April 2025

Snapchat abandons plans for a simplified version of its app

April 29, 2025
As part of its Q1 2025 earnings release, Snap said it’s scrapping plans for a simplified version of its app. The news comes seven months after Snapchat began testing a redesigned version of the app without the Snap Map or Stories tabs. The new version consolidated the app’s navigation bar around three icons: chat, camera, […]

Freepik releases an ‘open’ AI image generator trained on licensed data

April 29, 2025
Freepik, the online graphic design platform, unveiled a new “open” AI image model on Tuesday that the company says was trained exclusively on commercially licensed, “safe-for-work” images. The model, called F Lite, contains around 10 billion parameters — parameters being the internal components that make up the model. F Lite was developed in partnership with […]

Google Play sees 47% decline in apps since start of last year

April 29, 2025
Google Play’s app marketplace is losing apps. From the start of 2024 to present, the Android app marketplace went from hosting about 3.4 million apps worldwide to just around 1.8 million, according to a new analysis by app intelligence provider Appfigures. That’s a decline of about 47%, representing a significant purge of the apps that […]

OpenAI rolls back update that made ChatGPT ‘too sycophant-y’

April 29, 2025
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Tuesday said that the company is “rolling back” the latest update to the default AI model powering ChatGPT, GPT-4o, after complaints about strange behavior, in particular extreme sycophancy. “[W]e started rolling back the latest update to GPT-4o last night,” Altman wrote in a post on X. “[I]t’s now 100% rolled back for […]

Troubled startup CaaStle is now facing two new lawsuits and more allegations

April 29, 2025
CaaStle, the embattled fashion startup whose board of directors accused its founder, Christine Hunsicke, of financial misconduct, is starting to face lawsuits from a partner and a supplier over missed payments and more allegations of fraud. As first reported by Axios and by suits seen by TechCrunch, CaaStle is being sued by P180, a vehicle […]