Latest AI News
Google Photos adds a new AI ‘Video Remix’ tool
Google Photos is getting a new “Video Remix” feature that can edit and transform videos in seconds, Googleannouncedon Wednesday. The feature is powered byGemini Omni,Google’s recently released model that promises to “create anything from any input.” The launch is Google’s latest push to bring more generative AI tools into its consumer apps as it continues to compete with companies like Apple, OpenAI, and Adobe. By baking AI-powered video editing into Google Photos, the tech giant is making it easier for users to edit clips with a few taps instead of relying on dedicated software, giving users another reason to stay within Google’s ecosystem. The Video Remix tool can be accessed in the “Create” tab in Google Photos, allowing you to do things like apply cinematic relighting to brighten up a dark clip, swap out a plain background for something else, or add artistic styles to videos, such as watercolor, raw sketchbook, and oil painting effects. For example, you could edit a video to make it appear that you shot it in a greenhouse, relight a video with a morning glow, or paint a video in a watercolor effect. “Creating beautiful video clips shouldn’t require professional skills or hours of editing,” Google wrote in the blog post. “Now, with Video Remix in Google Photos, you can transform ordinary videos into share-worthy moments in just a few taps.” Video Remix starts rolling out today to eligible Google AI Plus, Pro, and Ultra subscribers in the U.S., Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, Pakistan, Philippines, South Korea, and Turkey. The feature is the latest in a series of AI-powered updates introduced to Google Photos. The app recently launchednew touch-up toolsto allow users to apply subtle edits and fixes, such as removing blemishes, refining skin texture, brightening eyes, and whitening teeth. Google also announcedan AI-powered featurethat turns photos of your clothes into a digital closet where you can create new outfit ideas and virtually try on outfits.
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Meta's Muse Image Uses Content From Public Instagram Accounts for AI-Generated Images
Meta has introduced Muse Image, its first image generation model from Meta Superintelligence Labs, alongside a new feature that allows users to generate AI images using public Instagram photos unless account owners choose to opt out. The model is rolling out across Meta AI, Instagram and WhatsApp, and lets users tag public Instagram accounts to incorporate publicly available photos into AI-generated visuals. Meta says Instagram users can disable the feature through their account settings if they do not want their public content to be used.
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Former OpenAI exec Kevin Weil is now on the board of Stoke Space
Kevin Weil, a veteran tech executive known for stints at Twitter, Meta, Planet Labs, and OpenAI, has joined the board ofStoke Space, a well-funded Seattle startup building reusable rockets to compete with SpaceX. “It’s real simple for me,” Stoke CEO Andy Lapsa told TechCrunch of meeting Weil when he co-founded Stoke in 2020 and soon after joined Y Combinator’swinter batch. “I came out of engineering, started a company, had no idea how to fundraise. I had no idea how Silicon Valley worked. I had no network. Kevin [an early investor in the company with his wife Elizabeth, through their fundScribble Ventures] comes with all of that background and was able to help me think about fundraising and getting the company off the ground. The two kept talking while Lapsa raised $1.34 billion — including a$510 million Series Dfunding round in 2025 — to build a rapidly reusable rocket that could fly this year. Now, the time is apparently right for Weil to join the board as a director to help continue scaling the company. Stoke declined to make Weil available for an interview, and he didn’t respond to TechCrunch’s outreach. Weil’s past work has focused on digital products and platforms, which aren’t obviously on Stoke’s roadmap. He was most recently the head of OpenAI’s efforts to accelerate scientific research,leaving the companyafter that program’s work was spread more widely across the frontier lab in April. He had previously served as OpenAI’s chief product officer from June 2024 until October 2025. Weil’s last job raises one obvious question: OpenAI’s Sam Altman wasreportedlykicking the tires on Stoke last year, contemplating an investment in his own SpaceX competitor. Could Weil be the link between the frontier AI lab and a possible partner in space? Lapsa declined to comment on “gossip and rumors” about OpenAI, saying Weil’s role was to focus on Stoke itself. Stoke is building a rocket, Nova, that is intended to be completely reusable and can be flown again and again. No one has ever done that, with SpaceX coming the closest with its enormous Starship rocket. The technological challenges of reusing a rocket — particularly its ability to survive the extreme heat of reentering the Earth’s atmosphere from space — deterred even space investors with the deepest pockets. Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, where Lapsa once worked, has flirted with the approach, but hasn’t prioritized it. Now, though, SpaceX’s blockbuster stock market debut — with much of its value resting onElon Musk’s promisesthat Starship will be flying operational missions this year — has proven Lapsa’s foresight. Despite many billions of dollars invested in new launch vehicles, there aren’t enough rockets to go around, and the next company to get a reasonably priced rocket flying regularly promises to make a killing. “The world is realizing that launch is still not solved,” Lapsa said. “The idea of full, rapid reuse was a little bit out there at that time…that’s now been rather normalized, and people see the inevitable now.” Notably, the idea of building distributed data centers in space to leverage solar power and escape political restrictions on Earth has captured the imagination of some venture capitalists. The key obstacle there is the cost of getting all those computer chips into orbit. Space data centers “really only make sense with full rapid reuse,” Lapsa said, which could be a key differentiator for Stoke as its rocket starts flying. Military contracts will also be key to the company’s success, and Weil has experience bridging the gap between Silicon Valley and the Department of Defense; he was one offour tech movers and shakerswho joined the U.S. Army Reserve in a bid to improve recruitment and cooperation between the Army and industry. And this isn’t his first time in the space business. Weil served as the president of Planet Labs, a satellite earth observation company, for three years as it went public 2021. Whatever Weil can add to the company’s strategy as it closes in on delivering an operational launch vehicle, though, the company has to execute. “We’ve got a good chunk of the risk behind us, we’ve got more to go,” Lapsa said. “We’ll work as hard as we can, and we’ll go when it’s ready.”
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Ford Opens Coimbatore GCC to Strengthen Business Continuity Operations
The new 800-seat facility will support finance and business functions while tapping Coimbatore’s talent pool.
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Enterprises Have an AI Pilot Problem. The Solution May Be Neurosymbolic AI
As AI pilots struggle to reach production across enterprise environments, one supply chain technology company is betting on combining neural AI with older, structured forms of reasoning.
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US Insurance Giant Nationwide Opens 1st International GCC in Hyderabad
The expansion comes as the company enters its 100th year of operations.
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Sarvam AI Opens Hiring for Forward Deployed Engineers
The company wants engineers who can take AI systems from design to production while working directly with enterprise customers.
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Will Uttar Pradesh's GCC Ambitions Have a Hard Stop at Noida?
Uttar Pradesh has an advantage when it comes to professionals looking to return closer to home later in their careers.
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Indian IT Braces for Soft Start to FY27 as AI Margins Remain a Mirage
Analysts expect a muted start to FY27 as Indian IT’s enterprise spending remains cautious, while AI is yet to generate meaningful high-margin revenues.
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Ex. GitHub CEO’s Startup Launches ‘Fastest’ Git Hosting Network
Entire says its distributed Git network sustained 570,000 repository clones per hour and 2.1 million Git pushes per hour in early testing, targeting AI coding agents that generate heavy concurrent Git traffic.
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AI chip maker SambaNova raises $1B at $11B valuation, 5 months after last mega round
AI chip companySambaNova Systemshas raised $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation led by General Atlantic, in a first close of its Series F round, with more investors expected to join soon. “In the next few weeks, a few more investors will be coming in, and the second close is likely to finish up,” Rodrigo Liang, CEO and co-founder of SambaNova, told TechCrunch. The latest round comes roughly five months after the Palo Alto, California-based startup companyunveiled its SN50 chip, alongside a$350 million Series E in February. SambaNova had also been in acquisition talks with Intel, a deal valuing it at roughly $1.6 billion, according toa December reportfromBloomberg News. Asked whether closing its Series E and F rounds meant SambaNova, founded in 2017, had settled on staying independent, Liang was noncommittal. He said the company keeps fielding interest. “We’re always being approached.” The door is open to such an exit in this dynamic AI market, the CEO said, but momentum and growth will most likely drive the company toward “being public at some point.” SambaNova’s ties toIntel, a backer since its Series C and a participant in this latest round, have deepened. Five months ago, the nine-year-old startupannounceda multi-year partnership with Intel to support AI inference development based on Intel’s Xeon chip. The two now co-develop products and take them to market together. “That gives us a great relationship with them that lets us leverage the scale of Intel with the technology we have,” Liang said. Alongside the new funding, SambaNova said it has been selected by JPMorganChase as an “inference-infrastructure partner,” with its SN40L and SN50 systems set to power secure, on-premises AI inference at the bank. “Having JPMorgan Chase decide they’re going to use SambaNova for their inference solution is a big deal,” Liang told TechCrunch. “It sends a message to the banking industry that it’s time not to completely depend on cloud services. These banks want heterogeneous [infrastructure].” Liang said the JPMorgan win was a signal to the broader market. Banks “of the caliber of JP Morgan” are now building their own private, secure infrastructure to run inference on their most sensitive models, he said, a move he expects to resonate beyond banking. Enterprises and governments are “just starting their AI journey,” Liang continued, with most of the growth so far concentrated among tech’s model makers and frontier labs, leaving what he called “a huge amount of revenue” still on the table. SambaNova launched itsSN40Lin September 2023, available in the cloud, and on-premises fromNovember 2023. Its next-generation SN50, unveiled in February 2026, is due to begin shipping to customers in the second half of 2026, with SoftBank as its first deployment partner, Liang noted. Liang said SambaNova’s edge as “premium inference” running the largest models and running them fast. Today’s frontier models span trillions of parameters, and he said SambaNova was built specifically to handle them at that scale. The company fits multi-trillion-parameter models onto a single rack which helps them run quickly. SambaNova sees three types of customers. The first is sovereign clouds, where governments fund local partners to build private clouds, a push Liang expects SambaNova to figure centrally in. The second is neoclouds. The third is enterprises building for their own use. In addition to JPMorgan, it also names Saudi Aramco, Intel, and other Japanese firms as customers. SambaNova will use the proceeds to scale the business and shore up its supply chain against what Liang called an incredible wave of demand. “We’re using that capital to secure the supply chain,” he said, describing it as essential to fulfilling orders and buying the materials the company needs to deliver over the next 12 months. Other investors participating in the round include Seligman Ventures, T. Rowe Price Associates, and Capital Group. New and existing investors also joined, including A&E Investment, Assam Ventures, Battery Ventures, Cambium Capital, BlackRock, Kabila Capital, QFO Capital, Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Vista Equity Partners, and Volantis.
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Hot French startup ZML releases free product to speed inference across lots of AI chips
The days of Nvidia’s unparalleled market dominance aren’t over, but challengers and choices are arising from all directions. ZML, a hot French AI startupendorsedby Turing Award winner Yann LeCun, has releasedinference-performance software that allowsa variety of open-source large language modelsto run on avariety of chips— including Nvidia’s, AMD’s, Google’s TPU, Apple Metal and Intel Arc. WithZML/LLMD, the newly launched LLM inference server, the company’s ambition is to break existing silos and make different chips available for AI use cases at their maximum available speed, and sometimes faster, ZML founder Steeve Morin told TechCrunch. As AI becomes integrated into our work and everyday lives, optimizing inference — aka, the processing of prompts — has been outpacingmodel trainingin importance, but often feels patchy behind the scenes, with software and architecture barriers that lead to vendor lock-in, Morin said. The promise of achieving peak performance across a variety of chips is a technological feat, but it could also be a market disruptor, amid mounting fears over AI-related costs. ZML hopes to provide enterprises and clouds with the option to use a mix of chips, some of which might be less costly or consume less energy. “The idea is to give people back the power to create their own system and achieve real efficiency gains that allow [AI] to be disseminated,” Morin said. Such a software assist may help novel AI chipmakers, many of which happen to be from Europe, Morin observed, citingAxelera,Fractile,Kalray,OLIX,Q.ANT,SiPearl,SpiNNcloud, andVSORA. But more than their region of origin, what matters to him is that ZML can work with them on “things that haven’t been done before anywhere in the world.” That doesn’t mean Morin is bearish on Nvidia.He’s not, in part because of its existing supply. He told TechCrunch that ZML has a good relationship with the AI chip giant, which has beengearing upfor the rise of inference. Inference has been an area of such intense investment, that the trend has been hailed the “inference gold rush.” So ZML has competition such asBaseten, recently valued at $13 billion;Inferact, from the creators of open source projectvLLM; as well asRadixArk, thecommercial company behind SGLang. Both vLLM and SGLang partially compete with LLMD, but Morin’s ambitions for ZML cover a broader spectrum. “We have reached the point where we are co-designing silicon,” he said. He further credited ZML’s lean team of 20 people as the reason why the Paris-based startup has been able to move fast, with more releases in the plans. It also helped that this small team is well funded for its size. Thanks to his track record as VP of engineering ofZenly, which Snapchat acquiredfor nine figures in 2017, Morin raised $20 million from venture firms including Harry Stebbings’ 20VC, >commit, AALVC, Drysdale Ventures, Xavier Niel’s Kima Ventures, Kindred Capital, LocalGlobe, and Puzzle Ventures. Unlike ZML’s first public project, the inference-focusedML frameworkreleased in 2024 andupdated in March, ZML/LLMD is not open source. But it is launching as a free product with the goal of learning about usage. “I’d rather measure and [then generate revenue] where it is most effective without hindering my growth stupidly because I have been too greedy from the get-go,” Morin said. It is too early to tell when ZML/LLMD might become a paid product, and what its adoption will look like. But the startup’s cap table confirms that other founders are paying attention, including Dagger and Docker founder Solomon Hykes, Clément Delangue and Julien Chaumond from Hugging Face, as well LeCun, now withAMI Labs. This also builds the case that Europe’s AI startupscan now build from home. “I couldn’t do ZML anywhere but in Paris,” Morin said.
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