Former OpenAI and DeepMind researchers raise whopping $300M seed to automate science 

Periodic Labs has raised from a tech industry who’s who, including Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia, Elad Gil, Jeff Dean, Eric Schmidt, and Jeff Bezos.

OpenAI is launching the Sora app, its own TikTok competitor, alongside the Sora 2 model

The social app Sora will let users generate videos of themselves and their friends, which they can share in a TikTok-like feed.

AI note-taking app Granola adds a repeatable prompts feature

Granola is launching a way for users to repeatedly use prompts via a new feature called Recipes.

DeepSeek releases ‘sparse attention’ model that cuts API costs in half

Researchers at DeepSeek released a new experimental model designed to have dramatically lower inference costs when used in long-context operations.

OpenAI takes on Google, Amazon with new agentic shopping system

This type of frictionless experience has the potential to spark a new movement in how people shop online – one that moves away from search engines like Google and e-commerce platforms like Amazon toward conversational agents with curated recommendations, comparisons, and easy checkout experiences. 

Vibe-coding startup Anything nabs a $100M valuation after hitting $2M ARR in its first two weeks

The problem with most vibe-coding companies is that they don’t provide all the infrastructure that nontechnical users need to launch a functional product. Anything is attempting to solve this problem.

Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 4.5, its best AI model for coding

Anthropic says its new AI model is robust enough to build production-ready applications, rather than just prototypes.

Brave updates its AI-powered search with a detailed answers feature

The search company said that this new feature will co-exist next to its AI Answers feature, which was introduced last year to give summarized responses to search queries.

OpenAI rolls out safety routing system, parental controls on ChatGPT 

The new safety features come after numerous incidents of ChatGPT validating users’ delusional thinking instead of redirecting harmful conversations — including the death of a teenage boy by suicide.

From $100B OpenAI deals to $100K visa fees

From $100 billion OpenAI commitments to $100,000 visa fees, this week showed just how much the tech landscape is shifting. On the latest episode of Equity, Anthony Ha and Max Zeff unpack the AI infrastructure gold rush and tech’s talent shuffle. Listen to the full episode to hear about:   Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced… Continua a leggere From $100B OpenAI deals to $100K visa fees