Tuesday, April 15, 2025

OpenAI releases GPT-4.1

Monday, April 14, 2025

Welcome to TC PM! Today we learn that OpenAI has more models to add to its API — and will phase one out; we also have the latest on Meta's AI training plans in Europe and Katy Perry heads to space. Blast off!

TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto / Getty Images

More models: OpenAI released a new family of AI models today that are focused on coding. This new model family is called GPT-4.1, despite GPT-4.5 having already been released. These new models will be available through OpenAI's API, not ChatGPT.

We hardly knew ya: OpenAI announced plans to phase out GPT-4.5, its biggest AI model yet, from its API. The model just launched in late February and will be available until July 14. The company is recommending its just-announced GPT-4.1 model as a replacement.

A hack! Car rental service Hertz has begun notifying customers of a recent data breach. The stolen data includes personal information like names and addresses and customers' driver's license numbers. The breach relates to a cyberattack on one of Hertz's vendors between October and December 2024.

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Afternoon must-reads

Image Credits: Blue Origin CEO David Limp (@davill) on X

Ladies who launch: Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin successfully launched its New Shepard rocket this morning with the first all-women space crew since 1963. Celebrities, including Katy Perry and Gayle King, among others, were on board the ship meant to highlight women in astronautics.

Training time: Meta announced today that it will start training its AI models on public content across its platforms, including social media posts and comments, in the European Union. Meta just launched a limited version of its Meta AI in the country last month.

Google AI heads to class: Google Classroom released new AI features for teachers that help them generate quiz questions based off a text input. Teachers can tell the AI to modify their questions for a specific grade level or test a specific skill.

Finally: DeepMind, Google's AI research lab, announced a new AI model that is designed to decipher dolphin vocalizations to better understand how they communicate. The model is called DolphinGemma and was trained on data from the Wild Dolphin Project. Neat!

Humanoids for Hugging Face: AI developer platform Hugging Face acquired robotics company Pollen Robotics for an undisclosed sum. Hugging Face plans to sell the company's humanoid robot Reachy 2 and let developers suggest solutions for its code.

Around the web

Betting and bank accounts: Robinhood recently announced it was going to offer bank accounts and wealth-management services. The Verge sat down with co-founder and CEO Vlad Tenev about how the company has evolved from its stock trading roots.

Dystopian or genius? inTouch is an AI startup that promises to call your parents if you don't have time and will send you a report of what they said and how they were feeling. We need help with the loneliness epidemic but, um, I'm not sure this is it.