TechCrunch Top 3

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1. What's Russia up to? Operation Zero, a company that exclusively sells zero-day exploits to the Russian government, has advertised that it's willing to pay up to $4 million for Telegram exploits. Read More

2. A look back at GTC: Nvidia's annual conference felt more bullish than ever. The chip giant sits firmly on its throne, which has been raised higher by powerful new chips, personal supercomputers, and cute robots. But being at the top has its challenges, and those are mounting every day. Read More

3. Unsexy unicorns: Commercial services tech isn't considered sexy, but the need for innovation in the space is huge, writes TC's Mary Ann Azevedo. Enter BuildOps, a startup that develops software for commercial contractors and just raised $127 million at a $1 billion valuation. Read More

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Morning must-reads

Image Credits: Steven Ferdman / Getty Images

💅 Everything's fine: Gwyneth Paltrow says her lifestyle company Goop is growing at a healthy rate, despite reports that sales have been flat since 2021 and two rounds of layoffs last year. In 2025, Goop is working on optimizing EBITDA as it attempts to keep its cultural edge. Read More

💬 Lost in translation: Just as reading Tolstoy in the original Russian is different than reading a translation, AI's censorship on answers to questions about China differs depending on the language. Read More

🗞️ Leverage: Google is doing its utmost to avoid paying news publishers in Europe for reusing snippets of their content. The tech giant experimented by removing news from search results and claimed that the results showed news is essentially worthless to Google's ad business. Read More

📺 Swing and a miss: Apple is losing more than $1 billion per year on its streaming service, Apple TV+, its only unprofitable service. And not even "Severance" is saving that balance sheet. Read More

🤓 Hackathon: The North Korean government is establishing a new hacking group within its intelligence agency to focus on offensive hacking tech and programs, as well as capabilities in stealing digital assets and developing AI-based techniques for information theft. Read More

Around the web

📚 A look at LibGen: As Meta battles copyright infringement claims from writers whose work was taken without their consent to train its AI models, The Atlantic takes a closer look at LibGen, one of the largest pirated libraries that Meta access high quality writing. Read More

🔮 Securities or not securities: That is the question the SEC answered in relation to proof-of-work cryptocurrency mining, which the agency says does not trigger federal securities laws, per CoinDesk. It's a huge win for Bitcoin and Dogecoin. Read More

🤝 Can't beat them: An excerpt from Gary Rivlin's book "AI Valley" (on Bloomberg) shares why Inflection AI staff defected to Microsoft in 2024, despite the fact that it was thriving. In short, the financial table stakes of AI meant that Big Tech would be the only ones with the cash to dominate, "blocking the birth of a generation of new tech powerhouses." Read More

Before you go

Image Credits: Brian Heater/TechCrunch

🪑 Loss of confidence: Apple's Siri has come under attack for failing at the most basic queries, despite the promises of Apple AI. So Apple is putting its Vision Pro lead, Mike Rockwell, in charge of the Siri team. Read More