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Today — 5 April 2025Tech News

Meta releases two Llama 4 AI models

By: Wes Davis
5 April 2025 at 16:05

Meta has announced Llama 4, its newest collection of AI models that now power the Meta AI assistant on the web and in WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram. The two new models, also available to download from Meta or Hugging Face, are Llama 4 Scout — a small model capable of “fitting in a single Nvidia H100 GPU” — and Llama 4 Maverick, which is more akin to GPT-4o and Gemini 2.0 Flash. Meta says it’s still in the process of training Llama 4 Behemoth, which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says is “the highest performing base model in the world.”

According to Meta, Llama 4 Scout has a 10-million-token context window — the working memory of an AI model — and beats Google’s Gemma 3 and Gemini 2.0 Flash-Lite models, as well as the open-source Mistral 3.1, “across a broad range of widely reported benchmarks,” while still “fitting in a single Nvidia H100 GPU.” Meta makes similar claims about its larger Maverick model’s performance versus OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash, and says its results are comparable to DeepSeek-V3 in coding and reasoning tasks using “less than half the active parameters.”

Visual comparison of model specs.

Meanwhile, Llama 4 Behemoth has 288 billion active parameters with 2 trillion parameters in total. While it hasn’t been released yet, Meta says Behemoth can outperform its competitors (in this case GPT-4.5 and Claude Sonnet 3.7) “on several STEM benchmarks.”

For Llama 4, Meta says it switched to a “mixture of experts” (MoE) architecture, an approach that conserves resources by using only the parts of a model that are needed for a given task. The company plans to discuss future plans for AI models and products at its LlamaCon conference, which is taking place on April 29th.

As with its past models, Meta calls the Llama 4 collection “open-source,” although Llama has been criticized for its license restrictions. For instance, the Llama 4 license requires commercial entities with more than 700 million monthly active users to request permission from Meta before using its models, which the Open Source Initiative wrote in 2023 takes it “out of the category of ‘Open Source.’”

DOGE reportedly planning a hackathon to build ‘mega API’ for IRS data

5 April 2025 at 13:14
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) plans to host a hackathon next week focused on the creation of a “mega API” that will provide access to taxpayer data, according to Wired. Wired says the hackathon is being organized by two DOGE staffers at the Internal Revenue Service — Gavin Kliger and Sam Corcos, who’s […]

Meta releases Llama 4, a new crop of flagship AI models

5 April 2025 at 13:01
Meta has released a new collection of AI models, Llama 4, in its Llama family — on a Saturday, no less. There are four new models in total: Llama 4 Scout, Llama 4 Maverick, and Llama 4 Behemoth. All were trained on “large amounts of unlabeled text, image, and video data” to give them “broad […]

More than 1,200 rallies worldwide protest Trump and Musk

By: Wes Davis
5 April 2025 at 12:41
“Hands Off” protesters in Manhattan.

People are gathering in cities all over the United States and globally to protest an “illegal, billionaire power grab” by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk. They’re being put on by over 150 different organizations, including civil rights groups, labor unions, and LGBTQ+ advocates, and span more than 1,200 locations.

Last weekend, “Tesla Takedown” protests targeted Tesla showrooms around the country to show disapproval for Musk, its CEO, who has spearheaded an effort to carry out mass federal workforce layoffs and hollow out government agencies. As Tesla’s sales have plummeted this quarter, Musk has threatened to “go after” the company’s critics, while the FBI has created a task force to investigate individual acts of vandalism and other actions aimed at the company.

The scope of these protests is much broader, targeting both Trump and Musk, who the Hands Off website accuses (accurately) of “shuttering Social Security offices, firing essential workers, eliminating consumer protections, and gutting Medicaid.” The Verge’s Mia Sato is in Manhattan’s Bryant Park in New York City, where she took the above video. She told me it wasn’t clear how many people are there, but that it’s “wall to wall everywhere” despite the fact that it’s “raining here and really nasty.”

Hands off rally in Washington, DC today

Lauren Feiner (@laurenfeiner.bsky.social) 2025-04-05T19:58:28.578Z

My colleague Lauren Feiner, who attended the protest in Washington, DC, said the protest there “is very big, thousands here around the Washington monument.” She described it as “very peaceful and orderly,” with attendees listening quietly to the speakers, occasionally chanting in response.

Jessica Toman, who went to the protest in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, texted the above image to me. A person posting images of the same protest on Bluesky guessed that protesters numbered in the thousands.

It looks like a similar story in Boston, where “thousands” are seen in this video from today:

WOW: Thousands are currently protesting in Boston. This is just one of more than 1200 'Hands Off' protests underway today across the nation as people rise up against the Trump-Musk regime. (via Rob Way)

MeidasTouch (@meidastouch.com) 2025-04-05T16:06:41.143Z

Fox 9 Minneapolis-St. Paul posted aerial footage of a massive crowd gathered at the State Capitol building in St. Paul, Minnesota:

Demonstrators gathered in massive numbers in Daley Plaza in Chicago, Illinois, too, where a CBS Chicago livestream showed what looked like many thousands of people streaming from one side of the street to another for many blocks while this story was being written. Protests are also taking place overseas, in cities like Berlin, Germany and London, England.

It’s not just major cities. Hundreds appear to have shown up to protest in cities like St. Augustine, Florida, which the US Census Bureau estimates has less than 16,000 people, and Riverhead, New York, where only about 36,000 people live. Cars honked in apparent support of a protest in Manhattan, Kansas (under 54,000 residents), according to the Bluesky user who posted this video:

4/5/25 Manhattan, KS-a college town & home of NBAF, in Sen Marshall’s district, 5 min after it was to begin & they’re still coming!😁✊🏻💜 Proud of my Blue Dot in a red state! #manhattankansas #handsoff

M (@snflwr6684.bsky.social) 2025-04-05T16:43:22.728Z

A similar scene plays out in this video, apparently taken in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, a town of fewer than 4,000 people, today:

Here’s a gallery with some more images taken by Sato, Toman, and The Verge’s Chris Welch:

Report: Samsung launching One UI 8, based on Android 16, as soon as July with new foldables

5 April 2025 at 12:35

Samsung’s Android 15 update, One UI 7, has been heavily delayed, with the stable rollout only due to start next week – a whopping six months after Google first finalized Android 15. Things appear to be moving much faster for One UI 8, though, with Samsung’s Android 16 update reportedly set to debut alongside the company’s next generation foldables.

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Indie App Spotlight: ‘Sofa’ keeps you organized during your downtime

5 April 2025 at 12:30

Welcome to Indie App Spotlight. This is a weekly 9to5Mac series where we showcase the latest apps in the indie app world. If you’re a developer and would like your app featured, get in contact.


Sofa is an easy-to-use app that helps keep you organized when you don’t have something to do. Everyone has some level of downtime, but often don’t plan things out. Social media doomscrolling is often an option, but Sofa helps you plan out other leisure activities. In its new update, it also added a built-in podcast player.

more…

Deel’s comms chief departs amidst spying lawsuit from Rippling

5 April 2025 at 11:48
Elisabeth Diana, head of communications at human resources Deel, is no longer with the company, according to her LinkedIn profile. Bloomberg first reported the news that Diana had resigned from Deel, which was recently accused of planting a spy at rival company Rippling. TechCrunch reached out to Diana but had not heard back at the […]

Go back to the Grid in TRON: Ares trailer

An AI program enters the real world in TRON: Ares.

It's difficult to underestimate the massive influence that Disney's 1982 cult science fiction film, TRON, had on both the film industry—thanks to combining live action with what were then groundbreaking visual effects, rife with computer-generated imagery—and on nerd culture at large.  Over the ensuing decades there has been one sequel, an animated TV series, a comic book miniseries, video games, and theme park attractions, all modeled on director Steve Lisberg's original fictional world.

Now we're getting a third installment in the film franchise: TRON: Ares, directed by Joachim Rønning (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil), that serves as a standalone sequel to 2010's TRON: Legacy. Disney just released the first trailer and poster art, and while the footage is short on plot, it's got the show-stopping visuals we've come to expect from all things TRON.

(Spoilers for ending of TRON: Legacy below.)

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© Walt Disney Studios

‘A Minecraft Movie’ is on-track for a $135M opening weekend

5 April 2025 at 11:29
The big screen adaptation of video game mega-franchise Minecraft brought in $58 million on Friday, putting it on-track for a $135 million opening weekend domestically — or potentially even more. That would give “A Minecraft Movie” the biggest opening of the year, beating out “Captain America: Brave New World” (which earned $88.8 million during its […]

Microsoft has created an AI-generated version of Quake

5 April 2025 at 11:23

Microsoft unveiled its Xbox AI era earlier this year with a new Muse AI model that can generate gameplay. While it looked like Muse was still an early Microsoft Research project, the Xbox maker is now allowing Copilot users to try out Muse through an AI-generated version of Quake II.

The tech demo is part of Microsoft’s Copilot for Gaming push, and features an AI-generated replica of Quake II that is playable in a browser. The Quake II level is very basic and includes blurry enemies and interactions, and Microsoft is limiting the amount of time you can even play this tech demo.

While Microsoft originally demonstrated its Muse AI model at 10fps and a 300 x 180 resolution, this latest demo runs at a playable frame rate and at a slightly higher resolution of 640 x 360. It’s still a very limited experience though, and more of hint at what might be possible in the future.

Microsoft is still positioning Muse as an AI model that can help game developers prototype games. When Muse was unveiled in February, Microsoft also mentioned it was exploring how this AI model could help improve classic games, just like Quake II, and bring them to modern hardware.

“You could imagine a world where from gameplay data and video that a model could learn old games and really make them portable to any platform where these models could run,” said Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer in February. “We’ve talked about game preservation as an activity for us, and these models and their ability to learn completely how a game plays without the necessity of the original engine running on the original hardware opens up a ton of opportunity.”

It’s clear that Microsoft is now training Muse on more games than just Bleeding Edge, and it’s likely we’ll see more short interactive AI game experiences in Copilot Labs soon. Microsoft is also working on turning Copilot into a coach for games, allowing the AI assistant to see what you’re playing and help with tips and guides. Part of that experience will be available to Windows Insiders through Copilot Vision soon.

What is a Cap Table?

5 April 2025 at 10:51

A capitalization table, or “cap table,” is simply a spreadsheet that shows who owns what in a company. If you’re asking this question, you’re probably trying to figure out how startups keep track of shares, ownership percentages, and types of […]

The post What is a Cap Table? first appeared on Tech Startups.

Apple has an iPad keyboard problem

5 April 2025 at 10:27

Last month, Apple introduced a number of new products, including a for $599. While that iPad wasn’t exactly remarkable, it did bring something new to the table – another variant of .

This new Magic Keyboard brings function keys to the for the first time, which is a pretty big win, but it also includes a number of head-scratching compromises. Let’s discuss.

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Week in Review: Nintendo unveils the Switch 2

5 April 2025 at 10:05
Welcome back to Week in Review! Tons of stuff for you today, including Nintendo’s Switch 2; capacity issues at OpenAI; a story that deserves the Hollywood treatment; and much, much more. Let’s go! It’s finally (almost) here: After almost 10 years, Nintendo finally released its Switch successor, the Switch 2. According to TechCrunch’s Amanda Silberling, […]
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