TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: Raspberry Pi

🥧 More Pi, please: Single-board computer company Raspberry Pi announced a new model today — Compute Module 5, which comes without any traditional ports and is well suited to embedded applications. Read more

🫢 Social media is public, people: Unlike many other social media sites, Bluesky isn't looking to use its users' posts to train its own AI model. However, Bluesky's API means that other companies can easily scrape users' posts for the same purpose. Read more

🐴 Pony AI ponies up nice valuation: Chinese autonomous driving technology company Pony AI started trading on the Nasdaq today. The company debuted with a share price of $13 and a valuation of $4.55 billion. Read more

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Afternoon must-reads

Image Credits: Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto / Getty Images

😼 Copycat starter pack: One of Bluesky's nicest features is its starter packs, which are essentially lists of people to follow if you are interested in a certain topic. Naturally, Meta's Threads is working to develop the same feature. Read more

™️ Trademark time: OpenAI filed a trademark application to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for "OpenAI o1," the name of the "reasoning" AI model the company released a few months ago. Read more

🎭 The drama! Xiaodi Hou, co-founder and former CEO of self-driving truck company TuSimple, is demanding that the board liquidate the company and return all remaining funds to shareholders. Hou is also suing the company and his former co-founder. Read more

🎤 Podcast production: Have you ever consumed a piece of media and thought, "Wow, I wish I could hear this in the form of a multispeaker podcast?" If so, Voice AI company ElevenLabs built a feature called GenFM to do just that. Read more

😎 TikTok sets limits: She's beauty, she's grace, she's under 18 so she can't use that filter on her face. TikTok is limiting the use of some of its appearance-altering filters for users under 18 as the company continues to get slammed for its impact on minors' mental health. Read more

📈 Searching for scale: European Union president Ursula von der Leyen told Parliament members in a speech that to remain competitive, the EU will need to close the "innovation gap." Read more

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Around the web

🚫 Gotta make it easier than that: The FTC is investigating Uber's subscription service, Uber One, after customers complained that they were signed up unwillingly and that Uber made it hard to cancel. Read more

📝 Applicants flock to DOGE: The Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, is looking to hire 100 people. Apparently quite a few are gunning for those roles, including students and startup executives. Forbes offers a look at why they want these jobs. Read more

Before you go

Image Credits: Google

♟️ AI we can all get behind: Google Labs introduced a new online project called GenChess that allows users to use Gemini Imagen 3 to create their own virtual chess pieces. A great reminder that tech can just be for fun sometimes! Read more