TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: Amazon

🤩 Echo Show(time): Amazon introduced the Echo Show 21 and an updated version of the Echo Show 15 today. Both of these devices have better audio quality than the first version of Show 15, and the Show 21 has the largest screen of any Echo Show device yet. Read more

🔓 A hack! London-based Finastra has confirmed that it's investigating a data breach. The company, which serves most of the world's top banks, says that it started to detect suspicious activity back on November 7. Read more

📉 AI models decelerate: AI models aren't scaling as fast as they used to. The industry seems to be realizing that you can't just throw more compute at an AI model to force it to improve. So how will AI companies scale their models now? Everyone is looking for the next thing. Read more

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Afternoon must-reads

Image Credits: Odoo

💰 Open source secondaries: Odoo, a Belgian company making open source business apps, recently held a €527 million ($527 million) secondary sale that valued the company at $5.26 billion. It was the first time the company took outside capital in eight years. Read more

🍅 Tomato robots: Four Growers is building devices that help greenhouse farms harvest plants like tomatoes. The company just raised a $9 million Series A to keep expanding into new crops and to expand its tech. Read more

🧐 Another AI model: DeepSeek, a Chinese AI researching startup, unveiled a "reasoning" AI model that is meant to rival OpenAI's o1 model. As a reminder, reasoning models allegedly fact-check themselves by spending more time on each question before answering. Read more

🐙 You can't do that: The U.S. government announced today that it has arrested five individuals associated with a multiyear hacking spree that targeted tech giants and cryptocurrency owners. The group is delightfully dubbed 0ktapus by security researchers. Read more

🔨 FTX exec avoids prison: U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan determined that former FTX CTO Gary Wang will not be heading to prison. Wang pled guilty to four felony counts associated with FTX's demise, but he cooperated with prosecutors the entire time. Read more

👀 Speaking of federal prosecutors: The FBI unsealed an indictment yesterday that alleges the founder of AI startup AllHere Education engaged in securities fraud, wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft in connection with defrauding investors. Another day, another Forbes 30 under 30 alum comes under legal fire. Read more

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Around the web

🫤 More AI slop: Back in April, 404 Media wrote about the rise of AI-generated influencers that steal content from influencers and adult content creators. Since then, the proliferation of this content has exploded on Instagram. Read more

🤨 Sam Altman's salary: How much would you guess OpenAI's Sam Altman makes a year? Would you guess it's almost the same salary as WNBA star Caitlin Clark's paltry rookie contract? Bloomberg discovered that last year Altman was paid $76,000. Read more