TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

🌤️ Bluesky smiling on me: If you are one of the many people who wants to leave Meta products but loves Instagram — guilty! — we have good news for you. Bluesky will be getting a photo-sharing app called Flashes. Read more

🌎 AI for all: Google Workspace members now have access to all of Workplace's AI tools for free. Until now, users would have to pay an additional $20 a month for Gemini features. This tells me that people weren't willing to pay up. Read more

💸 Gotta pay the toll: Donald Trump's nominee to run the Department of Transportation wants EV owners to pay to use roads. While that may seem like a crazy statement, federal road projects are funded from the taxes made on gas purchases. Regardless, that seems complicated. Read more

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Afternoon must-reads

Image Credits: Xuanyu Han / Getty Images

🦞 Rock lobster, Rockfish: Enterprises have a lot of data, but much of it can't be fully utilized because it's trapped in silos that don't talk to each other. Rockfish is helping enterprises bridge those silos using synthetic data. Read more

🥽 New AI lab just dropped: François Chollet, the famed AI researcher known for his work on deep learning during his decade-long stint at Google, is launching an AI lab of his own that will focus on artificial general intelligence. Read more

📰 AI and the media: If you are in line to announce a partnership between an AI company and a media org today, stay there! OpenAI and Axios announced they inked a deal that involves OpenAI funding the expansion of Axios' news room. Google's Gemini and The AP inked a deal of their own, too. Read more

🎙️ Mastodon on social media: What the future of social media looks like is unclear, but what is clear is that the landscape is changing. Equity sat down with Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko to talk about what the free open source social platform has been up to and why Rochko thinks the future of social media is decentralized. Listen here

😬 Propaganda time: Users of e-reader Boox are finding that the AI model behind the e-reader is spewing propaganda about countries like China and North Korea. ByteDance's LLM, DouBao, powers this reader. Read more

Around the web

🚒 Watching a disaster unfold on social media: Firsthand content about the Los Angeles wildfires went viral on social media platforms like TikTok. The Verge looks into how helpful that is considering timelines aren't in order and the platform isn't really designed to help in a natural disaster. Read more

🫶 An AI lover: While it's still unclear how big of a role AI chatbots will play in human relationships in the future, it's been fascinating to read about how people turn AI chatbots into friends or lovers. The New York Times has a fascinating firsthand account of a woman falling in love with a persona she created in ChatGPT. Read more

Before you go

Image Credits: Jason Ryan/NurPhoto / Getty Images

💵 Tech companies turn up: The wildfires in Los Angeles have devastated multiple neighborhoods. Tech companies are looking to help. We've got a list of all the tech companies donating money and how much they are shelling out. Read more