Friday, May 30, 2025

NYT inks AI deal with Amazon

Thursday, May 29, 2025

Welcome to TC PM! Today we have the details on an AI licensing deal between the New York Times and Amazon; we learn of a new problem brewing for Tesla; and we dig into Hugging Face's two new humanoid robots.

TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: mbbirdy / Getty Images

🤝 If you can't beat 'em: Nearly two years after suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, The New York Times is licensing its content to train AI. The legacy newspaper inked a deal with Amazon to license its materials to train the tech giant's AI models.

🤔 Well, well, well: It turns out working closely with the government does not mean it will work well for your business interests. As Elon Musk departs DOGE, Tesla is using Musk's X platform to lobby Senate Republicans against ending energy tax credits that would affect Tesla Energy.

📆 Branding is my passion: Apple is considering changing how it names its operating systems. The company is reportedly switching to name its systems by the year they were released, as opposed to just numerical order, which, if true, seems like a much easier way to approach it.

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Afternoon must-reads

Image Credits: Hugging Face (screenshot)

🤗 Hugging humanoids: Hugging Face unveiled two new humanoid robots today — one full-size humanoid, HopeJR, and one desktop robot, Reachy Mini. These robots were developed with Pollen Robotics, which Hugging Face acquired in April.

🍀 Luckey's lucky day: Meta and Palmer Luckey's Anduril are teaming up to build extended reality (XR) devices for the U.S. military. These devices will be based off of tech from Meta's AR/VR research center using Meta's Llama AI model and tapping into Anduril's Lattice software.

🧠 DeepSeek distilled: Chinese AI lab DeepSeek released a "distilled" version of its new R1 "reasoning" model, DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B, which can run on just one GPU. It's performing comparably to other models of the same size.

🐷 The fun is over for Funnull: The U.S. government imposed sanctions on Funnull, a company that's accused of providing cybercriminals with the infrastructure they need to run "pig butchering" crypto scams. The company is linked to scams that cost Americans $200 million in losses.

⛏️ Bootstrapping to success: Cybersecurity company Thinkst has reached $20 million in ARR with fewer than 50 employees and without raising a dime in venture capital. The company still has 60% of its first-year customers using its products after more than a decade in business. Impressive stuff!

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Around the web

✍️ Lame layoffs: Business Insider laid off 21% of its workforce today citing "traffic sensitivity." The company also said that it's leaning into AI after the cuts. I'm sure Business Insider will reverse traffic declines with well-hallucinated AI content slop.

🪴 Will space save my plants? While folks like Elon Musk tout a future of humans living on Mars, the concept of humans actually living in space is pretty far off. Aurelia Institute is a space design firm building products for that future. It's now teaming up with Heatherwick Studio to design space gardens.

Before you go

Image Credits: TechCrunch

👑 A sad day for short kings: Dating app Tinder is testing a new feature that lets paying users add their height preferences to their profiles. This won't function as a "hard filter" but rather just indicate a preference. It's tough to be a short king right now.