Duolingo is introducing 148 new language courses that were created with generative AI, the company announced on Wednesday. The launch comes as Duolingo has been facing backlash this week after sharing that it was going to replace contractors with AI and become an 'AI-first' company. 'Developing our first 100 courses took about 12 years, and now, in about a year, we're able to create and launch nearly 150 new courses,' said Duolingo co-founder and CEO Luis von Ahn in a press release. 'This is a great example of how generative AI can directly benefit our learners. This launch reflects the incredible impact of our AI and automation investments, which have allowed us to scale at unprecedented speed and quality.' On Monday, von Ahn told staff in an email that the company was shifting to AI and that it would 'gradually stop using contractors to do work that AI can handle.' He also wrote that 'headcount will only be given if a team cannot automate more of their work.' 'Al isn't just a productivity boost,' he wrote. 'It helps us get closer to our mission. To teach well, we need to create a massive amount of content, and doing that manually doesn't scale. One of the best decisions we made recently was replacing a slow, manual content creation process with one powered by AI. Without Al, it would take us decades to scale our content to more learners. We owe it to our learners to get them this content ASAP.'...

The crush of traffic going into training and running AI has quickly turned into a major cost and resource headache for organizations. Today, Cast AI, a startup building tools to ease and optimize workloads for AI and other tasks with automation, is raising a major round of funding on the back of strong growth and partnerships with major players in the space. The company has raised a $108 million Series C that it will be using for more R&D and to expand its business in core markets like the U.S. and elsewhere. Sources familiar with the deal told TechCrunch that the round has the company at 'near unicorn' valuation, post-money ' close to $900 million from what I understand. 'It's all about GPU, compute, and electricity,' said Yuri Frayman, Cast's CEO and co-founder. 'Our play is to ensure that we create efficiency, to be able to promote more workloads across GPUs. That is what we are about.' For context, when Cast last raised capital, $35 million in November 2023, it was valued at $300 million post-money, per PitchBook. Prior to this latest round, the startup had raised just over $86 million....

Founded in 2006 as TG-Technics by Tom Vermonden, TG Group has grown from a solo maintenance venture into a global supplier of packaging machines and feeder lines. The firm's international strategy has been bolstered by recent bolt-on acquisitions, including Entrec and Frematt in 2022, and now operates from facilities in Verrebroek and Hoogstraten. With more than 95% of its revenue derived from exports, TG Group is well-positioned for global expansion. Waterland's investment will support the company's ambitions to scale production capacity, integrate new technologies, and pursue further acquisitions. Meet and learn more from Waterland by joining the Swiss Private Equity Conference in Zurich. Subscribe to our Newsletter to increase your edge. Don't worry about the news anymore, through our newsletter you'll receive weekly access to what is happening. Join 120,000 other PE professionals today....

Instagram Threads, Meta's X competitor, has now grown to over 350 million monthly active users, CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed during the company's Q1 2025 earnings call on Wednesday. That's an increase of 30 million users since the prior quarter, where Meta reported that Threads had 320 million users. The new figure represents increased growth, as Threads added 30 million in the first quarter of this year, compared with 20 million in Q4 2024. It's also worth noting that in a single quarter, Threads added nearly the same number of users to its network as one of its newer competitors, Bluesky. The latter, a decentralized social app, today has roughly 35 million users. While Threads is still small in comparison to Meta's other social apps ' Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp ' its growth is helping to cement its place in the microblogging app ecosystem. In total, Meta says that more than 3.4 billion people now use at least one of Meta's apps daily. Sarah has worked as a reporter for TechCrunch since August 2011. She joined the company after having previously spent over three years at ReadWriteWeb. Prior to her work as a reporter, Sarah worked in I.T. across a number of industries, including banking, retail and software....