Latest AI News
AIM Chess League Wants to Bring India’s IT Minds on the Same Board
The AIM Chess League runs from July to October, beginning with an online league, followed by offline qualifiers in September, and ending with a final at Cypher 2026.
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Slack Rolls Out 30 Features to Make Slackbot Central to Enterprise Work
Slackbot now combines AI reasoning with access to organisational data, including channels, history, and workflows.
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Microsoft Appoints Aparajita Puri as MD for India & South Asia
Puri has joined Microsoft after over a decade at McKinsey & Company, where she served as a partner.
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Google More Than Doubles AI Pro Storage to 5TB, Deepens Gemini Integration
The extra storage will be available for Google Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos, as the monthly subscription price remains approximately ₹1,950 in India.
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Google AI Pro Plan Upgraded With 5TB Cloud Storage Across Drive, Photos Apps at No Additional Cost
Google on Thursday announced that it is upgrading the benefits of its Google AI Pro subscription plan. Subscribers enrolled in the plan will now enjoy higher bundled cloud storage at no additional cost, the company said. The update is now rolling out to users and significantly enhances the value of the AI-focused subscription, which already includes access to Google's latest artificial intelligence (AI) tools along with cloud storage benefits across its ecosystem.
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Meghalaya Taps Elon Musk-Owned Starlink To Bridge Connectivity Gaps
Meghalaya signed an LoI with Starlink to expand satellite internet access across remote regions, aiming to boost digital inclusion and economic growth.
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Beyond Cost Centre, Hyderabad is Becoming a Fintech GCC Engineering Hub
Companies including InvoiceCloud are tapping Hyderabad for domain-led engineering and decision science.
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Meet the 20-Year-Old IIT Madras Student Building Datasets for AGI Era
Dev Mandal’s ‘computer-use-large’ dataset has already crossed 1 lakh downloads on Hugging Face.
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Anthropic took down thousands of GitHub repos trying to yank its leaked source code — a move the company says was an accident
Anthropic accidentally caused thousands of code repositories on GitHub to be taken down while trying to pull copies of its most popular product’s source code off the internet. On Tuesday, a software engineer discovered that Anthropic had, seemingly by accident,included access to the source codefor the category-leading Claude Code command line application in a recent release. AI enthusiasts pored over the leaked code for clues about how Anthropic harnesses the LLM that underlies the application, sharing it on GitHub. Anthropic issued a takedown notice under U.S. digital copyright law asking GitHub to take down repositories containing the offending code. According to GitHub’srecords, the notice was executed against some 8,100 repositories — including legitimate forks of Anthropic’s own publicly released Claude Code repository, according toiratesocial mediausers whose code got blocked. Anthropic’s head of Claude Code, Boris Cherny,saidthe move was accidental and retracted the bulk of the takedown notices, limiting it to one repository and 96 forks with the accidentally released source code. “The repo named in the notice was part of a fork network connected to our own public Claude Code repo, so the takedown reached more repositories than intended,” an Anthropic spokesperson told TechCrunch. “We retracted the notice for everything except the one repo we named, and GitHub has restored access to the affected forks.” The botched clean-up here is another black eye for the company as it reportedly plans an IPO, a task which typically demands attention to execution and compliance. Leaking your source code as a public company? You better believe there’s a shareholder lawsuit coming.
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Meta’s natural gas binge could power South Dakota
Data centers have gotten so large that their power demands now rival entire U.S. states. Take Meta’s Hyperion AI data center, for example. When completed, the new AI data center will draw as much electricity as South Dakota. Last week, Meta announced it would fundseven natural gas power plants— on top of the three it had already committed to building — to support the $27 billion data center. When combined, the 10 power plants in Louisiana will generate around 7.5 gigawatts of electricity,slightly morethan the capacity of the entire Mount Rushmore State. Like many tech companies, Meta has touted its climate and environmental bona fides over the years. It regularly publishes sustainability reports, and it frequently crows about itsrenewable energy purchases. Iteffectively bought a nuclear power plantfor 20 years. Meta’s Hyperion data center site in Louisiana will test the company’s commitments. Natural gas has been hailed as a “bridge fuel” — build a few natural gas power plants now while renewables, batteries, and nuclear get their legs under them. That’s almost certainly how Meta is justifying the move internally. But people have been making the bridge fuel argument for decades, and it’s wearing a little thin. Renewables and batteries have plummeted in price while prices for gas turbineshave skyrocketed. Meta has been aleading purchaserof solar, batteries, and nuclear in recent years, which makes the decision to go big on natural gas all the more perplexing. TechCrunch reached out to Meta. The company did not reply to multiple requests for comment. The massive turbines in Louisiana will dump 12.4 million metric tons of CO2into the atmosphere every year, according to TechCrunch’s calculations, which is based on data from the Department of Energy. That is 50% more than Meta’s entire carbon footprint in 2024, the most recent year such numbers are available. That figure is an underestimate of the climate impact, too, since it doesn’t include leaks from the natural gas supply chain. Methane, the main component of natural gas, warms the planet 84 times more than carbon dioxide. Even leakage rates of 0.2% along the supply chain can make natural gas’ climate impactworse than coal. In the U.S., natural gas production and pipelines leak methane at a rate that’scloser to 3%. That’s hardly clean power. The company’s latest sustainability report makes no mention of methane leaks. It doesn’t mention methane or natural gas at all. And yet the fuel is poised to become one of the largest contributors to Meta’s carbon footprint in the coming years. The company may well stick to its climate pledge and find a way to offset those emissions through carbon removal credits. But now it will need a lot more of them, along with an honest accounting of exactly how much methane will leak into the atmosphere in service of feeding its new power plants.
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Wipro Kicks Off New FY With AI Unit Launch, Leadership Rejig
Company unveils AI-native business, appoints Nagendra Bandaru to lead unit, alongside leadership and structure changes.
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Less than a month: StrictlyVC San Francisco brings leaders from TDK Ventures, Replit, and more together
All good things come to those who wait. Thefirst StrictlyVC of the yearis headed to San Francisco in less than a month, on April 30, at the Sentro Filipino Cultural Center. And you won’t want to miss out on another lineup of stellar speakers to punctuate the night’s networking and mingling. AI innovators and founders in search of funding will be particularly well-served by the event’s discussions. You can get a ticket right now, but for those who haven’t been to a StrictlyVC event in the past and already clicked that link, let’s dive into what’s particularly exciting about this one … TDK VenturespresidentNicolas Sauvagewill kick things off after you get your requisite beverages and networking in, as he makes the case for corporate VCs in a conversation with TechCrunch editor-in-chief Connie Loizos. Sauvage, who leads TDK Ventures’ $500 million effort to invest in early-stage startups, will explain what makes corporate VCs operate differently and what founders should know about what catches his eye in an investment. And founders on the fence should take note: Sauvage has steered TDK into backing 45 startups and three unicorns — Groq, Ascend Elements, and Silicon Box — during his tenure. TDK will also be hosting and sponsoring this StrictlyVC event, soattendees will get ample opportunityto learn from and get some potential face time with their team. Then we’ll move to a conversation withCampbell Brown, former CNN host and head of news at Meta who has since made the pivot toward the startup scene as she looks to make AI platforms more trustworthy while more and more people turn to them for advice and information. She’s now theco-founder and CEO of Forum AI, and in the thick of the conversation over how to vet, verify, and sustain the veracity of information provided by LLMs. And those who are similarly a part of the AI revolution will be excited to hear thatAmjad Masad, co-founder and CEO ofReplit, is also taking to the stage to share his firsthand experience helping lead a revolution in how software is constructed. The rise of vibe coding has changed the ways many have worked, especially in the Bay Area, and that’s also brought in some potent competitors like Anthropic and OpenAI. Anyone looking for a peek into the future of programming is going to need to join us and stick around for Masad’s talk. As if that all wasn’t exciting enough, we still have one more speaker to announce, so you’ll be getting even more insights and expertise leading into the concluding round of networking and connection-making that defines the real proving point of StrictlyVC. Some of the greatest minds and most well-connected members of the startup community join us for these events, and you can be a part of it by registering, soget your ticket today!
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