners in the future.” Perplexity did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment. Snap revealed on Wednesday that Snapchat’s global daily active users (DAU) rose 5% year-over-year to 483 million, while monthly active users (MAU) also grew 5% to reach 965 million. The company attributed the growth to new features across the app, including Snap Map and its Lenses AR filters. “In Q1, we returned to growth in daily active users, accelerated revenue growth, expanded margins, and generated strong free cash flow,” Spiegel said in a press release. “We remain focused on disciplined execution as we invest in Specs and our long-term opportunity in intelligent eyewear and look forward to sharing more at AWE on June 16th.” Snap said in April that it was laying offroughly 16%of its global workforce, impacting around 1,000 full-time employees, citing advancements in AI for the cuts.
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Barry Diller trusts Sam Altman. But ‘trust is irrelevant’ as AGI nears, he says.
Billionaire media mogul Barry Diller doesn’t think OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is untrustworthy, despiterecent reporting to the contrary. Onstage at The Wall Street Journal’s “Future of Everything” conference this week, Diller vouched for the AI exec, who has been accused by some former colleagues and board members of being manipulative and deceptive at times. Diller, who is friendly with Altman, was responding to a question about whether or not people should put their faith in Altman to ensure that artificial intelligence benefits humanity. In particular, he was asked about the theoretical form of AI known as artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which could one day outperform humans on any task. The media exec, a co-founder of Fox Broadcasting and chairman of IAC and Expedia Group, said that while he believes Altman is sincere in his pursuits, that’s not really the area of concern people should be focused on. Rather, it’s the unknown consequences that will result from AI. “One of the big issues with AI is it goes way beyond trust,” Diller said. “It may be that trust is irrelevant because the things that are happening are a surprise to the people who are making those things happen. And I’ve spent a lot of time with various people who’ve been in the creation mode of AI, and they have a sense of wonder themselves. So…it’s the great unknown. We don’t know. They don’t know,” he explained. “We have embarked on something that is going to change almost everything. It is not under-reported. Now, whether these huge investments are going to come through — I couldn’t care less. I’m not invested in it, but progress is going to be made,” Diller added. Still, the media mogul said he believes that most of the people leading the charge are good stewards, saying he believes that Altman is sincere and “a decent person with good values.” (Diller wouldn’t say which of the AI leaders he thinks is insincere, we should note.) “But the issue is not their stewardship. The issue is … it’s dealing truly with the unknown. They don’t know what can happen once you get AGI, and we’re close to it. We’re not there yet, but we’re getting closer and closer, quicker and quicker. And we must think about guardrails,” Diller noted. Plus, he warned, if humans don’t think about guardrails, then the alternative is that “another force, an AGI force, will do it themselves. And once that happens, once you unleash that, there’s no going back,” Diller said.
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DeepSeek could hit $45B valuation from its first investment round
DeepSeek is in talks to raise its first round of venture capital, and in just a few weeks, its potential valuation has soared from $20 billion to $45 billion, theFinancial TimesandBloombergreported. The Chinese AI labcame to prominence in early 2025after launching a large language model that trained on a fraction of the compute power and at a fraction of the cost of the big U.S. models like those from OpenAI and Anthropic. It has since keptreasonable pacewith the top models in the world in areas like reasoning and coding while remaining open weight (versions are freely available onHugging Face). Founded by Chinese hedge fund billionaire Liang Wenfeng, who controls nearly 90% of the company, the lab has not previously sought out investors, the FT reports. However, faced with competitors poaching DeepSeek’s researchers, Liang opted to raise funds in order to offer employees shares in the company, sources tell the FT. The round is said to be led by the state investment vehicle China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, Bloomberg reports. China is seeking to fund homegrown AI technology to sidestep the difficulty of obtaining U.S. technology, particularly chips. DeepSeek has been optimized to run on chips made by China’s hardware giant Huawei Technologies. That combo is considered a powerful duo for the nation to develop its own AI to rival the United States. The country’s cloud giants Tencent and Alibaba are also reportedly in talks to participate, per Bloomberg. DeepSeek could not be immediately reached for comment.
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SpaceX may spend up to $119B on ‘Terafab’ chip factory in Texas
SpaceX, Elon Musk’s space company that also houses his AI company, xAI, is considering spending $55 billion, at least initially, to build a semiconductor factory in Grimes County, Texas, according to aproposalon the county website. The company estimates it may spend a total of $119 billion on the project, which would be a “multi-phase, next-generation, vertically integrated semiconductor manufacturing and advanced computing fabrication facility,” according to the filing. Musk has previouslyoutlinedplans for the project, dubbed “Terafab,” that will also see Tesla contributing resources. The companies haveroped chipmaking giant Intel into the effort, aiming to develop chips for AI servers, satellites, SpaceX’s proposed data center in space, as well as autonomous Tesla vehicles and robots. The billionaire has said the manufacturing facility will, sometime in the future, manufacture enough chips to provide 1 terawatt of power per year, arguing that semiconductor manufacturers aren’t making chips quickly enough for his companies’ artificial intelligence and robotics needs. “We either build the Terafab or we don’t have the chips, and we need the chips, so we build the Terafab,” he wrote. However, Muskwrotein a tweet on Tuesday that Grimes County, Texas, was only one of several locations under consideration for the factory. The filing comes as Musk has doubled down on ensuring xAI has enough computing power available to train and power its Grok series of AI models. He’s also intent on capitalizing on the demand for AI compute by building data centers in space, which he has cited as a big reason for combining xAI with SpaceX. The combined entity is said to have a valuation of $1.25 trillion and isexpectedto go public in June.
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How Elon Musk left OpenAI, according to Greg Brockman
In late August 2017, key figures at OpenAI (then a small nonprofit research lab) gathered to discuss how they would create a for-profit to commercialize its technology and raise the funds needed to realize AGI. Elon Musk was demanding full control of the company and had just given each of his co-founders a Tesla Model 3. CTO Greg Brockman said he saw that as way of buttering them up at a time when Musk and Sam Altman were vying to win support for their respective visions of the company’s future. OpenAI’s head of research, Ilya Sutskever, had commissioned a painting of a Tesla to give Musk during the meeting as a friendly gesture. The conversation didn’t follow that mood: When Musk was told the others would not accede to his demand for control of the company, Brockman said he got angry and upset. He sat for several minutes thinking quietly. Then, in Brockman’s telling, Musk said, “I decline.” The SpaceX and Tesla founder “stood up and stormed around the table…I thought he was going to hit me. He grabbed the painting and started to storm out of the room. And then he turned around and said, ‘When will you be departing OpenAI?’” Brockman and Sutskever didn’t leave or commit to Musk’s vision. Musk stopped his regular donations to the company’s operating budget, and within six months, he would leave the board, though he paid for office space the company shared with Neuralink until 2020. As today’s legal battle over the future of OpenAI proceeds, scrutiny has settled on a key period in 2017 when the organization’s original co-founders disagreed about who would control its future, eventually bringing us Musk’s lawsuit against his co-founders. We have yet to hear from Sam Altman, but OpenAI president Greg Brockman testified for two days, often referencing a personal journal that offers a rare insight into what it’s like to be a 30-year-old tech executive in a pitched battle with Elon Musk. “It’s very painful,” Brockman said of the publicity around the journal, which he called “deeply personal writings that were never meant for the world to see. [But] there’s nothing in there I’m ashamed of.” Cutthroat negotiations between startup founders are rarely shared so publicly, especially when a company becomes as world-changing as OpenAI. We saw a recent taste of this rancor when OpenAI’s lawyers shared a text message Musk sent to Brockman two days before the trial began: “By the end of this week, you and Sam will be the most hated men in America. If you insist, so it will be.” The jury won’t see that note, but Musk’s lawyers have done their best to realize its spirit. They are trying to show the court that Altman and Brockman “stole a charity,” while OpenAI’s legal team tries to show that Musk had the exact same plan in mind. The inciting incident for all of this was when an OpenAI model defeated the top human player in the video game DOTA II. Brockman said that convinced everyone in the organization that compute was the key resource to create powerful AI tools, but that fundraising purely as a nonprofit would be insufficient. That led to talks about a for-profit subsidiary, of which Musk wanted “unequivocal” control, at least at the start. The other founders proposed equal shares, and perhaps more equity commensurate with a cash investment. Another idea on the table was somehow connecting OpenAI to Tesla’s AI work. Shivon Zilis, an OpenAI advisor who acted as a go-between for Musk and the team there, said there were more than 20 variations on the plan. But when the other founders wouldn’t give Musk control, their partnership unraveled. “It should not be the case that there exists one person with full and absolute control over OpenAI,” Brockman testified. Brockman and Sutskever discussed a plan to kick Elon off OpenAI’s board in order to move forward, resulting in November 2017 journal entries that Musk’s lawyers have focused on. ‘[C]an’t see us turning this into a for-profit without a very nasty fight,” Brockman wrote. “[I’m] just thinking about the office and we’re in the office. and his story will correctly be that we weren’t honest with him in the end about still wanting to do the for profit just without him….btw another realization from this is that it’d be wrong to steal the non-profit from him. to convert to a b-corp without him. that’d be pretty morally bankrupt. and he’s really not an idiot.” That “steal the non-profit” line may seem damning, but the context, according to Brockman, was whether or not to try and toss Musk off the board. They ultimately did not do that. Musk left the board voluntarily in February 2018, concluding that “OpenAI is on a path of certain failure,” saying he planned to focus more on AI at Tesla. Brockman described his reflections as an effort to determine whether he would be satisfied with his work life. “This is the only chance we have to get out from Elon,” he wrote during the talks. “Is he the ‘glorious leader’ that I would pick? We truly have a chance to make this happen. Financially what will take me to $1B?” That last reflection was also seized on by Musk’s lawyers as a sign that Brockman was thinking more about his personal wealth than the nonprofit’s mission. Brockman said his current stake in the company is worth almost $30 billion, which became an opportunity for Steve Molo, the main trial attorney for Musk, to berate him. “Why you didn’t take the $29 billion more than the billion you said you would be good with, and donate that to the charity?” Molo demanded.“Look at what we accomplished,” Brockman replied. “The OpenAI nonprofit has over $150 billion of OpenAI equity value. That is something we have built through hard work, blood, sweat, and tears, all this time since Elon has left.” Molo also dwelt on emails from where Brockman said he will donate $100,000 to OpenAI, something he never did. Ironically, Brockman might be best known to the public for making the largest donation of the 2025 political cycle, $25 million given to MAGA Inc., a SuperPAC supporting President Donald Trump, but that didn’t come up in the trial. Molo did mock Brockman’s description of the charged meeting around his control of the company as Musk being “mean” to Brockman, and suggested that Brockman didn’t understand the governance issues the way Musk, a serial founder, did. Brockman, though, said Musk didn’t understand AI. “He did not and does not know AI,” he testified, describing Musk dismissing an early demonstration of the software that would become ChatGPT. “We did not think he was going to spend the time required to actually get good at it.” “The fact that Elon saw this very early version of the research, that really set all these things in motion, [and] didn’t recognize that spark — that was exactly the kind of thing that was critical to avoid happening in this environment,” Brockman said. In 2019, OpenAI would create a for-profit and use it to raise $1 billion from Microsoft. The company would raise a further $13 billion from the software giant over the next four years, fueling its rise as the leading AI frontier lab. It also fueled the net worth of the company’s executives and employees, as well as the assets held by OpenAI the nonprofit. And ultimately, those deals fueled Musk’s suspicions that Altman and Brockman got one over on him, leading him to file his suit in 2024. The trial is expected to continue through next week.
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Anthropic Secures Access to 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs Through SpaceX Deal
Anthropic said it is doubling Claude Code’s five-hour usage limits for Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans.
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Adobe Unveils New Productivity Agent for Acrobat, Adds New Features to PDF Spaces
Adobe unveiled the productivity agent, an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered agentic tool, on Wednesday. Designed for Acrobat, the AI agent orchestrates tools and models to generate images, text, and rich content such as presentations, podcasts, and social media posts. Alongside, the company is also upgrading PDF Spaces, a collaborative space to share documents, with new sharing and publishing capabilities. It can now combine PDFs, documents, links, and notes to create a personalised space for users and viewers. The new capabilities are part of Adobe's paid plans.
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AI boom pushes Samsung to $1T
Samsung reached a $1 trillion valuation on Wednesday as shares of the South Korean tech giant surged more than 10%, driven by the ongoing artificial intelligence frenzy fueling demand for chips. The milestone makes Samsung only the second Asian company to cross the trillion-dollar threshold, after TSMC. The news comes on the heels ofa blockbuster earnings report last week,in which Samsung posted profits eight times higher than the same period a year ago. Every company building AI right now needs chips, and Samsung makes the memory chips that power those AI systems. Demand is surging while supply struggles to keep up, pushing prices higher and boosting Samsung’s profits. There’s another reason shares surged on Wednesday.Reports came outyesterday that Apple has been in talks with both Samsung and Intel to manufacture chips for Apple devices on U.S. soil. Apple has long relied almost exclusively on TSMC in Taiwan for its chip production. If Samsung lands the deal, it would mark a significant shift in the global semiconductor supply chain. At the heart of Samsung’s profit boom is high-bandwidth memory (HBM), a type of chip critical to running AI systems, which has dramatically improved the company’s margins. But the competition is intense. Rival SK Hynix, a South Korean semiconductor giant, is aggressively vying for the same market, keeping the pressure on Samsung to maintain its edge. The AI boom is driving achip shortageacross the semiconductor industry, as the world’s three largest memory chip makers,Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, struggle to meet runaway demand from AI data centers. All three companieshave pulled investment away from their consumer chip businessesto ramp up production of HBM, which carries substantially higher margins and has become essential to powering large-scale AI infrastructure. Despite Wednesday’s historic surge, Samsung still faces headwinds. Workers arethreatening an 18-day strikelater this month, demanding a bigger slice of the AI-driven profits. Meanwhile, the company’s phone and TV divisions, which also need to buy those same memory chips to build their products, arepaying a steep price for the samechips powering Samsung’s record profits.
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3 days left to lock in 50% off a second ticket to TechCrunch Disrupt 2026
Three days. That’s all that’s left to decide, not just whether you’ll be atTechCrunch Disrupt 2026, but also who you’ll show up with from October 13 to 15 at San Francisco’s Moscone West — and how much credibility you gain from the opportunity. Right now, you canbuy one pass and get 50% off a second of the same ticket type.That offerends May 8 at 11:59 p.m. PT.After that, prices go up — and so does the cost of showing up without the coverage, visibility, and presence that actually make the experience count. Because at a certain point, what determines how quickly a company moves is whether it is seen, understood, and taken seriously by the people who can influence what happens next. You only have three days left to act. Who will you bring to Disrupt?Choose your ticket typeand lock in your 50% savings. Most founders don’t struggle to generate attention. There are more channels than ever to get in front of people, and more ways to create surface-level visibility. What’s harder, and far more important, is earning credibility. Investors don’t respond to visibility alone; they respond to confidence. Partners don’t engage based on awareness; they engage based on trust. Even early customers are making decisions about what feels established, what feels validated, and what feels worth their time. Across six industry stages,Disruptis designed to show how companies earn trust at every phase of growth — by putting founders, investors, and operators in environments where credibility is built in real time in these practical, hands-on sessions. Builders and operators break down how companies actually scale. Learning from founders who’ve done it, and applying those frameworks, helps you speak with more authority when discussing growth, fundraising, and execution. Explore how leading companies are applying AI in practice. Hearing directly from builders and investors working at the frontier helps founders anchor their approach in what’s proven — not just what’s promised, strengthening credibility with both technical and business audiences. Beyond software, AI is reshaping the physical world. Hear from founders and operators building trusted, scalable systems in robotics, biotech, and edge environments where real-world constraints define success. Money is being rebuilt in real time. Explore how founders are shaping the future of finance through stablecoins, payments, and fintech infrastructure — cutting through hype to reveal what’s actually working in a digital economy. Software is transforming energy, climate, and industrial systems. Explore how founders are rebuilding infrastructure — from data center power to grid bottlenecks — while deploying smarter, scalable systems for a more resilient future. The main stage where top founders, investors, and operators define what matters next. Being part of these conversations and referencing them positions you within the broader narrative of where the market is heading. Bringing a partner, co-founder, or colleague means you’re not just attending, but you’re also reinforcing that credibility across more conversations, more contexts, and more interactions. For the next three days, you canbuy one pass and get a second for 50% off. From October 13–15 in San Francisco,Disruptbrings together 10,000+ founders, investors, and operators in one concentrated environment built for evaluation and discovery. Across 250+ sessions, roundtables, and discussions — and with300+ startupsshowcasing — companies aren’t just seen once; they’re seen repeatedly, in front of the same investors, partners, and media. That repetition is what turns visibility into credibility. A quick introduction becomes recognition. Recognition becomes familiarity, and familiarity builds trust. This is where thebuy one, get one 50% off discountbecomes a real advantage. When you bring a co-founder, operator, or partner, you multiply those moments. You’re not relying on a single interaction — you’re reinforcing your presence across the event. For the next three days, you have the opportunity to do that together at a lower cost. The BOGO50% offer ends May 8at 11:59 p.m. PT. If you’re already planning to be there, the decision now isn’t whether to attend — it’s whether you show up in a way that actually moves things forward.Register here before time runs out.
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At TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, all your M&A questions will be answered
The year keeps moving swiftly, and so is all of our planning forTechCrunch Disrupt 2026! We have an exciting new panel in store for founders in need of merger and acquisition advice … but first, we have a limited-time ticket offer to share. Disrupt will once again be held in San Francisco’s Moscone West from October 13–15, and for a limited time, attendees can also bring a colleague, co-founder, investor, or teammate for less!You can buy one Disrupt 2026 pass here,andget 50% off a second passof the same ticket type with a limited-time offer that ends May 8 at 11:59 p.m. PT. As for the kind of programming that’ll keep you locked in during Disrupt’s three days, let’s dive into our newest panel that will be on the Builders Stage. If you’ve been following our recent coverage, acquisitions and acqui-hires remain in vogue, especially within the AI scene. Whether it’sOpenAI buying Hiro,Anthropic acquiring Vercept,Google taking the team behind Hume AI, orDatabricks pulling in two startups just for its security product, it’s been a busy year! And being acquired is far from being the end of a long road for founders; it can be part of their early-stage journey. And with those, and many other acquisitions in mind, we’ve gathered an expert panel to help equip founders with what they need to know about all the M&A options that lie before them. Their perspectives will equip you with a playbook for creating optionality for potentially selling, ways to make your startup more enticing to buyers, and the realities of going through the acquisition process. And for some background on our panel, let’s learn more about our industry leaders. Aklil Ibssabrings a buyer-side perspective from one of the biggest companies in crypto, as he leads the company’s acquisition strategy and execution, helping identify whereCoinbaseshould buy, invest, partner, or build. He’s overseen more than 14 acquisitions and nearly 50 early- and later-stage investments, and as one of the first hires on Coinbase’s corporate development team, he contributed to an M&A program that’s become among the most active in crypto, with more than 40 total completed acquisitions. Most importantly for founders, he’s seen firsthand how strategic buyers evaluate young companies: whether for technology, talent, licenses, product velocity, and beyond. And he’ll be able to speak to acquisitions, including Deribit, Liquifi, and Echo, and prominent investments in startups like Kalshi. Lindsey Mignanobrings the legal and structural expertise that often determines whether an early-stage M&A deal can actually get to the finish line. As founder of Mignano Law Group, she represents emerging technology companies, SMEs, venture-backed startups, and venture firms as outside general counsel. Her practice spans everything from SAFE notes, priced rounds, and bridge financings to buy-side and sell-side acquisitions, acqui-hires, and everything else you can bring to mind. That uniquely equips her to educate founders without insight into how early M&A readiness can begin. Many of her clients are seed through Series B companies, including enterprise SaaS, PaaS, and AI startups — exactly the kinds of companies now facing strategic interest, and she’ll be able to ground the conversation in the realities of cap tables, contracts, asset sales, and the necessary work for acquisitions to happen. Now it’s time for an investor and operator to join the conversation. As managing partner atM13,Karl Alomarbacks seed and Series A software founders across infrastructure, fintech, developer productivity, and other categories, feeling the brunt of the AI revolution. He has intimate knowledge of the earliest strategic decisions founders make: when to raise, when to partner, when to accelerate growth, and when an acquisition path may create the best outcome for the company, team, and investors. As COO of DigitalOcean, Alomar helped build the cloud infrastructure company from its first product to roughly $250 million in ARR and an eventual NYSE IPO, with its valuation peaking around $15 billion. But as a founder, he’s been a part of the acquisition cycle too. China Export Finance grew to approximately $140 million in revenue before being acquired in 2010, and Clearview Networks was acquired in 2000. That combination gives Karl a nuanced perspective on the core question facing founders in the audience: When should they keep building with their team, and when is M&A the right path forward? And remember:If you register for Disrupt 2026 by May 8 at 11:59 p.m. PT, you can take advantage of that offer to get your pass with savings of up to $410, and get 50% off a second pass of the same ticket type. All the insights Disrupt offers are best shared with a partner or colleague, so don’t miss this opportunity!
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Ethos raises $22.75M from a16z for its expert network with voice onboarding
When companies are looking for opinions or advice on a project, they tend to go to LinkedIn or use expert networks such as GLG, Third Bridge, or AlphaSights. But they often don’t find quality inputs, despite their searches. Today, these sites ask experts to fill in a form based on their job title, which is then used to match them with companies in need of their help. London-basedEthosthinks that AI can improve both sides of this experience. For experts, it offers voice-powered onboarding to ask a broader set of questions and get more data about their knowledge in various domains that their job titles don’t cover. For companies, Ethos can better match natural language queries posed by these organizations for their project, thanks to the wider range of data it has collected. Ethos said that its voice-based onboarding and data allows it to answer complex client questions like, “Find me people who worked at a funded startup by A-grade investors solving for finance automation.” Another example the startup gave was how a pharma company using its platform could search for doctors who specialize in a certain area, but who have also written papers on the subject or have an understanding of drug development. Today, Ethos announced a $22.75 million Series A round led by a16z with participation from General Catalyst, XTX Markets, Evantic Capital, and Common Magic. a16z’s Anish Acharya thinks that legacy platforms like LinkedIn and GLG only show shallow signals with job titles. He believes that Ethos captures different sub-specializations through its voice interview process with curated questions. “I think voice is the original form of human communication. Most people, you know, most people don’t know how to write their story down in a very succinct, compelling, and accurate way. Voice is a big unlock for Ethos,” Acharya told TechCrunch over a call. Ethos was founded by James Lo and Daniel Mankowitz in 2024. Lo previously worked at McKinsey and later at SoftBank, where he worked on the transformation of companies like WeWork and Arm. Mankowitz worked as an AI researcher at DeepMind, where he worked on YouTube’s video compression algorithm, Gemini, and the AlphaDev sorting algorithm. Both founders arrived at tackling the problems of building an expert network from different angles. Lo always wanted to work on providing the right economic and employment opportunities to people. Mankowitz thought that the economy is a knowledge graph of people, companies, and products, and using the right algorithms, you can match these entities with each other. “Traditional expert platforms almost purely focus on a mixture of job titles and job descriptions. What we observe is that most clients and most employers are not looking for a job title company. They’re looking for a specific skill and a specific capability. We also observed that, over time, looking for a skill and capability is going to gradually merge between the human economy and the agent economy,” Lo said. Beyond the data provided by experts, Ethos also looks at other public sources like blogs and academic papers, along with social links to match companies with the right people. The company also conducts interviews through its own platform using voice agents and extracts insights. Startups likeListen LabsandOutsetalready provide a way for companies to use conversational AI for interviews, offering some competition on this front. But Ethos thinks that its network of experts is better suited for certain clients than its competitors. Ethos doesn’t name its client base, but said that top hedge funds, private equity firms, leading foundational AI labs, and enterprise consulting were already using its product. It’s taking 30% or more as a per-project fee from businesses, depending on the nature of the project. The company noted that it’s on track for “an eight-figure annualized revenue” but didn’t provide specific numbers. It also didn’t say how many experts are on the platform, but said that roughly 35,000 people are joining each week. (Ethos sends invites to people whom they think can benefit from it.) One challenge for the startup is growing an expert user base that’s relevant to its clients. The company said that AI labs spending money to map human talent has been helping its cause. “Our perspective here is the AI labs have — are pointing a giant capital gun at every economically valuable occupation in the world. They’re trying to map out every profession. And so that’s an amazing tailwind for us,” Lo said. He noted that these labs are building professional services in areas of law, health, finance, and management, so they would want all kinds of experts in these networks to build out their models and get feedback about their products and strategy. The company has eight people on its team now, and its goal is to keep the team compact while scaling up.
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Apple to pay $250M to settle lawsuit over Siri’s delayed AI features
Apple has agreed to pay $250 million to settle aclass action lawsuitover how it marketed its AI features ahead of the launch of the iPhone 16. TheFinancial Timeswas the first to report the news. The lawsuit alleged that Apple exaggerated the breadth of features Apple Intelligence would bring, which included a significantly upgraded version of its assistant, Siri. The complaint alleges that the company created the impression that advanced AI capabilities would be available to users sooner than they actually were. In particular, the plaintiffs allege that Apple overstated both the readiness and functionality of these features, particularly the promised improvements to Siri, which have yet to fully materialize. As a result, the complaint claims, people who bought the iPhone 15 or iPhone 16 believed they were paying for cutting-edge AI tools that were not actually available at the time of purchase. The lawsuit framed this as false advertising, and says Apple’s marketing influenced buying decisions based on features that were incomplete or delayed. Apple did not admit to wrongdoing in court, but has chosen to settle the case rather than continue with litigation. Under the proposed agreement, eligible U.S. customers who purchased the iPhone 15 or iPhone 16 between June 10, 2024 and March 29, 2025 could receive up to $95 per device. Apple has been touting a more advanced version of Siri ever since it unveiledApple Intelligencein 2024 during WWDC. The anticipated updates areexpectedto help Siri function more like modern AI chatbots such as ChatGPT or Claude. The upgraded experience is rumored to be powered byGoogle Gemini, though newer reports state the company’s next iPhone operating system may letusers choose from a number of third-party large language models. The settlement arrives ahead of Apple’s annual developer conference onJune 8, when the company is expected to preview a version of its AI-enhanced Siri.
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