TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: Apple

💨 Breath of fresh air: Apple announced two new iPad Air models today, an 11-inch version and an a 13-inch version. These new devices include Apple's M3 chip, which isn't the company's newest chip, but it will still run Apple Intelligence. Read more

🤓 AI research: OpenAI announced that it will be putting $50 million in funding toward a new academic consortium, called NextGenAI, that is focused on AI research. The group's 15 founding academic partners include Harvard, University of Oxford, and MIT, among others. Read more

🐁 Mammoth mouse: Colossal Biosciences, the startup known for its ambitious goal of bringing the woolly mammoth back to life, has reached a furry milestone. The company has created genetically engineered mice that have mammoth-like fur. 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.

Download Here

Afternoon must-reads

Image Credits: Thos Robinson/Getty Images for The New York Times

🤔 Amazon needs a reason: Amazon apparently wants a "reasoning" AI model of its own. The company is looking to use a "hybrid" reasoning structure for this model, which would make it structurally similar to Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet model. Read more

📚 More models: Cohere's nonprofit research lab, Cohere For AI, released a new multimodal "open" AI model, called Aya Vision. The model can perform tasks like writing image captions, translating text, and generating summaries in 23 languages. Read more

✋ Not for everybody: Klarna made headlines last year when it announced that it had ditched Salesforce in favor of its own internal AI system. Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski is now explaining why he thinks others should not follow in his company's footsteps. Read more

💰 Crypto conversion: The hackers who stole $1.4 billion worth of Ethereum from crypto exchange Bybit have now converted most of the crypto into Bitcoin, which is being held across 4,400 addresses. Experts say this is likely the first step in a money-laundering operation. Read more

💬 Avoiding AI agents: Sierra founder and OpenAI board member Bret Taylor praised AI agents at Mobile World Congress today. While Sierra is building a customer service AI agent, Taylor seemed to avoid explaining the difference between agentic AI and generative AI. Read more

Around the web

🎰 Google vs. gambling: YouTube is going to tighten its policies around gambling content. Some of these restrictions include prohibiting creators from mentioning gambling services not approved by Google, restricting the content to viewers over 18, and more. Read more

🔫 Weapons on WhatsApp: There is a "thriving" illegal weapons trade market in India happening through Meta's WhatsApp messaging app. In an eight-month span leading up to January 2025, researchers found more than 8,000 messages advertising firearms across 234 groups. Read more