If you’ve ever pulled a sweater from the washing machine to find a tangled collection of yarn, you wouldn’t be the first. Whirlpool’s new washing machine has a feature that aims to solve the issue without requiring hand-washing or running a dedicated delicates cycle.

The new Whirlpool top-load washer includes a built-in delicate basket that sits inside the drum, shielding sweaters and other fragile items from the agitation of a regular wash cycle. The basket also corrals socks in one place, making it easier to match and fold them when laundry time is done.

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While LG’s sidekick pedestal washer makes a similar claim, that version features a separate wash bin under the main drum. Whirlpool’s is a simple plastic basket, large enough for a sweater and plenty of socks, that sits right on top of the machine’s impeller inside the drum. 

I saw the soon-to-be-released machine at KBIS in Orlando. Just weeks before, I’d ruined one of my favorite sweaters by machine-washing it, so the feature won me over. The idea is so simple and smart, yet this seems to be the only modern washing machine to incorporate it. 

While we weren’t able to see the machine in action yet (it was only on display), a Whirlpool representative told me that clothes placed in the center basket remain there through the cycle, thanks to the distinct water flow patterns. 

The basket is easily removed with a gentle squeeze of the handles, so you can extract your delicates and socks. You can also leave the basket out if it’s not needed for a particular wash cycle. 

Pricing was not available but the washing machine is set to launch at national retailers in September. 

PayPal is notifying customers of a data breach after a software error in a loan application exposed their sensitive personal information, including Social Security numbers, for nearly 6 months last year.

The incident affected the PayPal Working Capital (PPWC) loan app, which provides small businesses with quick access to financing.

PayPal discovered the breach on December 12, 2025, and determined that customers’ names, email addresses, phone numbers, business addresses, Social Security numbers, and dates of birth had been exposed since July 1, 2025.

The financial technology company said it has reversed the code change that caused the incident, blocking attackers’ access to the data one day after discovering the breach.

“On December 12, 2025, PayPal identified that due to an error in its PayPal Working Capital (“PPWC”) loan application, the PII of a small number of customers was exposed to unauthorized individuals during the timeframe of July 1, 2025 to December 13, 2025,” PayPal said in breach notification letters sent to affected users.

“PayPal has since rolled back the code change responsible for this error, which potentially exposed the PII. We have not delayed this notification as a result of any law enforcement investigation.”

PayPal also detected unauthorized transactions on the accounts of a small number of customers as a direct result of the incident and has issued refunds to those affected.

The company now offers affected users two years of free three-bureau credit monitoring and identity restoration services through Equifax, which require enrollment by June 30, 2026.

Affected customers are also advised to monitor their credit reports and their account activity for suspicious transactions. PayPal reminded users that it never requests account passwords, one-time codes, or other authentication credentials via phone, text, or email, a common tactic used in phishing attacks that often follow data breach disclosures.

While PayPal has yet to disclose how many customers were affected, it has reset passwords for all impacted accounts and said that users will be prompted to create new credentials upon their next login if they have not already done so.

BleepingComputer reached out to a PayPal spokesperson with questions about the incident, but a response was not immediately available.

In January 2023, PayPal notified customers of another data breach after a large-scale credential stuffing attack compromised 35,000 accounts between December 6 and December 8, 2022.

Two years later, in January 2025, New York State announced a $2,000,000 settlement with PayPal over charges that it failed to comply with the state’s cybersecurity regulations, leading to the 2022 data breach.

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It’s no secret that the electrical grid is aging, but one part stands out from the rest. Transformers haven’t changed much since Thomas Edison made his first light bulb. 

Now, a string of startups are working to modernize the transformer, replacing it with modern power electronics that promise to give grid operators more control over how and where electricity flows. 

“It becomes a very powerful device, equivalent to your internet router,” Subhashish Bhattacharya, co-founder and CTO of DG Matrix, told TechCrunch.

Three startups recently raised sizable rounds to scale up production of their solid-state transformer technologies. This week, DG Matrix raised a $60 million Series A and Heron Power raised $140 million in a Series B round. In November, Amperesand raised $80 million to chase after the burgeoning data center market.

Existing transformers are reliable and efficient, but that’s about it. They’re relatively crude instruments, made largely of copper and iron. They react passively to changes on the grid and are capable of tackling only one task per device.

“An old-school steel, copper, and oil transformer doesn’t have any monitoring, doesn’t have any control,” Drew Baglino, founder and CEO of Heron Power, told TechCrunch. In instances where electricity surges or a power plant trips offline, that can be a liability.

The devices can incorporate power from a range of difference sources — including traditional power plants, renewables, and batteries — and transform that electricity into either alternating current (AC) or direct current (DC) at a number of different voltages, allowing them to replace several devices.

For data centers, solid-state transformers offer an appealing alternative, allowing them to shrink the footprint of their power systems while giving them finer control over where and how electricity is directed.

Solid-state transformers poised to arrive at a time when existing transformers are aging and demand for new ones is surging — a classic tech supercycle. Most transformers on the grid today are several decades old, according to the National Laboratory of the Rockies. As demand from data centers, EV chargers, and other parts of the grid rises, the NLR expects the amount of power flowing through transformers to double by 2050.

While data centers are the the first market those companies are chasing, they also have their sights set on the electrical grid, which in the U.S. alone hosts as many as 80 million transformers. 

“All of the distribution transformers are ultimately going to need to be replaced. Over 50% of them are 35 years old. There’s a big need for an upgrade,” Baglino said.

Because they’re are made from silicon-based materials, they’re flexible, controllable, and software-updatable. They’re also immune from price fluctuations that rock the copper market.

“Power semiconductors keep getting cheaper. Steel, copper, and oil, unfortunately, is not in that situation,” Baglino said. “Commodity prices can move all over the place, and they generally move up.” 

In an old-style transformer, power flows into the transformer through copper wires wound around one side of an O-shaped iron core. As the electricity flows, it induces a magnetic field in the core. On the other side of the core, the magnetic field induces electricity in another set of copper windings. If the wires wrap around the core more times on the input side than the output side, the voltage decreases on the output side. If the ratio inverts, the output voltage increases.

Solid-state transformers eschew the copper windings in favor of semiconductors, using materials like silicon carbide or gallium nitride to handle frequency conversion. They can come in a range of configurations, with the most comprehensive setup consisting of three basic parts: a rectifier that converts alternating current to direct current, a converter that changes the voltage of the direct current, and an inverter that changes the direct current back into alternating current.

Unlike iron-core transformers, solid-state transformers can handle power that flows in both directions, making them useful in places that need backup power, like data centers. 

In a data center, a solid-state transformer can replace several different pieces of equipment, not just the transformer that steps voltage down from the grid. Every data center uses backup power, which requires a string of devices to bring power into the facility. Solid-state transformers can handle all of those duties in one box.

The technology also allows data centers to more easily integrate so-called behind-the-meter power, where generating capacity is connected directly to the data center, not the grid. Those typically require another set of transformers.

And when coupled with grid-scale batteries, solid-state transformers can eliminate uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), too, freeing up space inside the data center for more racks.

“If you add up the cost of everything we’ve taken out, we’re 60% to 70% of that cost,” Haroon Inam, co-founder and CEO of DG Matrix, told TechCrunch.

DG Matrix has been focusing on its Interport technology, which can route power from multiple sources to multiple loads of differing voltages, a setup the company holds multiple patents on.

Heron Power, meanwhile, is working to transforming medium-voltage power in data centers, solar farms, and grid-scale battery installations. In a data center, it’s Heron Link transformers can provide racks with 30 seconds of power while backup sources come online. Altogether, Heron Link occupy 70% less space than existing parts. At a solar farm, Heron Power’s transformers can perform the duties of an inverter and a transformer for the same price.

In a head-to-head comparison, solid state transformers still command a cost premium over iron-core transformers. For that reason, they’re unlikely to replace the giant humming boxes at grid substations in the very near future. 

But in data centers and at EV charging hubs, where solid-state transformers take the place of several pieces of equipment, they’ll start making inroads. 

When they finally hit the grid in bigger numbers, they have the potential to cut down on transmission and distribution costs, one of the biggest contributors to utility bill inflation.

Because today’s transformers are passive, unable to react to fluctuations, distribution networks have been built with a significant amount of spare capacity, Baglino said. Solid-state transformers, though, and can respond to changing conditions, allowing grid operators to send more power through the same lines.

“You can actually make the infrastructure more affordable because you’re putting more kilowatt-hours through the same poles and wires,” he said. “That’s where intelligence, in place of passive mechanical objects that were designed 100 years ago, can make a big difference.”

Move over, PayPal mafia: There’s a new tech mafia in Silicon Valley. As the startup behind ChatGPT, OpenAI is arguably the biggest AI player in town. The company is reportedly now in talks to finalize a $100 billion deal, valuing the company at more than $850 billion.  

Many employees have come and gone since the company first launched a decade ago, and some have launched startups of their own. Among these, some have become top rivals (like Anthropic), while others, just on investor interest alone, have managed to raise billions without even launching a product (see, Thinking Machine Labs).  

In January, Aliisa Rosenthal, OpenAI’s first sales leader, spoke a little bit about this growing network. She, like the other OpenAI alums who did not become founders, decided to become an investor and said she was going to tap into the ex-OpenAI founder network to look for deal flow. We know Peter Deng, OpenAI’s former head of consumer products (and now general partner at Felicis) already has.  

Below is a roundup of the major startups founded by OpenAI alumni, in alphabetical order. And we are certain this list will grow over time. 

David Luan — Adept AI Labs 

David Luan was OpenAI’s engineering VP until he left in 2020. After a stint at Google, in 2021 he co-founded Adept AI Labs, a startup that builds AI tools for employees. The startup last raised $350 million at a valuation north of $1 billion in 2023, but Luan left in late 2024 to oversee Amazon’s AI agents lab after Amazon hired Adept’s founders.

Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, and John Schulman — Anthropic

Siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei left OpenAI in 2021 to form their own startup, San Francisco-based Anthropic, that has long touted a focus on AI safety. OpenAI co-founder John Schulman joined Anthropic in 2024, pledging to build a “safe AGI.” The company has since become OpenAI’s biggest rival and just raised a $30 billion Series G, nabbing a $380 billion valuation in the process. IPO rumors are also swirling, as the company reportedly prepares for a public listing that could come sometime this year. (OpenAI is also allegedly preparing for an IPO this year and is maybe even trying to beat Anthropic to the public market.) 

Rhythm Garg, Linden Li, and Yash Patil — Applied Compute  

Three ex-OpenAI staffers (Rhythm Garg, Linden Li, and Yash Patil) have reportedly raised $20 million for a startup called Applied Compute, as reported by Upstart Media. All three of them worked as technical staff at OpenAI for more than a year before leaving last May to launch the startup, per their LinkedIns. The startup helps enterprises train and deploy custom AI agents. Benchmark led the round, valuing the 10-month-old company at $100 million, Upstart Media reported. 

Pieter Abbeel, Peter Chen, and Rocky Duan — Covariant

The trio all worked at OpenAI in 2016 and 2017 as research scientists before founding Covariant, a Berkeley, California-based startup that builds foundation AI models for robots. In 2024, Amazon hired all three of the Covariant founders and about a quarter of its staff. The quasi-acquisition was viewed by some as part of a broader trend of Big Tech attempting to avoid antitrust scrutiny. 

Tim Shi — Cresta 

Tim Shi was an early member of OpenAI’s team, where he focused on building safe artificial general intelligence (AGI), according to his LinkedIn profile. He worked at OpenAI for a year in 2017 but left to found Cresta, a San Francisco-based AI contact center startup that has raised over $270 million from VCs like Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and others, according to a press release.

Jonas Schneider — Daedalus

Jonas Schneider led OpenAI’s software engineering for robotics team but left in 2019 to co-found Daedalus, which builds advanced factories for precision components. The San Francisco-based startup raised a $21 million Series A last year with backing from Khosla Ventures, among others.

Andrej Karpathy — Eureka Labs

Computer vision expert Andrej Karpathy was a founding member and research scientist at OpenAI, leaving the startup to join Tesla in 2017 to lead its autopilot program. Karpathy is also well-known for his YouTube videos explaining core AI concepts. He left Tesla in 2024 to found his own education technology startup, Eureka Labs, a San Francisco-based startup that is building AI teaching assistants.

Margaret Jennings — Kindo

Margaret Jennings worked at OpenAI in 2022 and 2023 until she left to co-found Kindo, which markets itself as an AI chatbot for enterprises. Kindo has raised over $27 million in funding, last raising a $20.6 million Series A in 2024. Jennings left Kindo in 2024 to head product and research at French AI startup Mistral, according to her LinkedIn profile.

Maddie Hall — Living Carbon

Maddie Hall worked on “special projects” at OpenAI but left in 2019 to co-found Living Carbon, a San Francisco-based startup that aims to create engineered plants that can suck more carbon out of the sky to fight climate change. Living Carbon raised a $21 million Series A round in 2023, bringing its total funding until then to $36 million, according to a press release.

Liam Fedus — Periodic Labs  

Liam Fedus, OpenAI’s VP of post-training research, left the company in March 2025 to team up with his former Google Brain colleague, Ekin Dogus Cubuk, and launch Periodic Labs. The startup seeks to use AI scientists to find new materials, particularly new superconducting materials. It came out of stealth mode in September 2025, armed with a massive $300 million in seed-round funding with backers that included Jezz Bezos, Eric Schmidt, Felicis and Andreessen Horowitz. 

Aravind Srinivas — Perplexity

Aravind Srinivas worked as a research scientist at OpenAI for a year until 2022, when he left the company to co-found AI search engine Perplexity. His startup has attracted a string of high-profile investors like Jeff Bezos and Nvidia, although it’s also caused controversy over alleged unethical web scraping. Perplexity, which is based in San Francisco, last reported a raise of $200 million at a $20 billion valuation. 

Jeff Arnold — Pilot

Jeff Arnold worked as OpenAI’s head of operations for five months in 2016 before co-founding San Francisco-based accounting startup Pilot in 2017. Pilot, which focused initially on doing accounting for startups, last raised a $100 million Series C in 2021 at a $1.2 billion valuation and has attracted investors like Jeff Bezos. Arnold worked as Pilot’s COO until leaving in 2024 to launch a VC fund.

Shariq Hashme — Prosper Robotics

Shariq Hashme worked for OpenAI for 9 months in 2017 on a bot that could play the popular video game Dota, per his LinkedIn profile. After a few years at data-labeling startup Scale AI, he co-founded London-based Prosper Robotics in 2021. The startup says it’s working on a robot butler for people’s homes, a hot trend in robotics that other players like Norway’s 1X and Texas-based Apptronik are also working on.

Ilya Sutskever — Safe Superintelligence 

OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever left OpenAI in May 2024 after he was reportedly part of a failed effort to replace CEO Sam Altman. Shortly afterward, he co-founded Safe Superintelligence, or SSI, with “one goal and one product: a safe superintelligence,” he says. Details about what exactly the startup is up to are scant: It has no product and no revenue yet. But investors are clamoring for a piece anyway, and it’s been able to raise $2 billion, with its latest valuation reportedly rising to $32 billion this month. SSI is based in Palo Alto, California, and Tel Aviv, Israel.

Emmett Shear — Stem AI

Emmett Shear is the former CEO of Twitch who was OpenAI’s interim CEO in November 2023 for a few days before Sam Altman rejoined the company. Shear launched an AI company, StemAI, in 2024 (though it seems to have since rebranded as Softmax). The company, which appears to be a research company, has attracted funding from Andreessen Horowitz.

Mira Murati — Thinking Machines Lab 

Mira Murati, OpenAI’s CTO, left OpenAI to found her own company, Thinking Machines Lab, which emerged from stealth in February 2025. It said at the time (rather vaguely) that it will build AI that’s more “customizable” and “capable.” The San Francisco AI startup, now valued at $12 billion, announced its first product late last year: an API that fine-tunes language models. It recently made headlines when two of its co-founders announced earlier this year that they would return to OpenAI. 

Kyle Kosic — xAI

Kyle Kosic left OpenAI in 2023 to become a co-founder and infrastructure lead of xAI, Elon Musk’s AI startup that offers a rival chatbot, Grok. In 2024, however, he hopped back to OpenAI, where he remains. Meanwhile, xAI (which acquired Musk’s social media site X) was purchased by Musk’s SpaceX, giving the coalesce company a valuation of $1.25 trillion. It is looking to go public sometime in June for what could be a historic listing. 

Angela Jiang — Worktrace AI

Angela Jiang left OpenAI in 2024, after working as a product manager and on the public policy team. In April 2025, she quietly launched Worktrace, which uses AI to help enterprises make business operations more efficient. It observes employee work patterns and automates workflow, according to the company’s website. The business is backed by Mura Murati, OpenAI’s former CTO, who went on to launch Thinking Labs. It is also backed by OpenAI’s startup fund, in addition to a slew of other OpenAI names, like its chief strategy officer, Jason Kwon. 

Stealth Startups

In addition to these startups, a number of other former OpenAI employees have founded startups that are still in stealth mode, according to various updates TechCrunch found on LinkedIn. For instance, it seems that former OpenAI researcher Danilo Hellermark has been working on a generative AI stealth startup for the past few years. He officially left OpenAI at the beginning of 2023. There’s also one apparently in the works from Lucas Negritto, who worked on OpenAI’s technical team and left the company in 2023 after three years. Since then, he’s founded one startup and has been working on another since August 2025, according to his LinkedIn. 

OpenAI seems to have found product-market fit with young Indians. The company said on Friday that users between 18 and 24 years of age accounted for nearly 50% of messages sent to ChatGPT in the country, and users under 30 accounted for 80%.

The AI lab said Indians use ChatGPT mostly for work, with 35% of all messages relating to professional tasks, compared to 30% globally.

In particular, the company’s coding assistant, Codex, is seeing strong traction: OpenAI said Indians use Codex three times more than the global median, and weekly usage has increased by four times since the tool got a Mac app two weeks ago. Users in India are also asking three times as many coding-related questions as the median.

This is in line with findings from Antropic, which earlier this week said 45.2% of Claude’s tasks map to software-related use cases in India.

OpenAI said outside of work tasks, 35% of messages to ChatGPT from Indians requested guidance, 20% concerned questions about general information, and 20% were requests for the bot to produce or help with writing.

India is OpenAI’s second-largest market with more than 100 million weekly users, and the company has been actively trying to court Indians for its AI tools and services. The company offers a sub-$5 subscription tier in the country, and last year even ran promotional campaigns to spur adoption.

“AI adoption is moving faster than our ability to measure it – and that’s a challenge for anyone trying to make smart decisions. Signals is our way of putting real-world evidence on the table, so India’s AI debate can be grounded in facts, not hype,” OpenAI’s chief economist Ronnie Chatterji said in a statement.

OpenAI has had a busy few days in India, which is hosting a major AI Impact Summit in New Delhi this week. The company is opening new offices in Mumbai and Bengaluru this year, and has signed a major partnership with conglomerate Tata Group to secure 100 megawatts worth of AI compute capacity and distribute ChatGPT Enterprise within Tata’s IT services subsidiary, TCS.

The AI lab has signed agreements with fintech Pine Labs, travel platforms Ixigo and Makemytrip, and food and grocery delivery company Eternal. It has also partnered with educational institutes to distribute its tools to more than 100,000 students over the next six years.

This week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified in a landmark social media trial, claiming the company only wanted to make Instagram “useful” and not addictive. In this episode, we chat about Zuck’s testimony and the potential implications of this trial for social media companies. Also, we dive into the latest effects of the RAMaggedon RAM shortage, including a potential PlayStation 6 delay and a dire future for practically every consumer electronics company.

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Topics

• Mark Zuckerberg testifies that Instagram was meant to be “useful,” not addictive in social media addiction trial – 1:27

• Meta reportedly plans to launch a smartwatch later this year – 13:23

• The RAMageddon will likely kill some small consumer electronics companies – 15:54

• Apple could unveil a MacBook, new M5 Pro chip, and iPhone 17e at March 4th event – 26:26

• Google’s Pixel 10a arrives on March 5 – 32:17

• Email leaked to 404 media suggests Ring had plans to use its Search Party function for wider surveillance – 34:48

• Pop culture picks – 49:04

Credits

Host: Devindra Hardawar
Producer: Ben Ellman
Music: Dale North and Terrence O’Brien

Microsoft is bringing Copilot to the Windows 11 taskbar and File Explorer. The update turns the plain old search box into something that actually understands how you ask questions. Type “When is my performance review due?” and the system pulls the answer from your calendar, emails, and local files. No more digging through folders.

The taskbar becomes a kind of mission control for AI. The search field now connects your local PC with your Microsoft 365 data. It knows who you work with and what documents you touch most.

The taskbar is now a command center for AI agents

Hit the @ symbol in the taskbar search and you get a menu of AI agents that run in the background. These aren’t the kind that disappear into browser tabs. They sit on your taskbar so you can see their progress while you do other stuff. A researcher agent might spend 10 minutes comparing public sentiment against internal design guides. You watch its status on the taskbar icon like a download bar. Green checkmark means it’s done. Hover for a summary. Click for the full report with sources.

Voice works too. Hold the Copilot key or hit Windows key + C. Tell it “Find the file Robin shared” and it checks your emails and meetings to figure out which Robin you mean.

File Explorer gets Copilot Control for instant document insights

File Explorer now shows your SharePoint and OneDrive files right alongside local ones. Recent docs, shared stuff, favorites, all in one view. But the Copilot Control is the real trick. You can ask questions about a file without opening it.

Need a stat buried deep in a design doc? Ask for it. Copilot pulls out something like “over 70% of employees prefer sustainable materials” and shows you the context immediately. You never leave the File Explorer window.

Over on Android, Google is doing something similar with its Files app. Gemini now automatically offers to analyze PDFs when you open them, letting you ask questions about a document without importing it into a separate AI tool.

What this means for your workflow

The updates are rolling out now. Which ones you get depends on your hardware. Standard Windows 11 machines handle the cloud stuff. Copilot+ PCs with NPUs unlock the offline tools like Fluid Dictation and Click to Do.

Bottom line? You search less and find more. The taskbar starts acting like a coworker who remembers where everything lives. File Explorer becomes a window into your documents, not just a list of folders. Keep an eye out for the Copilot icons in the coming weeks.

WhatsApp has introduced Group Message History, a new feature that allows recent chat messages to be shared with newly added members so they can catch up without interrupting ongoing conversations.

The update enables group admins and participants to send between 25 and 100 recent messages to a new member, reducing the need for screenshots, copied summaries or repeated explanations when someone joins an active discussion.

Group Message History keeps all shared messages end-to-end encrypted, maintaining the same privacy protections as standard personal and group messages across the platform.