TechCrunch Top 3

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🇫🇷 Le API: French AI company Mistral released a new feature today for developers, Mistral OCR. This feature is an optical character recognition API that can turn any PDF into a text file to make it easier for AI models to ingest. Read more

💵 Cash for coding: Turing, a startup that helps contribute code to AI projects, including building LLMs, raised a fresh $111 million in new funding. This Series E round now values the company at a cool $2.5 billion. Read more

👻 Where did you go? Startup founders often share stories about being ghosted, or completely ignored, by investors they are trying to raise from. We've got a list of reasons why this happens, straight from VCs themselves. But seriously, it's just not hard to say no. Read more

A Message from Google Cloud

What businesses need to know about AI in 2025

Hear from 23 industry leaders including Amin Vahdat (Google Cloud), Chamath Palihapitiya (Social Capital), Harrison Chase (LangChain), Crystal Huang (GV), and more. They share their perspectives on the most critical cloud and AI trends, opportunities, investment areas, and challenges that business leaders need to be aware of in 2025 in Google Cloud's Future of AI: Perspectives for Startups report.

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Afternoon must-reads

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🚕 Ripe for robotaxis: TechCrunch caught up with Sachin Kansal, Uber's recently appointed CPO who has been at the company for eight years. Kansal walks us through the company's thought process when it comes to robotaxis and autonomous vehicles. Read more

🧑‍💻 ChatGPT be coding: OpenAI's ChatGPT can now edit code for users on macOS through supported developer tools. The feature is currently available to those macOS users with ChatGPT Plus, Pro, or Team accounts and rolls out to everybody next week. Read more

🚔 Crypto seizure: The U.S. Secret Service, alongside international law enforcement agencies, took down and seized Russian crypto exchange website Garantex. The platform is accused of working with darknet markets and ransomware hackers. Read more

🪃 CEO comeback: Mujeeb Ijaz is back as CEO of battery startup Our Next Energy (ONE) after stepping aside from the role in December 2023. In addition to this leadership change, the company also raised a new round of funding. Read more

🦆 DuckDuckAI: Private search engine DuckDuckGo released a chatbot tool in the fall, and it's now exiting beta and getting a new name. DuckDuckGo AI Chat will now be called Duck.ai, which is both shorter and more fun. Read more

🍿 So the drama: Miles Brundage, a former high-profile OpenAI policy researcher, took to social media to criticize OpenAI for "rewriting history" regarding how the company deployed potentially risky AI systems. Get your popcorn. Read more

Around the web

💬 Skype's story: As you've probably heard, Microsoft is shutting down video call service Skype this year. The Verge's Tom Warren dives into the company's history, its acquisition by Microsoft, and what went wrong after that. Read more

😬 We live in hell: AI is marketed as the biggest technology revolution of our time — and yet 404 Media reports that well-funded Chinese AI video generators are helping users create a flood of nonconsensual AI porn content. Yeah, that's not great. Read more