Sam Altman throws shade at Meta’s attempts to poach his staff

Wednesday, June 18, 2025 Posted by bloggerdaddy 0 comments

Wednesday, June 18, 2025

Welcome to TechCrunch AM! This morning, we've got details of Meta's attempts to poach OpenAI staff; a startup that wants to help founders become billionaires; and the "legendary party that never happened." We've also got notes on AI in the DOD; American EVs topping charts; Tumblr's AI moderation chaos; Gemini's Pokemon panic, and more. Let's go!

TechCrunch Top 3

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1. Swing and a miss: Sam Altman claims Mark Zuckerberg has been trying to poach OpenAI engineers to Meta's new superintelligence team with "$100 million signing bonuses" and other insane compensation. But Altman said the recruiting push hasn't had much success. Read More

2. Widening the gap: AI has created the opportunity for single-person, billion-dollar companies. Birk Jernström, CEO of Polar, wants to help developers reach that coveted status with a payment infrastructure platform. The startup just raised a $10 million seed round led by Accel. Read More

3. Party's over: Cluely founder Roy Lee, whose "cheat at everything startup" seems to be centered around rage-bait and banter, promoted a satirical after-party during YC's AI Startup School. It drew a crowd so massive, the police had to shut it down before the party even began. Read More

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Morning Must-Reads

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🦅 Uncle Sam wants AI: OpenAI has landed a DOD contract worth up to $200 million to prototype systems for its AI models employed in everything from healthcare to cyber defense. OpenAI is trying to say that use cases will align with its guidelines, but the government isn't beating around the bush. This is for "critical national security challenges," per the DOD. Read More

🔋 EVs FTW: Tesla dominated the top four spots on Cars.com's 2025 American-Made Index. That's not new or surprising, but what's interesting is that EVs took six of the top 10 spots in the index. The Kia EV6 and Volkswagen ID.4 accompanied Tesla's cars on the list. Read More

😣 Flagged for nothing: Tumblr is the latest platform to face chaos as a result of using AI for moderation. A wave of users are complaining that the site is mislabeling innocent content, like art, cat GIFs, and even hands, as "mature," reducing visibility and sparking confusion. Read More

🛍️ I see it, I want it: Grifin is an investment app that automatically purchases stocks in brands that users regularly buy. It's an attempt to make investing less intimidating to its female user base, and the company is gaining traction. So far the app has surpassed 500,000 users and secured a $11 million Series A round. Read More

🤳 Another delay: Trump is delaying TikTok's ban again, pushing it back by 90 days. The current extension was set to expire on June 19, but Trump wants to keep TikTok alive while the administration works to find a new owner for ByteDance's U.S. business. Read More

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💬 Would you like to speak to an agent? Boston-based Maven builds autonomous AI agents for enterprise customer support. Axios reported that it just raised a $50 million Series B led by Dell, which brings its total funding to $78 million. Read More

🩸 Fresh blood: Intel has brought on new leadership for its engineering division, Bloomberg reports, as it seeks to implement a broader turnaround and better compete in the AI semiconductor arena with the likes of Nvidia and AMD. Read More

Before You Go

🎮 Gotta catch em' all: AI companies aren't just battling for industry dominance – they're vying for Pokémon gym badges too. Google DeepMind says its Gemini 2.5 Pro "panics" when its Pokémon are near defeat, which leads to a drop in reasoning performance. Extremely relatable. Read More

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Waymo expands its scope in California

Tuesday, June 17, 2025 Posted by bloggerdaddy 0 comments

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By Rebecca Szkutak

Tuesday, June 17, 2025

Welcome to TC PM! Today we learn that Waymo is expanding its service area in multiple California cities; we dig into a ton of funding news from companies big and small; and we look at impending layoffs at Intel.

TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: Smith Collection/Gado / Getty Images

😳 Whoa, Waymo: While Waymo is temporarily restricting its services to certain areas of Los Angeles, due to ongoing protests, it's expanding its overall service area by 80 square miles in multiple California cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco Bay Area, and Silicon Valley.

🍽️ Gobbling up cash: Elon Musk's xAI is allegedly looking to raise $4.3 billion in new equity funding after raising $6 billion just six months ago. This is in addition to the $5 billion of debt financing Musk is looking to raise for the combined entity of X and xAI.

🗡️ No IPO for Sword: Digital health startup Sword Health raised $40 million in a new funding round at a $4 billion valuation. Despite the 10-year-old company being cash-flow positive, it decided to stay private and put a potential IPO off until at least 2028.

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Afternoon must-reads

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😔 More layoffs at Intel: Semiconductor giant Intel will lay off between 15% and 20% of its Intel Foundry workers starting in July. This isn't super surprising: Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan's philosophy is that the best leaders get the most done with the fewest people.

🚀 Streaming soars: Streaming service viewership exceeded both cable and network television viewership in May for the first time. Last month, streaming services accounted for 44.8% of all television viewership. YouTube was the most watched within streaming services.

🥕 Fresh funds: Autonomous vehicle software company Applied Intuition raised a $600 million Series F round that values the company at $15 billion. It works with most of the major automakers, as well as autonomous vehicle companies such as Gatik and Kodiak.

⌨️ More usage: Anysphere launched a new subscription plan for its AI coding tool, Cursor. The company says that people on the new $200-a-month subscription plan, Ultra, will get priority access to new features.

⛔️ Say no to AI training: Decentralized social media network Mastodon updated its terms of service today to bar any AI model from scraping its users' data to train LLMs. This comes after Elon Musk made a similar term change over at X.

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🤨 Too good to be true: The Trump administration announced that it plans to release a $499 phone that is fully made in America. The Verge argues that unless there is a domestic mobile phone supply chain everyone somehow missed, this isn't possible.

🏠 Hidden in plain sight: The political assassination of Minnesota Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband is stirring up an old debate after it was discovered that the suspected killer found their address through public people search sites. Why are these sites legal?