Latest AI News
Why Cohere is merging with Aleph Alpha
Canadian AI startupCohereis taking over Germany-based Aleph Alpha with support from Schwarz Group (parent company of grocery chain Lidl). With the blessing of their governments, the companies intend tooffer a sovereign alternative to enterprisesin an AI landscape dominated by American players. As companies that develop large language models, Aleph Alpha and Cohere have been hometown stars, while still lagging far behind OpenAI and the likes globally. But similarities aside, this isn’t an alliance between equals. Last valued at$6.8 billion, Cohere will lead the new entity that will incorporate Aleph Alpha, subject to approval by authorities and shareholders. Schwarz Group, one of Aleph Alpha’s main shareholders, is already fully onboard with the deal. The retail giant will now become a strategic backer of the new entity with €500 million in structured financing (approximately $600 million) — and with expectations that it will make use of STACKIT, the sovereign cloud service of its IT division Schwarz Digits. As part of its investment, Schwarz Group is also acting as Cohere’s lead investor in the Series E round of funding — and it already set the price tag. According to German business media outlet Handelsblatt, the term sheetanchors the valuation at around $20 billion. This would be a significant leap that combined revenue alone can’t justify. While Cohere reported$240 million in annual recurring revenuein 2025, Aleph Alpha had previously generatedlittle revenue and significant losses. But investors are betting that teaming up will improve their odds. They may not be alone in their thinking. Elon Musk’s AI startup xAIhas reportedly discussed a three-way partnershipwith France’s Mistral AI and Cursor,which SpaceX recently secured the option to buy. But it remains unclear whether the French company would be interested in risking undermining the very positioning asan alternative to U.S. tech that boosted its revenues. Cohere, too, is hoping to get tailwinds from enterprises looking for alternatives to AI providers that may not meet their requirements when it comes to privacy and independence. The new entity plans to target highly-regulated industries — including defense, energy, finance, healthcare, manufacturing and telecommunications— as well as the public sector. Aleph Alpha also developed specialized language models targeting enterprises and public institutions in Europe, such as the PhariaAI suite. Asubsequent pivotand thedepartureof its cofounder and CEO Jonas Andrulis made its strategy and leadership less clear, but its team of 250 people and their expertise could still complement Cohere. “Their focus on small language models, European languages andtokenizersis a really complementary one to our own, which is more of a general focus on large language models,” Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez said in a press conference announcing the plans on Friday. The press conference’s lineup was also telling. Rather than Aleph Alpha’s co-CEOs, it was co-founder Samuel Weinbach who joined Gomez on stage alongside Schwarz Group’s chief digital officer Rolf Schumann. The event also featured German digital minister Karsten Wildberger and his Canadian counterpart Evan Solomon. Amid growing tensions with the United States Canada has been increasingly keen to sign bilateral initiatives with a variety of partners, including Germany. With a shared concern for privacy and security, the two countries recently launcheda Sovereign Technology Allianceto “strengthen sovereign AI capacity and reduce strategic technology dependencies.” The question remains whether European organizations will view an initiative involving Canada as sufficiently sovereign, or whether they will trust that the alliance will remain transatlantic in the long run. According to Gomez, “Cohere will become a Canadian-German company.” But ownership could soon become less clear if an IPO is stillin the cards.
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The AI-Dependent Generation
Millions of developers in India are building with AI tools every day. They are overwhelmingly dependent. But some are also leaning on AI to make personal decisions.
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Meta’s loss is Thinking Machines’ gain
Weiyao Wang spent eight years at Meta — his first job out of college — helping build multimodal perception systems and contributing to open-world segmentation projects, including SAM3D. His final day at Meta was last week, and he has since joined Thinking Machines Lab (TML). His move to TML comes as the AI startup expands on multiple fronts. It just signed amultibillion-dollar cloud dealwith Google, giving it access to Nvidia’s latest GB300 chips and making it one of the first startups to run on the hardware. The agreement, announced this past Tuesday at Google Cloud Next, follows an earlier partnership with Nvidia, and puts TML in the same infrastructure tier as Anthropic and Meta. (Meta reportedly held talks to acquire Thinking Machines around this timelast yearand has more recently been picking off TML’s founders one by one.) The talent picture remains fluid. Wang and Kenneth Li — a Harvard PhD who spent 10 months at Meta before joining TML this month — are the latest examples of a talent grab that runs in both directions. Business Insider reported last week that Meta has now poachedsevenof TML’s founding members. A review of recent hires shows Thinking Machines is raiding Meta right back. At least, it appears based on a review of LinkedIn profiles, that TML has been hiring more researchers from Meta than from any other single employer. The most prominent is Soumith Chintala, TML’s CTO, who spent 11 years at Meta and co-founded PyTorch, the open source deep learning framework that now underpins most of the world’s AI research. He left Meta in late 2025 and was appointed CTO earlier this year. Piotr Dollár, another 11-year Meta veteran who served as research director and co-authored the influential Segment Anything model, is now on TML’s technical staff. Andrea Madotto, a research scientist in Meta’s FAIR division focused on multimodal language models, joined TML in December. James Sun, a software engineer with nearly nine years at Meta working on LLM pre- and post-training, also made the jump. TML has drawn talent from beyond Meta, too. Neal Wu — a three-time gold medalist at the International Olympiad in Informatics and a founding member of thebuzzycoding startup Cognition — joined early this year. Jeffrey Tao came via Waymo, Windsurf, and OpenAI. Muhammad Maaz previously held a research fellowship at Anthropic. Erik Wijmans arrived from Apple. Liliang Ren spent two and a half years on Microsoft’s AI Superintelligence team pre-training OpenAI models for code before joining in March. The startup’s headcount now stands at around 140. Meta’s pay packages — seven figures, no strings attached — are well known by now. For researchers weighing their other options, the calculus may be as simple as this: Thinking Machines Lab is right now valued at$12 billion. Though that figure would’ve been unimaginable for a company at this stage in any previous tech cycle (it has released justone productso far), compared with the record-breaking valuations of OpenAI and Anthropic, there’s still a lot of financial upside. Reached Friday morning, a spokesperson for TML declined to comment for this story.
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Tim Cook is stepping down. What happens to Apple now?
Loading the player… Tim Cook plans to step down from his CEO role in September,handing the reins to hardware chief John Ternus. Ternus may be inheriting one of the most durable businesses in tech, but he’s also stepping into a very different ecosystemthan the one Cook spent decades shaping. The App Store’s 30% cut is under pressure, the behind-the-scenes power Apple once held over developers is being challenged, andvibe-coded apps are changing what it means to build on Apple’s platform. Watch as TechCrunch’sEquitypodcast hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into what this transition means for startups and a closer look at some of the week’s biggest deals — including SpaceX’s $60B option on Cursor. Subscribe to Equity onYouTube,Apple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotifyand all the casts. You also can follow Equity onXandThreads, at @EquityPod.
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Marked-up Mac minis flood eBay amid shortages driven by AI
Overpriced Mac minis areflooding eBayamid shortages of the sold-out machines, which have become a favored tool for running on-device AI models likeOpenClaw. This week,reportsindicated that the $599 M4 Mac mini base model with 16GB RAM and 256GB of storage is sold out on Apple’s retail website, with no options for delivery or in-store pickup. The shortages have sinceextended to other configurationsof the base model, regardless of the amount of memory selected. This is the first time the base model has been sold out, someoutletsnoted. Meanwhile, models with higher storage (512GB and up) are only available to ship starting in June. As a result, eBay has become a secondary market for these in-demand computers. On the site, various configurations of the M4 Mac mini are available for sale at higher prices than if buying direct from Apple, which is no longer an option. Apple’s power-efficient Mac minis have become popular devices for testing and running at-home, on-device AI models, beginning with the OpenClaw craze but now extending to OpenClaw alternatives like ZeroClaw, other AI tools from Anthropic and OpenAI,Perplexity Computer,or otherspecialized local models.Unlike some PCs, Mac minis also run quietly and tend to be more reliable for 24/7 use, compared with laptop computers. The shortage of the devices also comes alongside anindustry-wide memory crunchand plans for a Mac mini refresh, according toBloomberg. However, refreshes of product lines haven’t led to shortages before. Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment. This perfect storm of supply chain stress and increased demand for AI-friendly machines has inflated the prices of used consumer electronics. As of Friday morning, M4 base models with the 16GB RAM/256GB SSD configuration were selling at markups like $715-$795 for a new, “open box” model, and as high as $979 for an “excellent” refurbished version. Some “lightly used, pre-owned” Mac minis with this configuration were selling for around $700 — more than $100 more than the price of a new base model. There was also a single listing for a $925 brand-new M4 Mac mini with the same 16GB RAM and 256GB storage; the listing warned in bright red text: “Last one.” While you still may be able to score a reasonably priced refurb if you keep a close eye out (or if you win an eBay auction where the bid has started at a lower price point), it seems that the demand for the device is going to keep prices up until Apple’s supply chain refreshes. And now that the Mac mini is unavailable, Apple has begun to see increased demand for the Mac Studio, too. That computer isalso now sold outacross several configurations. AsArs Technicapointed out, you can still get a MacBook Pro with 128GB RAM and larger SSDs within a few weeks, and even the new and popular MacBook Neo is still shipping within two to three weeks. This suggests the real issue is consumer demand for the Mac mini itself.
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Apple’s new CEO, and why Elon Musk wants to buy Cursor for $60B
A new era is on the way for Apple as Tim Cook plans to step down from his CEO role in September,handing the reins to hardware chief John Ternus. Ternus may be inheriting one of the most durable businesses in tech, but he’s also stepping into a very different ecosystem than the one Cook spent decades shaping. The App Store’s 30% cut is under pressure, the behind-the-scenes power Apple once held over developers is being challenged, andvibe-coded apps are changing what it means to build on Apple’s platform. On this episode of TechCrunch’sEquitypodcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into what this transition means for startups and a closer look at some of the week’s biggest deals — including SpaceX’s $60B option on Cursor. Listen to the full episode to hear about: Subscribe to Equity onYouTube,Apple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotifyand all the casts. You also can follow Equity onXandThreads, at @EquityPod.
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Google to invest up to $40B in Anthropic in cash and compute
Google plans to invest up to $40 billion in Anthropic and support the AI firm’s growing computing needs,Bloomberg reports. The Alphabet subsidiary is committing to invest $10 billion now, at a $350 billion valuation for Anthropic, with another $30 billion to follow if Anthropic hits certain performance targets, according to Anthropic. The promise of investment comes after Anthropic released its latest model, Mythos, to a limited group of partners this month. Anthropic says that Mythos is the company’s most powerful model to date and has significant cybersecurity applications. Due to potential misuse, Anthropic has restricted broader access while it works with select organizations to evaluate and address those risks — though the model has already fallen intounsanctioned hands. It’s also likely expensive to run at scale. The AI race is increasingly defined by access to the compute needed to train and deploy these systems. OpenAI has moved aggressively to secure that capacity through a web of multi-hundred-billion-dollar deals across cloud providers, chip suppliers, and energy, including anexpanded deal with chipmaker Cerebras this month. Anthropic has been in a scramble of its own. The company has facedwidespread complaintsabout Claude use limits in recent weeks and responded with a bevy of infrastructure deals. Earlier this month, Anthropicstruck a dealwith cloud computing provider CoreWeave for data center capacity. It also this week secured anadditional $5 billion investmentfrom Amazon, part of a broad agreement under which Anthropic is expected to spend up to $100 billion for around 5 gigawatts of compute capacity over time. While Google is a direct competitor in AI models, it’s also a key infrastructure supplier to Anthropic. Anthropic relies heavily on Google Cloud for chips and infrastructure, including access to Google’s tensor processing units (or TPUs), which are specialized chips designed for AI workloads and considered among the best alternatives to Nvidia’s in-demand processors. Anthropic’s relationship with Google predates this week’s news.Earlier this month, Anthropic announced a partnership with Google and chipmaker Broadcom, which designs custom AI chips for Google, to access multiple gigawatts of TPU-based computing capacity beginning in 2027; a subsequent Broadcom securities filing put that figure at 3.5 gigawatts. The new Google investment expands that arrangement, with Google Cloud now providing a fresh 5 gigawatts of capacity over the next five years, with room to scale further. Anthropic’s valuation stood at $350 billion as recently as February; investors have since been eager to back the company at $800 billion or more, according to Bloomberg. The company is also reportedly considering an IPO as soon as October.
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ComfyUI hits $500M valuation as creators seek more control over AI-generated media
ComfyUI, a startup that helps creators control image, video, and audio outputs from diffusion models with a node-based workflow, has raised a $30 million funding round at a $500 million valuation. The round was led by Craft Ventures, with participation from other investors including Pace Capital, Chemistry, and TruArrow. ComfyUI was started as an open-source project in 2023, shortly after the introduction of diffusion models. At that time, models like Midjourney and OpenAI’s DALL-E were barely functional, frequently making major mistakes, such as adding extra fingers to hands. To address these limitations, the project founders developed a modular framework that gives creators granular control over every step of the generation process. Their tool gained such significant traction among creative professionals that it eventually evolved into a formal startup. In late 2024, ComfyUI raised $19 million in Series A financing from investors including Chemistry Ventures, Cursor Capital, and Guillermo Rauch, founder of Vercel. Although the latest diffusion models have come a long way from adding a sixth digit to hands, the need for the granular precision that ComfyUI offers has only grown. “If you think about your typical prompt-based solution, like Midjourney or ChatGPT, you ask for something, it [gets only] 60% – 80% there,” Yoland Yan, ComfyUI’s co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch. “But to change that remaining 20%, you have to try this slot machine.” Yan (pictured left) compared the process to playing in a casino because prompting the model to make a small change can result in a completely different output, including overwriting the parts that were already perfect. ComfyUI’s node-based interface allows creators to link specific components of the generation process, giving them full control over the quality of their final output. “You cannot easily convey that message in the prompt box [of a foundational model],” Yan said. Creators seem to agree, as ComfyUI claims to have over 4 million users. The tool is being used by creative professionals for visual effects, animation, advertising, and even industrial design. The startup says its offering has become such a necessary tool of the trade for technical artists and other creatives that it is not uncommon to see “ComfyUI artist or engineer” listed as a job title on studio job boards. Although video and image foundational models continue to improve, Yan claims that they are far from perfect, and a tool like ComfyUI will continue to be in high demand. “In the world where AI slop is going to be everywhere, the Comfy version of human-in-the -loop approach is going to win out most of the eyeballs in the end,” he said. ComfyUI’s competitors includeWeavy, a startup that was acquired by Figma last year.
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DeepSeek previews new AI model that ‘closes the gap’ with frontier models
Chinese AI lab DeepSeek has launched two preview versions of its newest large language model,DeepSeek V4, a much-awaited update to last year’s V3.2 model and the accompanyingR1 reasoning modelthat took theAI world by storm. The company says both DeepSeek V4 Flash and V4 Pro are mixture-of-experts models with context windows of 1 million tokens each — enough to allow large codebases or documents to be used in prompts. The mixture-of-experts approach involves activating only a certain number of parameters per task to lower inference costs. The Pro model has a total of 1.6 trillion parameters (49 billion active), which makes it the biggest open-weight model available, outstripping Moonshot AI’s Kimi K 2.6 (1.1 trillion), MiniMax’s M1 (456 billion), and more than double DeepSeek V3.2 (671 billion). The smaller, V4 Flash has 284 billion parameters (13 billion active). DeepSeek says both models are more efficient and performant than DeepSeek V3.2 due to architectural improvements, and have almost “closed the gap” with current leading models, both open and closed, on reasoning benchmarks. The company claims its new V4-Pro-Max model outperforms its opensource peers across reasoning benchmarks, and outstrips OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 and Gemini 3.0 Pro on some tasks. In coding competition benchmarks, DeepSeek said both V4 models’ performance is “comparable to GPT-5.4.” However, the models seem to fall slightly behind frontier models in knowledge tests, specifically OpenAI’s GPT-5.4 and Google’s latest Gemini 3.1 Pro. This lag suggests a “developmental trajectory that trails state-of-the-art frontier models by approximately 3 to 6 months,” the lab wrote. Both V4 Flash and V4 Pro support text only, unlike many of its closed-source peers, which offer support for understanding and generating audio, video, and images. Notably, DeepSeek V4 is much more affordable than any frontier model available today. The smaller V4 Flash model costs $0.14 per million input tokens and $0.28 per million output tokens, undercutting GPT-5.4 Nano, Gemini 3.1 Flash, GPT-5.4 Mini, and Claude Haiku 4.5. The larger V4 Pro model, meanwhile, costs $0.145 per million input tokens and $3.48 per million output tokens, also undercutting Gemini 3.1 Pro, GPT-5.5, Claude Opus 4.7, and GPT-5.4. The launch comes a day after the U.S.accusedChina of stealing American AI labs’ IP on an industrial scale using thousands of proxy accounts. DeepSeek itself has been accused by Anthropic and OpenAI of “distilling,” essentially copying, their AI models.
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Nothing introduces an AI-powered dictation tool
In the last few years, AI-powered dictation tools have taken off. In addition to existing dictation apps like Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, Willow, and Monologue,newonesare being launched every week. On Thursday, hardware company Nothing launched a competitive product of its own, called Essential Voice. The core idea is similar to other dictation apps, as Essential Voice works in any app to turn your speech into formatted text, removing filler words like “um” and “ah” along the way. The company said that you can also create custom voice shortcuts for words, links, templates, and repeated phrases. For instance, you can assign the “my address” shortcut to your full address. At the moment, the feature is available on the Phone (3) with rollout for Phone (4a) Pro planned for later this month, and support for Phone (4a) arriving next month. The average person types 36 words a minute on a phone.But, they can say it four times faster.Essential Voice turns your speech into clear, ready-to-use writing.pic.twitter.com/l08bnS8sNF To access the feature, users either press the Essential key on devices where it is present or activate it from the keyboard. The feature issimilar to the one that Superwhisperreleased earlier this week for iPhone users, which allows them to map the iPhone’s action key to the app’s keyboard for dictation. Nothing’s new tool can also translate text directly from one language to another. At launch, Nothing said the feature supports over 100 languages. Going forward, it will also introduce app-based custom styling, meaning you’ll be able to change the tone of the AI editing within app categories, like work and messaging. Nothing is one of the first companies to offer a system-level integration for dictation. However, based onGoogle’s recent release of its offline dictation app, we might see more companies release similar tools in the future.
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Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga joins stacked StrictlyVC SF lineup for April 30 event
Surprise!StrictlyVC San Francisco, which will kick off this year’s events lineup for TechCrunch on April 30 at the Sentro Filipino Cultural Center, is getting a new addition to its increasingly stacked roster of speakers. Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga will join us to discuss, you guessed it, operating at scale in the age of AI. You’ll need to act swiftly to grab a ticket, though, for what’s becoming the go-to event within the SF startup scene next week. It’s an ideal one-stop shop for any founder or investor looking to widen their networks, deepen community ties, and learn from what’s now a wildly deep roster of speakers. Naga’s conversation with TechCrunch editor-in-chief Connie Loizos will cover that wide purview, exploring what it’s taken to build the many complex, interwoven systems amid the AI revolution on one of the most widely used services on the planet. And his work with Uber runs deep, having been with the company since 2015, long preceding the AI boom that is refining what CTOs have to focus on. And it’s notallAI. Naga has had a particular focus on developing earnings systems for drivers and couriers within Uber’s network, and he had previously played a key role in building LinkedIn’s early products and infrastructure that set it up to be the mainstay of professional life it is today. For those who haven’t been keeping score, we now have five (!!) speakers, including Naga: Eclipse founder and CEOLior Susan, whose recently raised $1.3 billion fund is focusing on physical AI startups, will take a deep dive into the kinds of ventures and projects that excite him and that other investors should take note of. Replit co-founder and CEOAmjad Masadwill provide a look into the future of AI-driven software development, which couldn’t be coming at a better time amid big claims about AI coding capabilities and major concerns from engineers. TDK Ventures, our sponsor for the evening, will have its president,Nicolas Sauvage, host an essential conversation about the ins and outs of raising capital from strategic backers and other early-stage investing topics that founders and VCs won’t want to miss. AndCampbell Brown, former CNN host and Meta media partnerships lead, will share her stories from entering the startup community with Forum AI, as she looks to contribute to the efforts to stem disinformation and inaccurate claims that arise from the misuse of AI. Don’t wait, don’t procrastinate,act now and snag a ticketbefore word on our latest speakers gets around. Block your calendar and make time to join the StrictlyVC community, and set yourself up for future success with the lessons learned from this SF event!
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India on the move: Personalisation, Sustainability, AI, and the New Era of Hospitality
Overall, 89% of Indian travellers say they want personalised trips, compared with 74% globally.
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