Tuesday, May 5, 2026

Data-labeling startup Scale AI raises $1B as valuation doubles to $13.8B

Scale AI, a company that provides data-labeling services for training machine learning models, has raised a $1 billion Series F round from a slew of big-name...

Scarlett Johansson says that OpenAI approached her to use her voice

OpenAI is removing one of the voices used by ChatGPT. Users found that it sounded similar to Scarlett Johansson, the company announced on Monday, and Johansson...

Meta’s Oversight Board takes its first Threads case

Meta’s Oversight Board has now extended its scope to include the company’s newest platform, Instagram Threads. Designed as an independent appeals board that hears cases and...

OpenseedVC, which backs operators in Africa and Europe starting their companies, reaches first close...

Founder-market fit is one of the most crucial factors in a startup’s success, and operators (someone involved in the day-to-day operations of a startup) turned founders have...

UK opens office in San Francisco to tackle AI risk

Ahead of the AI safety summit kicking off in Seoul, South Korea later this week, its co-host the United Kingdom is expanding its own efforts in...

Why companies are turning to internal hackathons

Companies are always looking for an edge, and searching for ways to encourage their employees to innovate. One way to do that is by running an...

With AI startups booming, nap pods and Silicon Valley hustle culture are back

When Jeffrey Wang posted Monday to X asking if anyone wanted to go in on an order of fancy-but-affordable office nap pods, he didn’t expect the...

OpenAI and Google lay out their competing AI visions

Welcome back to TechCrunch’s Week in Review. This week had two major events from OpenAI and Google. OpenAI’s spring update event saw the reveal of its new...

Expedia says two execs dismissed after ‘violation of company policy’

Expedia says Rathi Murthy and Sreenivas Rachamadugu, respectively its CTO and senior vice president of core services product & engineering, are no longer employed at the...

Meta’s latest experiment borrows from BeReal’s and Snapchat’s core ideas

Meta is once again taking on its competitors by developing a feature that borrows concepts from others — in this case, BeReal and Snapchat. The company...