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Influencers draw backlash for attending OpenAI’s first luxury trip
OpenAI’s first-ever influencer brand trip is sparking online backlash as tensions over the use of AI continue. Over the weekend, OpenAI took what appears to be a handful of influencers to a luxury retreat in upstate New York for what was called “Summer Club.” There, the creators were treated to farm-to-table dinners, wellness activities like beekeeping, and classes on how to better use OpenAI products. One creator posted about making a website, while another took a photo of a brochure that said “painting workshop” on it. The videos were aesthetic and lighthearted, but many of the comments were not. One influencer, for example, who posted about going on the trip on her TikTokand Instagramhad comments from people insinuating she sold her soul “for a nice hotel room,” orasking if she could do avideo reconciling her trip with AI data centers’ environment impact. Another influencerwho posted about the trip was askedif she was going to do a get-ready-with-me (the popular video format where influencers record their process of getting ready) about touring a data center. When TechCrunch reached out to a third influencer about her time on the trip, she appeared to have deleted the video she made about her time there, although she retained others that don’t explicitly reference that they were part of the OpenAI brand trip. It’s not surprising that OpenAI is enlisting influencers by offering luxury brand trips. In February, Vanity Fairreported that the company hired“celebrity whisperer” Charles Porch as its first VP of global creative partnerships. Porch was coming from Instagram, where he was VP of global partnerships. In announcing the hire, Porch said that his job was going to be talking to creative communities “to figure out how we build the best products to serve them,” and he planned to do a “listening tour” to learn more about the relationship people have with AI tools. It’s important to note that OpenAI is not the only AI lab that has worked with influencers. Anthropic reportedly hosted an influencer brand dinner for Claude, and back in February, Microsoft Copilot hosted an influencer brand trip to the Super Bowl, the tech newsletterSarah and Kate reported. None of those other AI trips seem to have struck as big of a nerve as this OpenAI brand trip. Oneinfluencer took to LinkedIn to writethat she thought people “would be interested in the behind-the-scenes tips and tricks” of using OpenAI technology, but didn’t realize how many people were anti-AI. “I didn’t for one second consider it would be controversial,” she wrote. TechCrunch spoke to a person who left a negative comment on a video posted by an influencer attending the OpenAI Summer Camp. The commenter pointed out that many Americans have a negative view of AI and that there needs to be a conversation about how to use the technology more responsibly. “These posh influencers events are, again, giving people ammunition to have negative opinions,” she told TechCrunch. “The world is on fire. It’s not a great time ot brag about your $5,000-a-night suite.” There is also more to the timing of the trip that struck people. OpenAI is set to strikea $500 billiondeal to build a data center in Ohio, during a time when the socio-ecological impact of AI data centers has taken center stage. The irony was not lost on some commenters that OpenAI held a brand retreat in a luxury resort nestled in nature. Other commenters also noted OpenAI’s $200 millioncontract with the Department of Defenseas a reason the brand trip evoked ire. TechCrunch has reached out to influencers for comment. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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DesignArena creators raise $7.9 million to bring taste to AI models
As co-founder Grace Li tells it, her company started a few weeks before graduation in 2025, with a handful of college friends trying to make their AI game engine work. The models could make functional games, but none of the games were fun — which raised the interesting question, how can you tell if a game will be fun? There was no substitute for human judgment, they decided, and soon they were brainstorming ways to get honest human feedback at scale. The result becameDesignArena, an AI tool now used by 5.3 million people around the world. As it turned out, there were lots of AI companies looking for scalable user feedback — and many of them were willing to pay for it. “It was the missing bottleneck for a lot of these models to make improvements in the design space,” Li says. “About a week later, we closed our first major deal with a frontier lab, and the rest is kind of history.” On Monday, the company behind DesignArena — dubbedIntelligence— announced a $7.9 million seed round led by Index Ventures with participation from Conviction (Sarah Guo and Mike Vernal), A*, Valkyrie, and others. For non-enterprise users, using DesignArena is a lot like using a sophisticated model router. There’s a Chat-GPT-style window for prompts, with separate dropdowns for websites, images, and a dozen other visual formats. Once you put in the request, format and style, you’ll be presented with a series of “A vs. B” choices until you’ve ranked the handful of outputs from best to worst. It’s a useful service, but the real value of the platform comes from the enterprise side, where participating models can treat it as a source of endless instant feedback for their media-generating models. The users tend to be indifferent to which models they’re ranking — as Li puts it, they just want the best output they can get — so their rankings can give critical input to what users really want. For frontier labs, that’s a service worth paying for, Li says, adding the site is currently generating $60 million in ARR, solidifying its position as a key source of human-led evaluation data for the AI industry. Crucially, users have to log in to get their output, so Intelligence can also track how those tastes change across different continents and over time. (Li notes that web dashboards in Asia tend to have a more maximalist design style.) These measures are an important complement to automated benchmarks, which can operate at a greater scale but are often subject to being gamed or otherwise manipulated, asthe Hugging Face breachdemonstrated in dramatic fashion last week. That’s not to say that crowdsourced human feedback will be an automatic winning market. Less than a year after launching,Yupp shuttered its doors earlier this year after raising $33M from a16z crypto’s Chris Dixon. It too nabbed some frontier models as customers and had, it said, over 1.3 million users, but still couldn’t build a sustainable long-term business. Even so, other startups based on human evaluation seem to be thriving. LM Arena, which takes a similar approach to text-based responses,raised $150 million in a Series A in January, just four months after formally launching its paid product.
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Tech Mahindra’s AI Chief Thinks India Is Building the Wrong AI
“The end goal is to actually produce something which only India has the ability to produce.” That, according to Malhotra, requires a very different mindset.
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A Marc Benioff-backed startup thinks AI can solve the AI deployment problem
It’s so hard for big businesses to get AI tools working reliably that whole new organizations offorward-deployed engineersor FDEs— specialists who drop into a company to get its AI systems up and running — are springing up to help them. “AI, paradoxically, increases the demand for professional services,” says Efrat Rapoport, a former Salesforce executive whose new company, June, emerged from stealth Monday morning. “The industry’s answer to AI implementation is, ‘let’s hire more and more and more people.” Rapoport and her three cofounders — Ohad Hen, Barak Goldstein, and Idan Tsitiat — have a different idea about how to bring AI into broader use. To pursue it, the company raised $20 million in pre-seed funding led by Marc Benioff’s Time Ventures, with additional backing from tech luminaries like Michael Dell, Aaron Levie and George Kurtz. The company declined to share its valuation. The four founders previously startedBonobo AI, a pre-transformer language model company that launched a voice-to-text service in 2017. Bonobo AI was snapped up two years later by Salesforce, and the team worked for several years on the tech giant’s AI initiatives before setting out on their own again after watching customers struggle to bring AI into their existing platforms. Their potential was clear enough to their investors, Rapoport says, that “we didn’t even have a deck for this raise.” While the so-called SaaSpocalypse has software firms fearing that AI might replace them, thus far no one is vibe-coding a CRM for a Fortune 500 company. Any AI model brought into a corporate setting still has to work with Salesforce, ServiceNow, DataBricks, Workday, or any of a dozen other data-management platforms. “Before AI can create value, someone has to deal with legacy systems,” Rapoport says. “You have fragmented data across these platforms. You have complex workflows. You have years of technical debt.” Building an agent template is the easy part, she says. The hard part is getting it to work with the mess underneath. “How does an agent know how to operate when you have 10 duplicate [database] fields that say the same thing, and different teams are using them?” June’s platform scans a company’s existing systems to understand its business processes, find bottlenecks, and then build more optimized, agent-powered processes to replace them, automatically notifying teams through the company’s comms channels. “We give you the full roadmap automatically of what needs to happen step by step for you to actually implement this agent successfully in an enterprise environment, which is often very complex,” Rapoport said. “We give you a step by step guide. ‘Remove these duplicates. Connect to this data source.’ And then you click on ‘build’ on each task, and June starts building it for you in the organization.” Paul Akinmade, chief strategy officer at CMG, a major U.S. mortgage lender, moved his company’s software engineering over to Claude Code quickly, but hit roadblocks trying to integrate it with Salesforce. That was a problem since he’d promised at Salesforce’s annual conference the year before that he’d return with 100 agents running, and it wasn’t looking like he’d hit that target.Akinmade says his team spent weeks hitting a wall — meeting with architects, talking to forward-deployed engineers, consulting everybody they could — without making progress. June changed that, he says, giving his team a clear view of where to deploy agents and letting them do so safely, even before the official kickoff call between the two companies Rapoport sees June as a tool that complements FDEs and consultants, but her customers may be drawn to it for the opposite reason: it lets them avoid FDEs altogether. When Akinmade was first considering piloting the tool at CMG, he says he told her: “If your product requires FDEs, I don’t want your product. I’ve already I’ve already done that and I’m getting annoyed by it. I don’t want a black box. I don’t want something only certain people can figure out. I want an easy-to-use tool.” Evidently, June cleared the bar.
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OpenAI’s Unreleased Astra Model Solves 10 Long-Standing Math & Computer Science Problems
The company also released research papers, Lean-certified proofs, and the model’s reasoning walkthroughs for each result.
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Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-Max To Become First Open-Weight Max Model
Qwen3.8-Max offers competitive results versus GPT-5.6 Sol and Anthropic’s Claude Fable on several public benchmarks.
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Physical AI's Biggest Problem? Teaching Machines How to Feel
Deccan AI, a physical AI startup that recently raised $25 million, believes the hardest data annotation isn't visual. It's touch.
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Identity May Become as Fundamental to AI Infrastructure as Compute and Cloud
As Indian enterprises embrace AI, Ping Identity views digital identity as essential for securely scaling AI and managing regulatory demands.
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PM Modi Lays Foundation Stone for South India's First ISM-Approved Semiconductor Facility in Visakhapatnam
The project will begin operations with an initial investment of over ₹460 crore in partnership with South Korean semiconductor company APACT Co.
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Why 96% of Govt AI Projects Stall—And It’s Not About Money
Industry experts argue that the problem is not a lack of interest or funding, but the complexities of operationalising AI across fragmented government systems
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Nurix AI Rebrands to NuPlay AI, Targets 4x Growth
The rebranding follows NuPlay AI’s acquisition of Verloop.io, which expanded its conversational AI capabilities.
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Sam Altman and AI’s decel debate
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently said that it may betime to “pace the rate of AI development”so that society can “harden around some of these new capability levels.” On the latest episode ofTechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I discussed how Altman’s comments were probably prompted by a recent hack in whichan OpenAI agent breached Hugging Face’s systems. Sean noted that while a hack performed by an AI agent is novel, the hack itself was not “some new advanced thing.” “It was more like Nixon’s people breaking into Watergate than some real stealthy cyber-op, because it didn’t need to be, and it wasn’t instructed to be,” Sean said. “Hopefully, this is a sign that these companies will take this forward and be more careful about that stuff.” Altman’s comments also gave me a chance to wonder about the usefulness of the whole accelerationist versus deceleration debate, because (yes, I’m about to quote myself) the framing “kind of suggests that there’s only one path” and “all we get to decide — inasmuch as we get to decide at all — is, do we speed up or do we slow down?” Keep reading for a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. Sean O’Kane:Maybe we’ve finally hit an inflection point here. I think a big driver of this has to be what we talked about last week, with one of OpenAI’s models breaking into Hugging Face’s data and apparently breaching a few other things around the internet, as well. [Altman’s] not calling for a pause, like we’ve seen some people in the tech industry try to do in the past. He was very careful with his words and saying, “Pace it.” And we’ll see how this holds. Any caution that we see some of these labs throw out there often gets reversed when the incentives push them forward to resume, full speed ahead. So I remain skeptical, big surprise. Kirsten Korosec:Now I will say this — [Altman] might have been careful with his words, but OpenAI and Anthropic did[support] a petitionthat does reflect what he did talk about. And I do agree with you, I think that a lot of this was very much triggered by Hugging Face. It probably spooked him and certainly a lot of people in the industry. The hard thing here is: How do you thread the needle or how does OpenAI thread the needle of continuing to generate revenue, raise money, or have a successful IPO, and quote unquote “pace development.” I don’t know if they can do that. I’ll be curious to see if they manage both. Anthony Ha:One of the things I’ve been wrestling with is also this question of: Is acceleration [vs.] deceleration the right framework to be thinking about this? Because it kind of suggests that there’s only one path and we’re all stuck on this path. All we get to decide — inasmuch as we get to decide at all — is, do we speed up or do we slow down? As opposed to — again, I’m going to really torture this metaphor — but do we build different guardrails? Do we choose different paths? I’m just very resistant to this framework. As opposed to saying, “Okay, if we’re not happy about what models are doing right now, what else can we do? Is a slowdown, a pause, a stoppage, the only option?” And I don’t think it is. One thing that I did want to emphasize again, because it’s been really interesting to see the level of alarm around this — this sense of, “What if we have these autonomous agents and models just running around hacking each other, trying to prevent hacks, it’s just all getting out of our control,” leading to all these broader debates about alignment thatRebecca Bellan did a great piece about. But it’s worth coming back to one of the points that we also wrote about at TechCrunch, that this specific hack — yes, it was caused by an OpenAI model, butit sounds like they just didn’t secure the testing site properly. In theory, this model should not have been able to get online. Now, of course, if you have a powerful misaligned AI, the risks of that human error go up dramatically. But it does start from just the fact that they didn’t secure things the way they should have. Sean:I think that’s right. I think your point is well taken in the sense of, we shouldn’t only think about this in some linear fashion and whether things are accelerating or decelerating. There’s a lot that could and should be said about just how responsible these companies are being. Lorenzo, one of our colleagues, also wrote a really good piece walking throughhow serious security researchers who pay attention to this stuff think that the hack really was. It really does seem like, on both sides of this hack, there were steps that probably should have been taken that would have prevented it. And one of the things that I found most interesting in that story was that some of the researchers were pointing out that what this model did was not some new advanced thing. It was really very human in the way that it thought about trying to break into trying — not to anthropomorphize, but the way that it thought about breaking into Hugging Face, and that it was also very loud and messy and wasn’t really trying to hide its tracks. It was more like Nixon’s people breaking into Watergate than some real stealthy cyber-op, because it didn’t need to be, and it wasn’t instructed to be. That should have been more easily preventable. And hopefully, this is a sign that these companies will take this forward and be more careful about that stuff. I will say one other thing on the accel vs decel [debate.] I don’t know if this is the motivation, but you mentioned the IPO, Kirsten. I think it’s smart of Altman to be able to push this advantage that they have now, which is that [OpenAI is] not going to [the] markets next month, or two months from now. He’s even floated the idea of going in 2027 and that they only filed their confidential filing so that they have the option ready when they’re ready. So if you believe all of that, he has the ability to talk this talk in a way that Anthropic can’t, because Anthropic’s already in conversation with a lot of the bankers and is headed towards a more near-term IPO and is therefore more restricted in what it can say and how it should be saying it and how the market is going to react to that.
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