TechCrunch Top 3

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🍿 The fintechs are fighting: Get your popcorn — the latest in the debacle between Deel and Rippling just dropped. Deel is now accusing Rippling of having a spy of its own posing as a legitimate Deel customer to gain unauthorized access to Deel's systems. Juicy!

😵‍💫 AI train-ception: When DeepSeek released an updated version of its R1 reasoning model last week, it didn't mention what data the model had trained on. Now AI researchers are speculating that at least some of the data the model trained on was likely output data from Google's Gemini.

🛒 A hack! Indian grocery delivery startup KiranaPro was hacked, and all of its data — including customer names, emails, and payment details — has been wiped. The app just launched in December, and prior to the incident was seeing 2,000 daily orders.

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Afternoon must-reads

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🏋 AI authority: Renowned solo VC Elad Gil returned to the StrictlyVC Download podcast this week to talk about his new AI strategy, which involves buying up "traditional" businesses and using AI to help them modernize and scale.

🔎 Privacy, please: Reddit is rolling out a new update meant to increase users' privacy on the platform. It's adding a "Content and Activity" setting that allows people to decide what kind of content from the subreddits they participate in will show up on their profile.

🐺 Call of the wild: "De-extinction" startup Colossal Labs caused quite a stir a few months ago when it claimed to have brought dire wolves back from extinction. Now the company is saying it will release the sounds of them howling later this year.

♻️ Carbon offset: Meta said it's paying billions of dollars to keep an Illinois power plant running through 2047. Interestingly, this isn't a ploy to get the plant's power to a Meta data center — an increasingly common strategy —but rather to lower the company's carbon footprint.

🎨 AI art? Allegedly there's a movie in the works about Sam Altman's ousting and reinstatement at OpenAI in 2023. I'd love to know what the estimated audience is here considering a lot of folks outside of tech have no clue who Altman is — even if they use ChatGPT.

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Around the web

👀 Open source offensive: Ukraine executed an offensive drone attack on Russia over the weekend that wiped out a third of Russia's strategic long-range missiles. These attacks were facilitated by a 20-year-old open source software mainly used by hobbyists.

🕵️ Surveillance state: Use of worker surveillance tools has grown outside the U.S. These tools are increasingly being built by venture-backed startups and are being used in regions like Latin America, where there are fewer labor protections.

Before you go

Image Credits: Apple

👂 Rumor has it: Apple's WWDC 2025 kicks off on Monday. Naturally, the rumors of what Apple will announce have started swirling. Here's how to watch the keynote on Monday.