• OpenEvidence hits $12B valuation, with new round led by Thrive, DST  

    VCs who have backed OpenEvidence are apparently not worried about new health information products from OpenAI and Anthropic.  On Wednesday, the startup announced that it raised an additional $250 million in Series D funding at a $12 billion valuation, co-led by Thrive Capital and DST.   That’s double the valuation from its last raise in October: $200 million at $6 billion, led by GV. It has now raised a total of $700 million, the company says, from backers including Sequoia, Nvidia, Kleiner Perkins, Blackstone, Bond, Craft Ventures, Mayo Clinic, and others.  OpenEvidence is an AI-powered medical information platform, similar to what…

  • Irony alert: Hallucinated citations found in papers from NeurIPS, the prestigious AI conference

    AI detection startup GPTZero scanned all 4,841 papers accepted by the prestigious Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), which took place last month in San Diego. The company found 100 hallucinated citations across 51 papers that it confirmed as fake, the company tells TechCrunch.  Having a paper accepted by NeurIPS is a résumé-worthy achievement in the world of AI. Given that these are the leading minds of AI research, one might assume they would use LLMs for the catastrophically boring task of writing citations. So caveats abound with this finding: 100 confirmed hallucinated citations across 51 papers is not…

  • Anthropic revises Claude’s ‘Constitution,’ and hints at chatbot consciousness

    On Wednesday, Anthropic released a revised version of Claude’s Constitution, a living document that provides a “holistic” explanation of the “context in which Claude operates and the kind of entity we would like Claude to be.” The document was released in conjunction with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos. For years, Anthropic has sought to distinguish itself from its competitors via what it calls “Constitutional AI,” a system whereby its chatbot, Claude, is trained using a specific set of ethical principles rather than human feedback. Anthropic first published those principles — Claude’s Constitution —…

  • Apple plans to make Siri an AI chatbot, report says

    Apple’s long-awaited Siri revamp could turn the smart assistant into a chatbot more akin to ChatGPT, according to a report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. His sources say that the Siri chatbot, which would be integrated into iOS 27, could be the focal point of Apple’s WWDC presentation in June. The Siri chatbot, internally codenamed “Campos,” will work with both voice and text inputs. Apple senior vice president Craig Federighi had previously stated that he didn’t want Siri to be a chatbot, and rather, that he wanted Apple’s AI options to be “integrated so it’s there within reach whenever you need…

  • Todoist’s app now lets you add tasks to your to-do list by speaking to its AI

    Maybe you don’t need an AI smart ring to keep up with your to-dos. Doist, the company behind Todoist, a popular to-do list app that works across multiple devices, is launching its new AI-powered, “voice-to-tasks” feature: Todoist Ramble. The feature allows you to describe your tasks using natural language. True to its name, Ramble can take your meandering, unstructured speech and turn it into organized tasks. The app will also capture other details you mention, like project deadlines, priorities, duration, and assignees. Image Credits:Todoist The idea is that people often think of things they need to do while on the…

  • X copies Bluesky with a ‘Starterpacks’ feature that helps you find who to follow

    Bluesky’s “Starter Packs,” the curated lists of suggested users to follow, have proven a popular way to help people connect with others on the social network — so popular, in fact, that X is now copying the feature. On Wednesday, X’s head of product, Nikita Bier, announced in a post that the Elon Musk-owned app will soon introduce its own version of these lists, which it’s calling “Starterpacks.” (How original!) The idea behind the new feature is to help users find accounts that match their interests across a range of categories, including News, Politics, Fashion, Technology, Business & Finance, Health…

  • Not to be outdone by OpenAI, Apple is reportedly developing an AI wearable

    Apple may be developing its own AI wearable, according to a report published Wednesday by The Information. The device will be a pin that users can wear on their clothing, and that comes equipped with two cameras and three microphones, the report says. Should the rumored device come to market, it would mark another sign that the AI hardware market is heating up. This news follows comments made Monday by OpenAI Chief Global Affairs Officer Chris Lehane, who told a Davos crowd that his company will likely announce its highly anticipated first AI hardware device in the second half of…

  • Sources: Project SGLang spins out as RadixArk with $400M valuation as inference market explodes

    Some of the team responsible for maintaining SGLang, a popular open source tool used by companies like xAI and Cursor to accelerate AI model training, has transitioned to its recently launched commercial startup. That company, called RadixArk, was announced last August. RadixArk, which originated as SGLang in 2023 inside the UC Berkeley lab of Databricks co-founder Ion Stoica, was recently valued at about $400 million in a round led by Accel, according to two people familiar with the matter. TechCrunch could not confirm the size of the funding. The startup previously raised angel capital from investors, including Intel CEO Lip-Bu…

  • A timeline of the US semiconductor market in 2025

    Last year was a tumultuous one for the U.S. semiconductor industry.   From leadership changes at legacy companies to continuously changing dialogue around AI chip export controls, a lot has happened. If the first few weeks of 2026, which saw new chip tariffs and international semiconductor deals, are any indicator — this year will be as unexpected as the last.   But before we get too deep into 2026, here is a final look at everything that happened in the U.S. semiconductor industry in 2025:   December Nvidia finds gold with Groq  December 24: Nvidia announced that it struck a non-exclusive licensing deal with chip maker Groq. While this wasn’t an acquisition, Nvidia hired Groq’s founder and president,…

  • Apps for boycotting American products surge to the top of the Danish App Store

    European consumers are fighting back against the U.S. following Trump’s threats to take control of Greenland, a Danish territory. As a result, two mobile apps that offer a way to determine if products are made in America, then suggest local alternatives, have surged to the top of the Danish App Store in recent days. The Danish App Store serves users in both Greenland and Denmark, and the same is true for Google Play. The boost in downloads comes as Danish consumers have been organizing a grassroots boycott of American-made products, which also included canceling their U.S. vacations and ditching their…