​Apple CEO Tim Cook commented on the impact of President Trump’s tariffs during Thursday’s second-quarter earnings call with investors. While the iPhone maker saw only “limited impact” from tariffs in the March quarter, Cook said Apple couldn’t forecast what that would mean for the coming quarter. However, if things remained the same, the company estimates […]  

​Three years ago, a group of TikTokers joined NBCUniversal’s new initiative aimed at transforming social media influencers into the next generation of TV show creators.  Now, four of these creators are set to launch their original series on Peacock.  According to The Hollywood Reporter, the shows set to premiere are “The Warehouse Phase,” developed by […]  

​Mach Industries, the defense tech founded by 21-year-old Ethan Thornton, is about to close a fresh $100 million in financing co-led by new investor Khosla and existing investor Bedrock Capital, a source familiar with the deal tells TechCrunch. The new round will value the company at around $470 million, according to the source. However, the […]  

​Payments processing software provider Stripe is ready to help iOS app developers bypass Apple’s cut of App Store transactions. Following yesterday’s ruling in the Apple-Epic antitrust trial, where Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers outright shamed Apple for not permitting external payment links in apps as she had previously ruled, Stripe shared documentation that shows iOS developers […]  

​Dub, the copy-trading platform that says it’s transforming how Gen Z invests, has secured a $30 million Series A funding round, bringing its total raised to $47 million. The deal, which founder Steven Wang had previously hinted to TechCrunch was in the works, comes a year after its official launch. The 23-year-old’s Harvard dropout’s platform […]  

​FutureHouse, an Eric Schmidt-backed nonprofit that aims to build an “AI scientist” within the next decade, has launched its first major product: a platform and API with AI-powered tools designed to support scientific work. Many, many startups are racing to develop AI research tools for the scientific domain, some with massive amounts of VC funding […]  

​Bench, the accounting and tax startup that was bought in a fire sale last December, has conducted a round of significant layoffs, it confirmed to TechCrunch. Bench didn’t specify how many people were affected, but one person who works there estimated that Bench was eliminating dozens of positions – that’s a big chunk of the […]  

​‘Tis the week for small AI models, it seems. On Thursday, Ai2, the nonprofit AI research institute, released Olmo 2 1B, a 1-billion-parameter model that Ai2 claims beats similarly-sized models from Google, Meta, and Alibaba on several benchmarks. Parameters, sometimes referred to as weights, are the internal components of a model that guide its behavior. […]