Recent AI news and official updates

TechCrunch AI published: The Snapchat maker is spinning off yet another internal unit. Dotmo will be composed of current Snap staff who are leaving the social media company to focus on AI video development.

TechCrunch AI published: OpenAI is bulking up before its IPO, landing Transformer co-inventor Noam Shazeer from Google DeepMind and former Trump AI policy official Dean Ball in the same week.

TechCrunch AI published: About 47% of singles look negatively at the use of AI in dating -- but many dating app users are open to AI helping with profile punch-ups and conversation starters.

TechCrunch AI published: AWS is in talks to sell its chips to other data centers. CEO Andy Jassy has said this represents a $50 billion opportunity for the company.

TechCrunch AI published: FERC told grid operators to give data centers a fast lane for interconnections, but it failed to address electricity supply shortages.

TechCrunch AI published: Here's what you need to do to get those pesky "write with Gemini" pop-ups to go away.

TechCrunch AI published: After spending a year and a half focusing on his own journey — from fitness and nutrition to meditation, sobriety, relationships, and personal growth — Brown wants to help others do the same.

TechCrunch AI published: The startup trains embodied AI and world models using Medal’s dataset of 2 billion videos per year from 10 million monthly active users.

TechCrunch AI published: Guardrails positions itself as a populist political movement that runs on small donations from people in the trenches of the AI boom.

TechCrunch AI published: Here's what you need to do to get those pesky "write with Gemini" pop-ups to go away.

Simon Willison's AI Notes published: Chinese AI lab Z.ai released GLM-5.2 to their coding plan subscribers on June 13th, and then yesterday (June 16th) released the full open weights under an MIT license. Similar in size to their previous GLM-5 and GLM-5.1 releases this is a 753B parameter, 1.51TB monster - with 40 active parameters (Mixture of Experts). GLM-5.2 is a text input only model - Z.ai have a separate vision family most recently represented by GLM-5V-Turbo , but that one isn't open weights. GLM-5.2 has a 1 million token context window, up from GLM-5.1's 200,000. The buzz around this model is strong. Artificial Analysis, who run one of the most widely respected independent benchmarks: GLM-5.2 is the new leading open weights model on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index . GLM-5.2 is the leading open weights model on the Intelligence Index v4.1. At 51, it leads MiniMax-M3 (44), DeepSeek V4 Pro (max, 44) and Kimi K2.6 (43) They did however find it to be quite token-hungry: GLM-5.2 uses more output tokens per task than other leading open weights models: the model uses 43k output tokens per Intelligence Index task, up from GLM-5.1 (26k) and above MiniMax-M3 (24k), Kimi K2.6 (35k) and DeepSeek V4 Pro (max, 37k) The model is also now ranked 2nd on the Code Arena WebDev leaderboard , behind only Claude Fable 5. That leaderboard measures "front-end web development tasks, including agentic coding workflows". I'm impressed to see it rank so highly given the lack of image input, which I had incorrectly assumed was a key part of building a truly great frontend coding model. I've been trying it out via OpenRouter , which has it from 9 different providers, almost all of which are charging $1.40/million for input and $4.40/million for output. For comparison, GPT-5.5 is $5/$30 and Claude Opus 4.5-4.8 is $5/$25. Excellent pelican, disappointing opossum GLM-5.1 gave me one of my favorite pelicans and my all time favorite opossum (for the prompt "Generate an SVG of a NORTH VIRGINIA OPOSSUM ON AN E-SCOOTER".) Interestingly, in both of those cases the model chose to return SVG wrapped in an HTML document that added additional animations using CSS. Let's try GLM-5.2. For "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle" I got this : It's a self-contained fully animated SVG, and the animations aren't broken! Often I'll see eyes falling off or wheels rotating independently of the bicycle but here everything works great. It's a very nice vector illustration of a pelican too. Very impressive. Sadly, the NORTH VIRGINIA OPOSSUM ON AN E-SCOOTER did not come out nearly as well : This is such a step down from GLM-5.1! As a reminder, that possum looked like this: 5.2 didn't even try to animate it. Tags: ai , generative-ai , llms , pelican-riding-a-bicycle , llm-release , openrouter , ai-in-china , glm

TechCrunch AI published: Tokenmaxxing was the hottest trend in Silicon Valley earlier this year, with CEOs encouraging employees to push AI usage as far as it would go. Then the bill came due. Uber reportedly blew through its annual AI budget in a few months, some companies cut Claude licenses for parts of their org, and Meta killed its internal leaderboard. This tension between […]

TechCrunch AI published: French President Macron and Indian PM Modi raised alarms at the G7 summit that the U.S. could cut off access to American AI overnight — a fear the Anthropic blackout just made real.

TechCrunch AI published: Anthropic has joined the Frontier coalition, which received another $915M in pledges to fund carbon removal projects.

TechCrunch AI published: Tokenmaxxing was the hottest trend in Silicon Valley earlier this year, with CEOs encouraging employees to push AI usage as far as it would go. Then the bill came due. Uber reportedly blew through its annual AI budget in a few months, some companies cut Claude licenses for parts of their org, and Meta killed its internal leaderboard. This tension between […]

TechCrunch AI published: World models are the next big thing in AI beyond LLMs and, with this round, Odyssey has cemented itself as one of the startups to watch.

Simon Willison's AI Notes published: What happened in 2025 was this: the economics of code production were turned upside down . Instead of being very hard, time-consuming, and expensive to generate code, it became effectively free and instant. Lines of code went from being treasured, reused, cared for and carefully curated, to being disposable and regenerable, practically overnight. — Charity Majors , AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less Tags: ai , charity-majors , generative-ai , llms , ai-assisted-programming

TechCrunch AI published: Although Wall Street loves AI, every day Americans are significantly less optimistic about the industry, a new report from Pew Research shows.

TechCrunch AI published: Google is betting generative AI can breathe new life into the smart speaker. The company's new $99.99 Google Home Speaker replaces the rigid commands of the Google Assistant era with more conversational Gemini interactions.

Google AI Blog published: Research in “Nature” shows our conversational AI system matches primary care physicians in complex disease management.