Friday, April 18, 2025

Welcome to TC PM! Today we dive into some new features at OpenAI that could be considered a bit creepy; we dig into the details of a robotics company that is exiting via a SPAC; and we learn that Bluesky might be getting a verification system of its own. Have a great weekend!

TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: SEBASTIEN BOZON/AFP / Getty Images

🤨 AI remembers: OpenAI quietly announced a new ChatGPT feature, "Memory with Search." This feature lets ChatGPT pull information from a user's past conversations, like their favorite food, to inform queries. This comes after OpenAI beefed up ChatGPT's long-in-the-tooth memory tools.

👀 So I creep: In other OpenAI news, some users have started to notice that ChatGPT occasionally refers to them by their first name. Some of the people reporting this feature don't think they've ever told the bot what to call them.

♻️ Climate controversy: Geoengineering, or trying to change the planet's atmosphere, is a controversial approach to climate change. One geoengineering startup, Make Sunsets, is drawing negative attention from Donald Trump's EPA for its operations.

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Afternoon must-reads

Image Credits: Eugene Mymrin / Getty Images

🤷 In this economy? Exiting through a special purpose acquisition company was the soup de jour of the 2021 exit market. Now, not so much. This week on Equity, the hosts dive into why Kodiak Robotics is pursuing a SPAC in 2025, what's up with the Figma IPO, and more.

🎮 All according to plan: Nintendo announced that it will open up preorders for its Switch 2 next week, after a slight delay due to President Trump's tariffs. Fans feared that tariffs would make the Switch 2 more expensive, but that is not the case. Fab!

😒 Government misinformation: Under Donald Trump's purview, the covid.gov website, a government-run website about the pandemic, now redirects to a site that touts the unproven theory that the virus was created in a laboratory in China.

✅ Let's verify that: Decentralized social media platform Bluesky may soon get a blue-check verification system that will look similar to X's checkmarks but will work very differently — Bluesky's system will rely on multiple organizations to distribute the checks.

Around the web

⛔️ You can't do that: A judge in Nevada has ruled that the controversial tower dump data-retrieval method, where law enforcement collects personal data from cell towers, is unconstitutional. But interestingly enough, the judge ruled that law enforcement involved in this specific case could keep the data. Love that!

😼 Let's try that again: Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield is planning to sue crypto exchange Coinbase for selling unregistered securities. Sound familiar? This is essentially the same suit the U.S. brought against the company. Coinbase is calling it a "copycat case."