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Microsoft built a simulated marketplace to test hundreds of AI agents, finding that businesses could manipulate agents into buying their products and more (Russell Brandom/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/05/microsoft-built-a-synthet…

Microsoft built a fake marketplace to test AI agents — they failed in surprising ways | TechCrunch
The research raises new questions about how well AI agents will perform when working unsupervised — and how quickly AI companies can make good on promises of an agentic future.

OpenAI is merging its Model Behavior team with its Post Training group to bring the work of the Model Behavior team closer to core model development (Maxwell Zeff/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/05/openai-reorganizes-research-team-be…

OpenAI reorganizes research team behind ChatGPT's personality | TechCrunch
OpenAI is shuffling the team that shapes its AI models' behavior, and its leader is moving on to another project within the company.

OpenAI launches AgentKit, a toolkit for building and deploying AI agents, including Agent Builder, which Sam Altman described as like Canva for building agents (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/06/openai-launche…

OpenAI launches AgentKit to help developers build and ship AI agents  | TechCrunch
“AgentKit is a complete set of building blocks available in the open AI platform designed to help you take agents from prototype to production, it is everything you need to build, deploy and optimize agent workflows with way less friction,” Sam Altman said Monday at OpenAI's Dev Day.  

Meta launches Vibes, its short-form video feed of AI-generated videos, in Europe through the Meta AI app, following its US debut six weeks earlier (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/06/meta-brings-its-short-form-video-feed-of…

Meta brings its short-form video feed of AI slop to Europe | TechCrunch
Meta says that since the launch of Vibes, media generation in the Meta AI app has jumped more than tenfold.

Mastodon plans to add Bluesky-like starter packs to suggest accounts to follow for new users, but will allow accounts to opt out of being included in Packs (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/07/mastodon-is-taki…

Mastodon is taking cues from Bluesky with plans for its own starter 'Packs' | TechCrunch
Mastodon is planning to make it easier for newcomers to discover curated collections of users to follow by launching a new starter packs feature.

Roblox launches text-to-speech and speech-to-text APIs, and AI tools, including letting creators generate fully functional 3D objects from prompts, and more (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/05/robl

Roblox announces short-form video feed for gameplay clips, new AI tools for creators, and more | TechCrunch
Users can scroll through a feed of gameplay moments shared by the Roblox community and react to the clips using emojis, and jump into an experience right from a video.

Wabi, a "YouTube for apps" launched by Replika founder Eugenia Kuyda to let users create and share mini apps without coding, raised a $20M pre-seed (TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/05/replika-founder-raises-20m-pre-seed…

Replika founder raises $20M pre-seed for Wabi, the ‘YouTube of apps’  | TechCrunch
Wabi, a startup from the founder of Replika, has just raised a $20 million pre-seed round. Wabi is like "YouTube for apps" -- a social platform where anyone can use prompts to instantly create mini apps and share them with friends.

Sam Altman says ChatGPT has reached 800M weekly active users, 4M developers "have built with OpenAI", and OpenAI processes over 6B tokens per minute on its API (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/06/sam-altman-says-…

Sam Altman says ChatGPT has hit 800M weekly active users  | TechCrunch
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Monday at Dev Day that ChatGPT has reached 800 million weekly active users, marking an increase of adoption among consumers, developers, enterprises, and governments.  

Inception, which is building diffusion-based AI models for code and text, raised a $50M seed led by Menlo and releases an update to its Mercury coding model (Russell Brandom/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/06/inception-rai…

Inception raises $50 million to build diffusion models for code and text | TechCrunch
Diffusion models already power AI image generators, but Inception thinks they can be even more powerful applied in software development.

Polars, the Amsterdam-based startup behind the popular open-source library for data manipulation of the same name, raised a €18M Series A led by Accel (Anna Heim/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/29/the-startup-behind-open-source-t…

The startup behind open source tool Polars raises $21M from Accel | TechCrunch
Polars, the Amsterdam-based company behind the popular open source project by the same name, has raised an €18 million Series A led by Accel.