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…
Author: David
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…
Have you ever thought about why chatbots like ChatGPT say things like “Sorry, I can’t do that” or some other nice no? OpenAI is only giving a small glimpse into the thinking behind its own models’ rules of behaviour, like following brand guidelines or not making NSFW material. Big language models (LLMs) don’t have any built-in limits on what they can or will say. In some ways, that makes them so useful, but it also makes them imagine and fool easily. Any AI model that deals with people needs to have some rules about what it can and can’t do.…
Match Group owns several dating apps, such as Tinder and Hinge. On Tuesday, the company posted its first-quarter earnings report, which shows that Tinder’s paying users have gone down for the sixth quarter in a row. Hinge, on the other hand, has more users who are willing to pay for the app. In the first quarter of 2024, Tinder had 10 million paid users, which is 9% less than the same time last year. Also, Hinge now has 1.4 million paid users, which is 31% more than the same time last year. Because of changes in the way people use…
The company said on Thursday that TikTok will begin automatically labelling AI-generated video that was made on other platforms. With this change, if a creator puts on TikTok content that was made with a service like OpenAI’s DALL·E 3, it will have a label that says “AI-generated” next to it to let people know that it was made with AI. Content Credentials is a technology from the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), which was started by Microsoft and Adobe. The social video platform is using it to do this. Content Credentials add certain metadata to content, which TikTok…
As of Wednesday, Samsung Medison, a division of Samsung Electronics that makes medical devices for diagnostic imaging, said it would buy Sonio, a company in Paris that makes AI-powered software for ultrasound workflows, for about $92.7 million (KRW 126 billion). The French company’s AI assistant is meant to help obstetricians and gynecologists evaluate and record ultrasound exams. The company has also been given FDA 510(k) approval for Sonio Detect, a product that uses deep learning algorithms to improve the image quality of ultrasound scans in real time. The company that makes Samsung Medison said that Sonio’s software would help it…
Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, has said that lidar devices are a “crutch” for self-driving cars. In fact, his company has bought so many from Luminar that it is now their biggest buyer. In the first quarter of 2024, Tesla brought in “more than 10%,” or a little more than $2 million, of Luminar’s income, the lidar company said in its earnings report released Tuesday. Luminar said that its sales dropped 5% from the fourth quarter of 2023 to the current quarter. It mostly said this was because “lower sensor sales to non-automotive customers.” But “sensor sales to Tesla,…
Google launched its digital wallet in India on Wednesday, with local features. This comes almost two years after the app was remade in the U.S. as a digital wallet platform. According to an exclusive story from TechCrunch last month, Google Wallet will work in India along with the current Google Pay app. Google Pay will still be the company’s payments app in India. In February, Google switched from the Pay app to Wallet in the U.S. “Google Pay isn’t going away.” At a news conference in New Delhi, Ram Papatla, general manager and India engineering lead for Android at Google,…
The U.K.-based startup Wayve has raised $1.05 billion in Series C funding led by SoftBank Group. The money will be used to build a self-learning system for self-driving cars instead of a rule-based system. This is one of the biggest AI fundraises ever in the UK and one of the twenty biggest AI fundraises ever in the world. Nvidia and Microsoft, which was already a partner, also took part in the raise. Yann LeCun, who is the head of AI at Meta, was one of Wayve’s early backers. The Cambridge-based business Wayve was started in 2017 and raised $200 million…
The launch of Boeing’s Starliner tonight has been pushed back “out of an abundance of caution.” The historic launch was supposed to happen just two hours ago. It is said that the scrub was necessary because of a problem with the oxygen release valve on the upper stage of the Atlas V rocket. On May 7, 10, and 11, there are backup launch times. The mission will be Boeing’s first try to send astronauts to the International Space Station. It has been years in the making and has cost over $1 billion more than planned. After fixing the problem with…
The Met Gala is a big deal, whether you like or dislike celebrities. Those of us who aren’t too jaded get to see all the biggest stars take the biggest fashion risks of the year. Unlike an award show, this event supports avant-garde extravagance. It’s funny that Ed Sheeran’s outfit looks like something Troy Bolton wore in High School Musical 3. For those who think the whole thing is dull. The Met Gala This Year, Though, Was A Test “Oh, Katy Perry. “That’s it,” one X post said. Katy Perry looks like she is wearing a big dress in the…
In November of last year, Adam D’Angelo was at the center of one of the biggest scandals in the tech business. The board of OpenAI, the $80 billion startup that started the AI trend, fired its CEO, Sam Altman, all of a sudden, but then brought him back a few days later. Altman was fired by the board, and D’Angelo was (and still is) on the board that hired him back. Because of the changes that followed, he was the only one who held their seat while most of the other board members left. OpenAI was having a rough time,…
The government of President Joe Biden wants to fund projects that use digital twins to make the process of making semiconductors better. Digital twins are computer models that are used to test and improve real-world processes and objects. Automobile companies, for instance, want to use digital twins of their plants to try out new ways of making things without stopping production. The Biden administration said it would be accepting applications for what it thinks will be a total of $285 million in funding for work that includes building and supporting combined physical and digital facilities, industry demonstration projects, training for…
The 122-megapixel pictures taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, which is 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, are making progress in astronomy. Really cool stuff. But the space agency’s newest sky-peeper does something different: it uses 36 pixels to do groundbreaking science in space. There really are 36 pixels, not 36 megapixels. A project called XRISM, which stands for “crism,” is a partnership between NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). It was launched into space last September and has been searching the universe ever since for answers to some of science’s hardest problems. Resolve, the mission’s imaging tool,…
“I think the Space Force will be involved in going to the moon at some point,” says a Republican politician. As humanity continues its trip into space to find new things and possible ways for people to stay alive, there is a chance that superpowers will try to get ahead in this race to strengthen their control over the world. Some of the most powerful countries in the world are thinking about sending their armies into space to keep their rivals in check. This is in addition to science explorations and trying to figure out how these things work. Ken…
As you enter Startups Weekly, Haje will tell you about all the important news in the world of startups for the past week. If you sign up here, it will come to your email every Friday. Musk’s 10-month-old baby, xAI, is getting close to a huge $6 billion funding round. The social network X, which used to be called Twitter and is also part of Elon’s tech family, has already bought shares. At first, the deal was only meant to bring in $3 billion, but as more people wanted to join, the price went up. Musk’s friends from Sequoia Capital,…
X, which used to be Twitter, now uses Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok to power a feature in the Explore section of the app that summarizes the personalized popular stories. A post and screenshots from the X Engineering team on Friday say that Premium subscribers will be able to read a summary of posts on X that are related to each popular story on the For You tab in Explore. The “For You” page shows you the news and stories that are popular in your network and are being shared across X’s platform, along with other suggestions. It’s one of…
In a new filing, Google fights back against Epic Games’ many suggested solutions to the problem that a court found Google did things on its Play Store that hurt competition. After the jury’s decision at the end of last year, both sides made their points for why Google should have to change how it acts because of the decision. Epic Games, for its part, made a very long list of demands, such as being able to use the Play Store’s library of apps and games for six years, being able to put its own app store on Google Play for…
There will be new iPad Pros, iPad Airs, the Apple Pencil, and maybe even the M4 chip. It’s still hard to believe that the “Let Loose” event on May 7 is even going to happen. This event was planned even though Apple’s annual Worldwide Developer Conference is still more than a month away. The company felt there was enough news to support its own event. The focus will be on iPads, such as the iPad Pro and iPad Air. The Apple Pencil, which has been ignored for a long time, is finally getting some love. It was, after all, the…
Microsoft has made it clear again that U.S. police forces can’t use Azure OpenAI Service, the company’s fully managed, enterprise-focused wrapper around OpenAI tech, to use generative AI for facial recognition. New language added to Azure OpenAI Service’s terms of service on Wednesday makes it clearer that integrations with Azure OpenAI Service can’t be used “by or for” U.S. police departments for facial recognition. This includes integrations with OpenAI’s current image-analyzing models and maybe even future models. There is a new bullet point that says “any law enforcement globally” can’t use “real-time facial recognition technology” on mobile cameras like body…
National space agencies have always been the only ones allowed to explore Mars. But NASA is trying to change that by giving private companies a dozen research projects as a way to get them involved in future missions to the Red Planet. It’s the second time in a month that the agency has shown it wants private companies to help with trips to Mars. Earlier this month, they pretty much scrapped the original Mars Sample Return mission in favor of an alternative that hasn’t been decided yet but is likely to be run by private space companies. Nine companies were…
It’s still not clear how many Americans were affected by the cyberattack two months after hackers broke into Change Healthcare systems and stole and then encrypted business data. CEO of UnitedHealth Group, which owns Change Healthcare, Andrew Witty said last month that the stolen files contain personal health information for “a substantial proportion of people in America.” At a House meeting on Wednesday, Witty was asked for a more specific answer. When pushed, he said that the breach affected “maybe a third [of Americans] or somewhere on that level.” Witty said he couldn’t give a more exact answer because the…
Once again, TikTok users can make music videos with songs from UMG’s library. This includes songs by Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, and Ariana Grande, among others. That’s because, after months of fighting, the social media site and Universal Music Group (UMG) have finally come to an agreement on how to license material. There was no information about how much the deal cost. The move comes at a very bad time for the business. TikTok is once again in danger of being banned in important countries, such as the United States. So getting this deal with UMG is important not only…
Radeon was fined $1.1 million by the Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday. The order says that the company that made gaming accessories lied to customers when it said that its flashy Zephyr mask was approved as N95-grade. In the middle of a global pandemic, these companies lied when they said that their face mask was the same as a N95 approved respirator, according to a statement from FTC Bureau of Consumer Projection Director Samuel Levine. “The FTC will continue to take action against companies that make false or unproven claims to get people to make decisions about their health and…
Tesla has fired most of its charging team, even though it has recently won over big automakers like Ford and General Motors and made its connection the standard in North America. Tesla’s network of Superchargers has been seen as one of its biggest benefits for a long time. There are a lot of them, and they work much better than other charging networks. The connector technology, which is called the North American Charging Standard (NACS), is now being used by almost all big automakers in North America. The Information was the first to report that CEO Elon Musk told executives…
TikTok might be going around the App Store to avoid paying fees. New information shows that the social video app run by ByteDance is giving some of its users a link to a website where they can buy the coins that are used to tip digital creators. Usually, these coins are bought through an in-app payment, which means Apple gets 30% of the price. There’s a chance that most people can’t see the feature. This could be on purpose, or it could be that only testers or high-spenders can see it. In any case, people who can see the new…
Is an IDE with AI the way of the future for making software? GitHub is throwing out the idea. GitHub launched Copilot Workspace before its annual GitHub Universe conference in San Francisco early this fall. Copilot Workspace is a development environment that uses “Copilot-powered agents” to help developers use natural language to come up with ideas, plan, build, test, and run code. Jonathan Carter, who is in charge of GitHub’s software research and development team called GitHub Next, says that Workspace is like a more general version of Copilot, GitHub’s AI-powered coding assistant. It builds on new features like Copilot…
Employees who were laid off say that Google fired people from key teams like Flutter, Dart, Python, and others before its annual I/O developer meeting in May. The news was shared on social media by those who were affected. Google told TechCrunch that they were letting people go, but they wouldn’t say which teams or jobs were affected or how many people were let go. Alex GarcÃa-Kummert, a spokesperson for Google, said, “As we’ve said, we’re responsibly investing in our company’s biggest priorities and the big opportunities ahead.” “To get ready for these chances, many of our teams made changes…
Finally, there is one thing that everyone can agree on: big tech companies like Facebook and Google are too powerful. A poll by the Pew Research Center found that 78% of American adults think social media companies have too much power over politics. Of those polled, 84% were Republicans and 74% were Democrats. In general, this point of view has grown 6% more common since the last election. The way Americans feel about social media is similar to how their lawmakers feel. Recently, attempts to hold social media companies accountable have been some of the few political issues that have…
Federal safety officials are looking into Ford’s BlueCruise hands-free driving assistance system after it was used in two recent crashes into stationary cars that killed several people. ODI, which is part of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, stated on Monday that BlueCruise was involved in both accidents. One was in Texas in February, and the other was in Pennsylvania in early April. These people are the first known to have died in crashes involving BlueCruise. BlueCruise is now offered on the Mustang Mach-E and some Ford F-150s, including the Lightning, Explorers, and Expeditions. The investigations into the two crashes…
OpenAI, the company that made the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT, has gotten another news licensing deal in Europe. The Financial Times in London is the latest publication that OpenAI is paying to access its material. Like other publishing licensing deals OpenAI has made in the past, the financial details of this one are not being made public. The latest agreement between OpenAI and a publisher sounds a little cozier than other recent ones, like the ones with Axel Springer in Germany or the AP, Le Monde, and Prisa Media in France and Spain. The two companies are calling it a…
The European Union will apply its most important market fairness and contestability rules to Apple’s iPadOS, the Commission announced today. This means that the Digital Markets Act (DMA) will now apply to four Apple-owned platforms, which increases the regulatory risk for the tech giant by including its tablet ecosystem. There are six months left for Apple to make sure that iPadOS is in line with the DMA. Apple may have to make big changes to how it runs its tablet platform in the EU to make sure it meets a lot of DMA rules. For example, so-called “gatekeepers” won’t be…
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration ended a long-running investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot driver assistance system after looking at hundreds of crashes where it was used incorrectly. Thirteen of these crashes were fatal, and “many more” involved major injuries. At the same time, the NHTSA is starting a new review to see if the fix Tesla made to the Autopilot recall in December works well enough. In papers made public on Friday, the NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation said it had finished “an extensive body of work” that showed “Tesla’s weak driver engagement system was not appropriate for Autopilot’s permissive…