Tech
CPO Paul Gubbay says Squarespace is training its AI tools with curation and taste
Will generative AI tools help people build better websites, or will they just fill the web with spam? With the recent launch of Design Intelligence, a new website builder full of generative AI tools, Squarespace is betting on the former.
I spoke with chief product officer Paul Gubbay about Design Intelligence and Squarespace’s broader AI strategy. Our conversation began with a glimpse at what other (unspecified) AI-powered website builders deliver when prompted to create a generic spa website: confusing, ugly websites.
This was, of course, a setup for a demo of Design Intelligence, which began with a few prompts allowing Gubbay to specify things like the kind of website he wanted to build and the personality of the brand being featured. The resulting website featured AI-generated design, text, and images, but it looked — for lack of a better word — like a “real” site, with plenty of options for further customization.
Gubbay argued that while other website builders have “scrambled very quickly” to launch AI features, those competitors are asking, “How can we take this technology and use it to stand out to our customers?” while Squarespace has been asking something a little different: “How do we take all these latest technologies and really use it to help our customers stand out?”
Read a transcript of our conversation below, edited for length and clarity.
When I imagine an AI website generation product, I imagine it looking like a prompt — like everything at the beginning of the demo. But here, with every step, you could still go in and customize it. It looks, in some ways, like Squarespace today. So I’m curious: How did you decide where you wanted the AI to step in and generate elements of the website versus where you wanted it to still be customizable by humans?
We’ve taken our time to really think about how these things come together. So we have this principle when it comes to building something like a website or anything visual: I know it when I see it. And I think that holds true for not just professionals, but for anybody.
Trying to build a website through a chatbot is really challenging. It’s like being in a car and typing in “turn left” or “turn right.” You want the system to be able to show you things, and when you see the thing you like, you want to go, “OK, that’s it.” But then you don’t want to be limited by that; you want to be able to continue playing. We want it to feel like a playground.
And so for us, it really was taking this “I know it when I see it” concept. And every time the team came and said, “How about we add a chat? How about we do these things that everyone’s doing?” we were like, “I don’t think that’s really the way people want to do this.” That just became the model for us, and once everyone adopted that, it became very natural for all of us just to think through that ideology.
It was very important for us, also, that we treat the customers’ information that they give us with a lot of respect. You’re telling us something about who you are, you’re entrusting us to take that and use it effectively for you. So we wanted to make sure that the concepts that we showed you in Blueprint would carry through into the system as well, so that you would feel like those choices you made up front weren’t just for naught.
You also talked about this idea of curation and technology. Often those things are set in opposition to each other, but it sounds like you’ve actually tried to build curation into the technology. You even said that you have a curation engine. Can you talk a bit more about what that looks like?
Our CEO says this sometimes; I think it’s true: The fact that we have text generation inside of our website tool, it’s great. But you could also go to Open AI and ChatGPT, type in something, get the text, and copy and paste it [into Squarespace], and that’s fine as well. The challenge a lot of people have is knowing how to prompt those engines the right way to actually get the right output from them.
We have a very specific, proprietary point of view on how we prompt engines and how we curate the content that comes out of them, to get the look and feel and the views that we think are going to be really valuable to our customers based on our experience, based on what they’re telling us, and based on our taste.
AI imagery is a great example of that. We built our whole library of how we prompt [AI models] specifically to get the type of imagery that we want to get out, that we feel is very Squarespace, very right for our customers. We tag and curate those things, and then we feed that back into the system again.
We do that when we look at color palettes; we do that when we think about layout switching. That’s the curation element. It’s our design and creative team spending lots of time thinking about: How do these elements come together? How do we prompt engines? How do we choose what comes out of this and discard the things that we don’t want that come out of this? We keep getting better and better, so you don’t have to do it. The whole point of coming to us is that you don’t have to do it.
It sounds like part of your approach is, you’re not necessarily trying to build all these models yourself. You’re focusing on how you present it and make it accessible and bring it together.
Look, we’re not the LLM experts in creating all these different types of content. We leverage them. We leverage Google, we’re leveraging OpenAI, Anthropic. We have great partnerships. But for us, the secret sauce is how we’re prompting and curating that content as it’s coming out, and making sure it fits what we know about you.
Obviously, Squarespace has made it easy to create and customize websites already. How do you think bringing more generative AI into the process will change that ecosystem? Are Squarespace websites going to look different than they do today?
I’d like to think that they’re going to look even better. It’s very, very important for us, and it’s always been incredibly important for us, that design is always at the forefront. People come to Squarespace because they believe that design is going to make a difference. And a big part of that difference is not just capturing their brand and who they are, but it’s about making sure that the thing that gets pre-created, at the end of the day, feels bespoke.
When you ask a question like that, it could imply they all look the same in some way. And that’s absolutely not what we would want, right? So I think we are going to give people the tools to get even better results faster, but we will always make sure that it’s going to adhere to the vision of what they want.
Squarespace works very closely with designers; you just wrapped up a whole event with design partners. How do you think designers, especially Squarespace partners, should be looking at a tool like AI? To what extent should they see it as a threat versus an opportunity?
I think it’s important to look at it as an opportunity. AI technology is clearly a huge part of our future, and just like any new technology, learning how to leverage it and use it the right way is going to enhance what you’re able to do. I 1 million percent do not believe it replaces design. It’s meant to enhance it. We will continue to play our role to ensure that it enhances it for our customers and our creators.
We just had Circle Day with many [design] professionals. And when I think about something like design intelligence, for me, it just helps them bring a vision to life faster to share with a customer. But of course, [customers are coming to us] to implement all of the things that they want on top of that. If we can inspire them with some choices that they will then change and go deeper on, fantastic. We’re just going to make the job faster for them and maybe easier for them, but we would never replace them.
Tech
Volkswagen’s cheapest EV ever is the first to use Rivian software
Volkswagen’s ultra-cheap EV called the ID EVERY1 — a small four-door hatchback revealed Wednesday — will be the first to roll out with software and architecture from Rivian, according to a source familiar with the new model.
The EV is expected to go into production in 2027 with a starting price of 20,000 euros ($21,500). A second EV called the ID.2all, which will be priced in the 25,000 euro price category, will be available in 2026. Both vehicles are part of the automaker’s new of category electric urban front-wheel drive cars that are being developing under the so-called “Brand Group Core” that makes up the volume brands in the VW Group. And both vehicles are for the European market.
The EVERY1 will be the first to ship with Rivian’s vehicle architecture and software as part of a $5.8 billion joint venture struck last year between the German automaker and U.S. EV maker. The ID.2all is based on the E3 1.1 architecture and software developed by VW’s software unit Cariad.
VW didn’t name Rivian in its reveal Wednesday, although there were numerous nods to next-generation software. Kai Grünitz, member of the Volkswagen Brand Board of Management responsible for Technical Development, noted it would be the first model in the entire VW Group to use a “fundamentally new, particularly powerful software architecture.”
“This means the future entry-level Volkswagen can be equipped with new functions throughout its entire life cycle,” he said. “Even after purchase of a new car, the small Volkswagen can still be individually adapted to customer needs.”
Sources who didn’t want to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly, confirmed to TechCrunch that Rivian’s software will be in the ID EVERY1 EV. TechCrunch has reached out to Rivian and VW and will update the article if the companies respond.
The new joint venture provides Rivian with a needed influx of cash and the opportunity to diversify its business. Meanwhile, VW Group gains a next-generation electrical architecture and software for EVs that will help it better compete. Both companies have said that the joint venture, called Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies, will reduce development costs and help scale new technologies more quickly.
The joint venture is a 50-50 partnership with co-CEOs. Rivian’s head of software, Wassym Bensaid, and Volkswagen Group’s chief technical engineer, Carsten Helbing, will lead the joint venture. The team will be based initially in Palo Alto, California. Three other sites are in development in North America and Europe, the companies have previously said.
“The ID. EVERY1 represents the last piece of the puzzle on our way to the widest model selection in the volume segment,” Thomas Schäfer, CEO of the Volkswagen Passenger Cars brand and Head of the Brand Group Core, said in a statement. “We will then offer every customer the right car with the right drive system–including affordable all-electric entry-level mobility. Our goal is to be the world’s technologically leading high-volume manufacturer by 2030. And as a brand for everyone–just as you would expect from Volkswagen.”
The Volkswagen ID EVERY1 is just a concept for now — and with only a few details attached to the unveiling. The concept vehicle reaches a top speed of 130 km/h (80 miles per hour) and is powered by a newly developed electric drive motor with 70 kW, according to Volkswagen. The German automaker said the range on the EVERY1 will be at least 250 kilometers (150 miles). The vehicle is small but larger than VW’s former UP! vehicle. The company said it will have enough space for four people and a luggage compartment volume of 305 liters.
Tech
The hottest AI models, what they do, and how to use them
AI models are being cranked out at a dizzying pace, by everyone from Big Tech companies like Google to startups like OpenAI and Anthropic. Keeping track of the latest ones can be overwhelming.
Adding to the confusion is that AI models are often promoted based on industry benchmarks. But these technical metrics often reveal little about how real people and companies actually use them.
To cut through the noise, TechCrunch has compiled an overview of the most advanced AI models released since 2024, with details on how to use them and what they’re best for. We’ll keep this list updated with the latest launches, too.
There are literally over a million AI models out there: Hugging Face, for example, hosts over 1.4 million. So this list might miss some models that perform better, in one way or another.
AI models released in 2025
Cohere’s Aya Vision
Cohere released a multimodal model called Aya Vision that it claims is best in class at doing things like captioning images and answering questions about photos. It also excels in languages other than English, unlike other models, Cohere claims. It is available for free on WhatsApp.
OpenAI’s GPT 4.5 ‘Orion’
OpenAI calls Orion their largest model to date, touting its strong “world knowledge” and “emotional intelligence.” However, it underperforms on certain benchmarks compared to newer reasoning models. Orion is available to subscribers of OpenAI’s $200 a month plan.
Claude Sonnet 3.7
Anthropic says this is the industry’s first ‘hybrid’ reasoning model, because it can both fire off quick answers and really think things through when needed. It also gives users control over how long the model can think for, per Anthropic. Sonnet 3.7 is available to all Claude users, but heavier users will need a $20 a month Pro plan.
xAI’s Grok 3
Grok 3 is the latest flagship model from Elon Musk-founded startup xAI. It’s claimed to outperform other leading models on math, science, and coding. The model requires X Premium (which is $50 a month.) After one study found Grok 2 leaned left, Musk pledged to shift Grok more “politically neutral” but it’s not yet clear if that’s been achieved.
OpenAI o3-mini
This is OpenAI’s latest reasoning model and is optimized for STEM-related tasks like coding, math, and science. It’s not OpenAI’s most powerful model but because it’s smaller, the company says it’s significantly lower cost. It is available for free but requires a subscription for heavy users.
OpenAI Deep Research
OpenAI’s Deep Research is designed for doing in-depth research on a topic with clear citations. This service is only available with ChatGPT’s $200 per month Pro subscription. OpenAI recommends it for everything from science to shopping research, but beware that hallucinations remain a problem for AI.
Mistral Le Chat
Mistral has launched app versions of Le Chat, a multimodal AI personal assistant. Mistral claims Le Chat responds faster than any other chatbot. It also has a paid version with up-to-date journalism from the AFP. Tests from Le Monde found Le Chat’s performance impressive, although it made more errors than ChatGPT.
OpenAI Operator
OpenAI’s Operator is meant to be a personal intern that can do things independently, like help you buy groceries. It requires a $200 a month ChatGPT Pro subscription. AI agents hold a lot of promise, but they’re still experimental: a Washington Post reviewer says Operator decided on its own to order a dozen eggs for $31, paid with the reviewer’s credit card.
Google Gemini 2.0 Pro Experimental
Google Gemini’s much-awaited flagship model says it excels at coding and understanding general knowledge. It also has a super-long context window of 2 million tokens, helping users who need to quickly process massive chunks of text. The service requires (at minimum) a Google One AI Premium subscription of $19.99 a month.
AI models released in 2024
DeepSeek R1
This Chinese AI model took Silicon Valley by storm. DeepSeek’s R1 performs well on coding and math, while its open source nature means anyone can run it locally. Plus, it’s free. However, R1 integrates Chinese government censorship and faces rising bans for potentially sending user data back to China.
Gemini Deep Research
Deep Research summarizes Google’s search results in a simple and well-cited document. The service is helpful for students and anyone else who needs a quick research summary. However, its quality isn’t nearly as good as an actual peer-reviewed paper. Deep Research requires a $19.99 Google One AI Premium subscription.
Meta Llama 3.3 70B
This is the newest and most advanced version of Meta’s open source Llama AI models. Meta has touted this version as its cheapest and most efficient yet, especially for math, general knowledge, and instruction following. It is free and open source.
OpenAI Sora
Sora is a model that creates realistic videos based on text. While it can generate entire scenes rather than just clips, OpenAI admits that it often generates “unrealistic physics.” It’s currently only available on paid versions of ChatGPT, starting with Plus, which is $20 a month.
Alibaba Qwen QwQ-32B-Preview
This model is one of the few to rival OpenAI’s o1 on certain industry benchmarks, excelling in math and coding. Ironically for a “reasoning model,” it has “room for improvement in common sense reasoning,” Alibaba says. It also incorporates Chinese government censorship, TechCrunch testing shows. It’s free and open source.
Anthropic’s Computer Use
Claude’s Computer Use is meant to take control of your computer to complete tasks like coding or booking a plane ticket, making it a predecessor of OpenAI’s Operator. Computer use, however, remains in beta. Pricing is via API: $0.80 per million tokens of input and $4 per million tokens of output.
x.AI’s Grok 2
Elon Musk’s AI company, x.AI, has launched an enhanced version of its flagship Grok 2 chatbot it claims is “three times faster.” Free users are limited to 10 questions every two hours on Grok, while subscribers to X’s Premium and Premium+ plans enjoy higher usage limits. x.AI also launched an image generator, Aurora, that produces highly photorealistic images, including some graphic or violent content.
OpenAI o1
OpenAI’s o1 family is meant to produce better answers by “thinking” through responses through a hidden reasoning feature. The model excels at coding, math, and safety, OpenAI claims, but has issues deceiving humans, too. Using o1 requires subscribing to ChatGPT Plus, which is $20 a month.
Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 3.5
Claude Sonnet 3.5 is a model Anthropic claims as being best in class. It’s become known for its coding capabilities and is considered a tech insider’s chatbot of choice. The model can be accessed for free on Claude although heavy users will need a $20 monthly Pro subscription. While it can understand images, it can’t generate them.
OpenAI GPT 4o-mini
OpenAI has touted GPT 4o-mini as its most affordable and fastest model yet thanks to its small size. It’s meant to enable a broad range of tasks like powering customer service chatbots. The model is available on ChatGPT’s free tier. It’s better suited for high-volume simple tasks compared to more complex ones.
Cohere Command R+
Cohere’s Command R+ model excels at complex Retrieval-Augmented Generation (or RAG) applications for enterprises. That means it can find and cite specific pieces of information really well. (The inventor of RAG actually works at Cohere.) Still, RAG doesn’t fully solve AI’s hallucination problem.
Tech
Not all cancer patients need chemo. Ataraxis AI raised $20M to fix that.
Artificial intelligence is a big trend in cancer care, and it’s mostly focused detecting cancer at the earliest possible stage. That makes a lot of sense, given that cancer is less deadly the earlier it’s detected.
But fewer are asking another fundamental question: if someone does have cancer, is an aggressive treatment like chemotherapy necessary? That’s the problem Ataraxis AI is trying to solve.
The New York-based startup is focused on using AI to accurately predict not only if a patient has cancer, but also what their cancer outcome looks like in 5 to 10 years. If there’s only a small chance of the cancer coming back, chemo can be avoided altogether – saving a lot of money, while avoiding the treatment’s notorious side effects.
Ataraxis AI now plans to launch their first commercial test, for breast cancer, to U.S. oncologists in the coming months, its co-founder Jan Witowski tells TechCrunch. To bolster the launch and expand into other types of cancer, the startup has raised a $20.4 million Series A, it told TechCrunch exclusively.
The round was led by AIX Ventures with participation from Thiel Bio, Founders Fund, Floating Point, Bertelsmann, and existing investors Giant Ventures and Obvious Ventures. Ataraxis emerged from stealth last year with a $4 million seed round.
Ataraxis was co-founded by Witowski and Krzysztof Geras, an assistant professor at NYU’s medical school who focuses on AI.
Ataraxis’ tech is powered by an AI model that extracts information from high-resolution images of cancer cells. The model is trained on hundreds of millions of real images from thousands of patients, Witowski said. A recent study showed Ataraxis’ tech was 30% more accurate than the current standard of care for breast cancer, per Ataraxis.
Long term, Ataraxis has big ambitions. It wants its tests to impact at least half of new cancer cases by 2030. It also views itself as a frontier AI company that builds its own models, touting Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun as an AI advisor.
“I think at Ataraxis we are trying to build what is essentially an AI frontier lab, but for healthcare applications,” Witowski said. “Because so many of those problems require a very novel technology.”
The AI boom has led to a rush of fundraises for cancer care startups. Valar Labs raised $22 million to help patients figure out their treatment plan in May 2024, for example. There’s also a bevvy of AI-powered drug discovery firms in the cancer space, like Manas AI which raised $24.6 million in January 2025 and was co-founded by Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder.
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