Reid Hoffman, Richard Branson, and the Chainsmokers are among the people who have backed the company. Learned that LoanSnap, an AI mortgage startup, is being sued by many creditors and has been kicked out of its headquarters in Southern California. This has made workers worry about the future of the company. LoanSnap was started by Karl Jacob (pictured above) and Allan Carroll, who are both experienced business owners. The company has raised about $100 million since its seed round in 2017, with $90 million coming in between 2021 and 2023, according to PitchBook. LoanSnap says that investors include Reid Hoffman,…
Author: David
Spotify has raised the price of its services for people in the U.S. This is the second time in a year that the prices have gone up. The big music streaming service says that premium prices will go up from $10.99 to $11.99 in July, which is a rise of almost 10%. Prices for the Duo and Family plans will go up by $2 and $3, respectively, to $16.99 and $19.99 per month. The price for the student plan will stay the same at $5.99 per month. Spotify recently reported a 20% rise in income, a 14% rise in premium…
People have said that the first efforts to make hardware specifically for artificial intelligence were, well, not very good. On the other hand, here’s an AI tool that’s just plain rubbish: A Finnish company called Binit is using the picture processing power of large language models (LLMs) to keep track of trash around the house. Business people have been interested in using AI to sort the trash so that recycling is more efficient at the municipal or business level for a while now (see Greyparrot, TrashBot, and Glacier). But Borut Grgic, the founder of Binit, thinks that tracking trash is…
The factories that Apple uses in Austin, Texas. The business has built its Mac Pro desktop about 20 minutes north of downtown since 2013. The building is 400,000 square feet and is in a maze of industry parks. It’s only a short drive south from the company’s still-under-construction main campus. In recent years, the capital city has become a hub for tech innovation. This is mostly because of the University of Texas at Austin, which is close and has a huge pool of talented people. In 2019, work began on a new site worth $1 billion. Soon after the first…
Spotify is still getting bad feedback about its choice to stop supporting Car Thing, its in-car streaming device, which it announced in May. The company said that the gadget will stop working on December 9, 2024. Gen Z users are making videos on TikTok to say they don’t like what Spotify did and what it suggests they do, like switching to Android Auto or CarPlay. Users say that they often couldn’t use the infotainment systems that came with their cars, which makes them a good fit for a specialized player like Car Thing. The streaming service’s car kit hadn’t been…
It’s possible that fake audio and video of candidates will play a big role in the 2024 election. As election campaigns heat up, voters should know that AI companies don’t really fight back against voice clones of famous politicians, from the President on down. This is what a new study shows. Six speech cloning services were looked at by the Center for Countering Digital Hate. These were Invideo AI, Veed, ElevenLabs, Speechify, Descript, and PlayHT. For each, they tried to get the service to copy the sounds of eight well-known politicians and say five lies in each voice. 193 of…
On June 5, SpaceX’s huge Starship rocket could take to the sky for the fourth time. The main goal is to test the second stage’s reusable heat shield as the vehicle tries to safely return the atmosphere for the first time. Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, wrote on his social media site X, “There are many tough problems to solve with this vehicle. But the biggest problem is making a reusable orbital return heat shield, which has never been done before.” He said earlier this month that the main goal of the next Starship test was to “get through max…
Everything in society, from standardized tests to AI programs, can feel like it’s trying to be the best it can be. It’s taught that you should know what you want and then figure out how to get there. Ken Stanley, a former researcher at OpenAI and co-founder of Maven, a new social media platform, has been saying for years that this way of thinking is not only useless but also damaging. Stanley says that instead of putting goals first, we should put chance first. Stanley told TechCrunch in a video interview, “Sometimes we have to get off the path of…
The shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, killed several people. Their families are fighting Activision, Meta, and Daniel Defense, the company that made the guns. Josh Koskoff, an attorney, is representing the families who are suing. He earlier got Remington to pay the families of Sandy Hook shooting victims a settlement. The suit against the tech companies says, “Over the last 15 years, two of America’s largest tech companies have worked with the firearms industry in a scheme that makes the Joe Camel campaign look almost cute and harmless.” The lawsuit specifically mentions Activision’s popular “Call of Duty”…
Welcome back to TechCrunch’s Week in Review, an email that goes over the biggest news stories of the week. Want it sent to your email every Saturday? Click here to sign up. This week, OpenAI said it would be removing Sky, one of the sounds its new GPT-4o model used, because users said it sounded a lot like Scarlett Johansson’s AI character in “Her.” In a statement, the actor said that she had hired a lawyer to find out how the voice was created. The company says the voice wasn’t based on Johansson’s, but the actress said OpenAI had asked…
Lucid Motors is letting go of about 400 workers, or about 6% of its staff, as part of a reorganization that will happen before the release of its first electric SUV later this year. The company told the government on Friday morning that the restructuring should be finished by the end of the third quarter and will cost between $21 million and $25 million. It’s been a little more than a year since Lucid Motors cut 1,300 jobs. CEO Peter Rawlinson told the company in an email, “I’m confident Lucid will deliver the world’s best SUV and dramatically expand our…
The US Department of Justice and 30 state attorneys general sued Live Nation Entertainment, which owns Ticketmaster, for what they say are unfair business tactics. When Live Nation and Ticketmaster joined in 2010, they made a powerful entertainment company that handles most of the country’s ticket sales and venue bookings. But Taylor Swift fans’ experience buying tickets for the Eras tour in late 2022 was so bad that lawmakers looked more closely at how much power the entertainment giant had over the business. The presale was full of bugs and people had to wait hours to get tickets, and the…
Elon Musk’s company, X, is planning to make social network “likes” private. This could make it hard for users to tell the difference between something they’ve saved and something they’ve favorited. New posts from employees of the company say that the decision to hide likes is meant to protect their public image and encourage people to interact with the site by letting them like “edgy” material. It is not clear that this is the best way for X to solve the problems it wants to fix, like giving its algorithm more information so it can better tailor your material to…
It’s not a joke—a job posting says that President Joe Biden’s campaign for reelection needs someone to handle jokes. It is said that the new “Partner Manager, Content and Meme Pages” will “start and manage day-to-day operations in engaging the internet’s top content and meme pages.” It can pay up to $85,000. Yes, it’s silly to make a living managing memes. But these days, planning online is just as useful as getting to know people in person at a farmers market. If a politician wants to meet voters where they are, they need to be online. If something goes viral,…
Big Tech still doesn’t see enough women as AI leaders. Meta said on Wednesday that it would be making an AI advisory council with only white guys. What else do you think we should expect? Women and people of color have been complaining for decades that they are ignored and left out of the world of AI, even though they are qualified and have played a big part in its development. Meta didn’t answer right away when we asked them to say something about how diverse the advisory board is. The Oversight Board and Meta’s real board of directors are…
A remote access app is being used on the computers at check-in at a number of hotels in the US. This app is leaking photos of guest information to the internet. Learned that at least three Wyndham hotels across the United States have spying apps for everyday use running on their check-in systems. The app, pcTattletale, constantly and quietly took screenshots of the hotel booking systems, which showed information about customers and guests. Because the spyware has a security hole, these screenshots can be seen by anyone on the internet, not just the people who are supposed to use the…
It began with a sketch on a napkin. TechCrunch has heard that AirLoom Energy is now raising an extra $12.7 million. A statement with the government says that the money came from 21 investors, but it doesn’t name the backers. A request for word from the company did not get a response right away. The new company in Wyoming has a unique way of using wind power. Instead of putting huge turbines on top of towers that are more than 100 meters tall, it connects vertical blades to wires that run along an oval-shaped track 25 meters (82 feet) above…
The Indian budget hotel group Oyo, which used to be very successful, has pulled its IPO application from the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) for the second time. This is a big setback for the company, which already didn’t have high hopes. According to a notice on the regulator’s website, the Gurugram-based startup, which was worth $10 billion at its peak, scrapped its plans to go public on May 17. Oyo first sent paperwork to SEBI in 2021 to become public, but later took it back and sent it again in 2023. SEBI has not yet approved either…
A recent spam attack on Bluesky shows that even decentralized social networks can be hit by spam sent by botnets. Earlier this month, Bluesky’s network saw a lot of posts that said “remember to always vote Trump.” These posts came from users with random names and default avatars. The scam didn’t come from Bluesky, though. Instead, it went through Mastodon and Nostr, two other autonomous networks, on its way to Bluesky. The botnet used “bridges,” which are paths that were built between networks so that they could work together, to do this. The spam attack happened on May 11, but…
You can now get Google Play Store apps promoted in places other than the Play Store. It was released last week at Google’s I/O 2024 developer conference. The company talked about a plan to get people to use apps they already have on their phones again, as well as new ones, by giving app writers a place to show off their work in a new way. More than 35 software partners have already signed up to test the new service. Companies like Shopify, Spotify, Pinterest, and Tumblr are just a few of them. The company went into a bit more…
Microsoft wants to make creative AI a big part of Windows and the PCs that run it. This week, at an opening event before its annual Build developer conference, the company showed off a new line of Windows computers it calls Copilot+ PCs. The computers also have generative AI-powered features like Recall that help users find apps, files, and other content they’ve seen before. Copilot is Microsoft’s brand of creative AI, and it will soon be a lot more built into Windows 11. Also, new Microsoft Surface gadgets are on the way. All the important news has been put together…
One of the characters that ChatGPT uses is being taken away by OpenAI. The company revealed on Monday that users thought it sounded like Scarlett Johansson. In response, Johansson said in a statement that she had hired a lawyer to look into the Sky voice and find out exactly how it was made. The game Sky is being stopped because OpenAI used it last week to show off its new GPT-4o model. According to the company in a blog post, AI voices shouldn’t try to sound like famous people. For example, Sky’s voice is not a copy of Scarlett Johansson’s;…
Dog Gun It Agence France-Presse reports that the Chinese military recently showed off a bunch of robot dogs with machine guns on their backs during the country’s biggest-ever drill with Cambodian troops. The scary robodogs with guns were part of “Golden Dragon,” a huge 15-day military drill that took place in a remote training center in central Cambodia and off the coast of the country. People from the press watched as staff walked the robodogs during the drill. The machine guns that were attached to their backs were apparently never fired. This is a scary picture of how war might…
But Mark Gurman says that’s only true if you’re turning in for an iPhone 15 model.If you’ve been holding on to an older iPhone model, now might be a good time to change. According to Mark Gurman of Bloomberg, Apple will start giving a little more than usual for trade-ins next week in the US and Canada. Even though the company hasn’t said anything about the deal, Gurman says that buyers will be able to get it in-store and use the credit toward any iPhone 15 model. According to reports, this will begin this Monday and last until June 3.…
Before the AI safety meeting starts later this week in Seoul, South Korea, the UK, which is also hosting it, is stepping up its own work in the area. They opened a new office in San Francisco. The AI Safety Institute is a U.K. group that was created in November 2023 with the big goal of evaluating and fixing risks in AI systems. The goal is to get closer to where AI is being developed the most. Some of the most important companies in AI are based in the Bay Area. These include OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta. Generated AI…
Under the terms of the deal, OpenAI will use Reddit’s data to teach its AI models. The company said in a blog post on its press relations website that the relationship with Reddit will give it access to “real-time, structured and unique content” from Reddit, such as posts and replies. This will help its tools and models “better understand and showcase” that content. OpenAI’s famous conversational AI, ChatGPT, will use content from Reddit. The two companies will also work together to give Reddit users and moderators new “AI-powered features.” OpenAI will also work with Reddit to show ads. “OpenAI’s platform…
This was Mark Zuckerberg’s 40th birthday present from his wife. With a sly smile, Zuckerberg smiles at the camera while sitting in a carefully made copy of his childhood bedroom. There’s a lava lamp, a participation trophy, and a white stuffed dog, all of which are very childish. But the environment foreshadows the cultural-shifting, technological force that Zuckerberg would build. A framed sepia-toned picture of what looks like a young Zuckerberg poses in his desk chair the same way he does now, with one arm over the back of the chair and the other over his legs spread out. The…
A public sample of Microsoft’s custom Cobalt 100 chips will be given to the public at its Build conference next week, CEO of Microsoft’s Cloud and AI group, Scott Guthrie, directly compared Cobalt to AWS’s Graviton chips, which developers have been able to use for a number of years, in a meeting for analysts before Build. Guthrie said that Microsoft’s chips will be 40% faster than other ARM chips on the market. The new chips are already being used by Adobe, Snowflake, and other companies. Microsoft first talked about its Cobalt chips in November of last year. These 64-bit chips…
During its Upfronts presentation on Wednesday, Netflix said it is starting its own advertising technology platform. This comes just over a year and a half after Netflix started selling ads. With this move, it goes up against big names in the business that have ad servers, such as Google, Amazon, and Comcast. The news means that the streaming giant will be advertising in a very different way going forward. When Netflix first started making ads, it worked with Microsoft to make them. This helped the company get into the ad business quickly and catch up to competitors like Hulu, which…
The European Commission said Thursday that Facebook and Instagram are being officially looked into because of worries about child safety. Since the bloc’s new online rules, the Digital Services Act (DSA), went into effect last August, parent company Meta has been asked for a lot of information. This is what the procedures are about. This could be a big deal because the formal procedures give EU law enforcers more investigative power, like the ability to do things like inspect offices or take temporary measures. Any proven violations of the DSA could lead to fines of up to 6% of Meta’s…
Let’s say you’re sitting on a park bench and looking at your phone while doing nothing. Boom. This thing is taken by someone and they run off with it. There are already some safety features built into Android and iOS, but what about the few seconds when the phone is unlocked? Is there a way to wipe it from afar? In that short time, thieves can get to a lot of data. Each second is important. Google revealed on Wednesday and at its Google I/O 2024 developer conference that Theft Detection Lock, a new feature for Android that will help…
Today is the day you’ve been waiting all year for: the Google I/O address! Every year, Google starts its developer meeting with a lot of announcements, including many shows of new things it’s been working on. Brian started things off by telling us what to expect. You might not have had time to watch the whole two-hour presentation on Tuesday, so we did it for you. We gave you quick hits of the most important news from the keynote as they were released in a list that was easy to read and skim. Let’s go! Genkit For Firebase Firebase Genkit…
There’s a good chance that you use apps like Cash App and Venmo to split bills with your roommates or pay your friends back. Lydia is a French company that also made a payment app and service for mobile users. The company is now in an interesting spot after getting 8 million users. Does it want to raise the average amount of money each user makes by adding more banking services? Or does it want to make its app easier to use so that as many people as possible can give and receive money from their phones with Lydia? The…
Facebook used to want to be a big part of business communication and efficiency, but today, Meta, the company that owns Facebook, will end a very important part of that story. Meta is shutting down Workplace, a version of Facebook that was made to help business teams and larger organizations talk to each other. Our sources tell us that the company plans to make an official announcement later today. We have reached out to the company for confirmation. From what the sources say, things will go on as normal on the platform until the beginning of September 2025, or August…
The software that controls Waymo’s self-driving cars is being looked into by federal regulators after 22 reports of the robotaxis crashing or possibly breaking traffic rules by driving in the wrong lane or into construction zones. The Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says the investigation is meant to test the software and see how well it avoids hitting fixed objects and recognizes and reacts to “traffic safety control devices” like cones. The study is called a “preliminary evaluation,” and the ODI aims to finish it in eight months. As part of its plan…
Foodpanda, a service owned by Delivery Hero, will be bought by Uber Technologies for $950 million in cash on Tuesday. The deal is part of Uber Eats’ plan to grow in Asia, especially in Taiwan, by making its position stronger there. Also, the sale comes at the same time that Delivery Hero is trying to sell off a bunch of its other businesses in Southeast Asia, which shows that the company is moving away from that market. Uber is also getting a piece of Delivery Hero as part of the deal. It is going to buy $300 million worth of…
OpenAI released GPT-4o, their newest top-level generative AI model, on Monday. The “o” stands for “omni,” which means the model can handle text, speech, and video. GPT-4o will be added to the company’s developer and consumer goods in small steps over the next few weeks. OpenAI CTO Mira Murati said that GPT-4o has “GPT-4-level” intelligence but is better than GPT-4 in many ways and with more types of media. On Monday, Murati gave a live streamed talk at OpenAI’s offices in San Francisco. He said, “GPT-4o thinks across voice, text, and vision.” “And this is very important because we’re looking…
AI-powered tools like OpenAI’s Whisper have made it possible for many note-taking apps to include transcribing as a core feature. As a result, the space has grown quickly. Many apps, including AudioPen, Cleft Notes, and TalkNotes, are available in app stores and on the Internet. However, most of them don’t have many features. You can record and transcribe notes, and some even sum them up. There’s still a lot of ground to cover in terms of features. This is the first time that Voicenotes has been used. Voicenotes was created by Jijo Sunny, founder of the creator-tipping platform Buymeacoffee, and…
India’s second-largest telecom company, Airtel, announced on Monday that it has formed a long-term relationship with Google Cloud to create and offer cloud-based and generative AI products to Indian companies. The goal of the partnership is to use Airtel’s big customer base, which the company says has a million new businesses and 2,000 large businesses. The businesses want to provide AI solutions, such as creative AI, which Airtel will train with its huge amounts of data. As part of their partnership, Airtel and Google Cloud will offer geospatial analytics, location intelligence for spotting trends, predictive tools, market analysis, site selection,…
This past weekend was a busy one for trying to form a union at U.S. Apple stores. At one store, the union decided to allow a strike, while at another store, workers voted against joining a union. It was in 2022 that workers in Towson, Maryland, formed the first official union at an Apple shop. The workers in that union, which is part of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, decided on Saturday to go on strike. The date of this possible strike has not been set yet. The IAM CORE Negotiating Committee said in a statement, “Today’s…