TechCrunch Top 3

Satya Nadella has issued a shocking warning to companies using AI: Of all the debates raging about the potential downsides of AI, there is one worry causing the most hand-wringing among AI enthusiasts in Silicon Valley — that the giant AI labs that sell proprietary models are somehow acting like Trojan horses. Read More

Apple says former employee exploited 'rare' bug to download confidential files after leaving for OpenAI: Apple would not comment on the "security breach," which allegedly allowed a former employee to download sensitive files from Apple's network long after he departed the company for rival OpenAI. Read More

Already rich, already successful, why the last wave of tech winners is grinding again: They're rolling up their sleeves again, seemingly out of fear of missing AI's defining moment and, presumably, the irresistible allure of making even more money -- potentially a lot more. Read More

A message from General Compute

General Compute is making a $300m bet against GPUs

General Compute raised $15m to build the worlds first ASIC cloud. By removing the GPU bottleneck, it runs frontier LLMs up to 16x faster than standard GPU clouds. ASIC silicon is also far more energy efficient, so it deploys in air-cooled data centers, making growth and expansion dramatically easier.

Learn more here

Morning Must-Reads

The real AI race may no longer be at the frontier: Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue says enterprises increasingly want open models, due to cost, accessibility, and ownership. Do frontier models still matter if most production AI ends up running on open models? Read More

Pinwheel launches a retro-inspired landline phone for kids: Kid-friendly tech company Pinwheel announced the launch of a new landline phone designed to let children stay connected without the distractions of a smartphone. Read More

Video-generation startup PixVerse raises $439M, valuation soars past $2B: With the cash, the company aims to expand its world model offering and reach customers across geographies. Read More

Telegram's shortlink domain is back online after day-long suspension: Telegram CEO Pavel Durov confirmed an outage in a tweet, saying that shortlinks to the messaging app had "stopped working." Read More

Superhuman's new auto-draft feature almost makes me like AI replies: Superhuman’s latest AI email drafting feature is its most convincing yet, generating replies that often required little to no editing in our testing. Read More

Last but Not Least

Hermes agent maker Nous Research in talks for new funding at $1.5B valuation: The company is raising at least $75 million, led by Robot Ventures, with significant participation from USV and other prominent investors. Read More