Launched in May, Cal AI has generated over 5 million downloads in eight months, Yadegari says. Better still, he tells TechCrunch that the customer retention rate is over 30% and that the app generated over $2 million in revenue last month. Although TechCrunch couldn't validate his download and revenue claims, Cal AI does have a 4.8-star rating on the Apple App Store, with 66,000 reviews, and over 1 million downloads on Google Play with a 4.8-star rating on nearly 75,000 reviews. It's not a unique idea. For instance, the big dog in calorie counting, MyFitnessPal, has its Meal Scan feature. Then there are apps like SnapCalorie, which was released in 2023 and created by the founder of Google Lens. Cal AI's advantage, perhaps, is that it was built wholly in the age of large image models. It uses models from Anthropic and OpenAI and RAG to improve accuracy and is trained on open source food calorie and image databases from sites like GitHub. Yadegari built his first business in the ninth grade and sold it for $100,000 to another game company, FreezeNova, when he was 16, he tells TechCrunch. 'After quarantine, schools gave out Chromebooks to all of their students, and unsurprisingly, kids tried to abuse this by playing games in school,' he said....

If you've invested in a new Samsung Galaxy S25 phone, then you get access to the latest software features from Samsung, courtesy of One UI 7. This is Samsung's take on Android 15, which will slowly be making its way to older Galaxy handsets over the coming months, though there's no exact time frame. One UI 7 brings with it a new lick of digital paint and a range of small improvements. But two new features stand out: Now Bar and Now Brief. Built with a sprinkling of artificial intelligence (of course), these are the new features you'll want to check out first if you want to make the most of your Galaxy S25. The Now Bar is Samsung's answer to Live Activities on the iPhone: Those panels that pop up and expand onscreen when there's real-time information you need to know about. Think sports scores, or a rapidly approaching Uber, or a timer for a recording you're making'anything where a persistent notification is useful. Android has long supported persistent notifications that stick at the top of the screen, but the Now Bar makes them more prominent, specifically on the lock screen. Even if your Galaxy S25 is locked, you can keep up with important updates from critical apps: Maybe navigation instructions in Google Maps, for example....

The last installment of our RAG series compares RAG vs. fine tuning alternatives. The engineering edition looks at OpenAI's new agentic APIs. research section dives into Microsoft's Phi-4 new models. In our opinion essay we will debate another controversial topic. Small foundation models is one of the most fascinating trends in generative AI. Seeing how relatively small models can match the capabilities of mega models is truly amazing. Last week we had two remarkable releases in this area: Command A and Gemma 3. Command A, developed by Cohere, is engineered to match or surpass the performance of leading models like GPT-4o and DeepSeek-V3 across various enterprise tasks. Notably, it achieves this efficiency while operating on just two GPUs, a stark contrast to other models that may require up to 32 GPUs. This reduction in hardware dependency translates to faster processing speeds'Command A processes information at a rate of 156 tokens per second, outpacing GPT-4o by 1.75 times and DeepSeek-V3 by 2.4 times. Such advancements position Command A as a cost-effective solution for businesses seeking robust AI capabilities without incurring substantial infrastructure expenses....

No company has capitalized on the AI revolution more dramatically than Nvidia. Its revenue, profitability, and cash reserves have skyrocketed since the introduction of ChatGPT over two years ago ' and the many competitive generative AI services that have launched since. And its stock price soared. The chip giant ramped up its venture capital activity in 2024, participating in 49 funding rounds for AI companies, a sharp increase from 34 in 2023, according to PitchBook data. It's a dramatic surge in investment compared to the previous four years combined, during which Nvidia funded only 38 AI deals. Note that these investments exclude those made by its formal corporate VC fund, NVentures, which also significantly ramped up its investing in the last two years. (PitchBook says NVentures engaged in 24 deals in 2024, compared to just 2 in 2022.) Below is a list of startups that raised rounds exceeding $100 million where Nvidia is a named participant since 2023, including new ones it has backed so far in 2025, organized from the highest amount to lowest raised in the round....