Uber’s subscription service reportedly target of FTC probe

The Federal Trade Commission is investigating Uber over whether it broke consumer protection laws by allegedly automatically signing people up for its Uber One subscription service and making it hard to cancel, according to Bloomberg News. The investigation was opened earlier this year after the FTC received customer complaints. Uber told Bloomberg that its cancellation […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Published: 2024-11-27 22:07:39

Pony AI’s valuation hits $5.25B after Nasdaq debut

Published: 2024-11-27 21:42:00

Alibaba releases an ‘open’ challenger to OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model

A new so-called “reasoning” AI model, QwQ-32B-Preview, has arrived on the scene. It’s one of the few to rival OpenAI’s o1, and it’s the first available to download under a permissive license. Developed by Alibaba’s Qwen team, QwQ-32B-Preview contains 32.5 billion parameters and can consider prompts up ~32,000 words in length; it performs better on […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Published: 2024-11-27 21:30:55

Spotify cuts developer access to several of its recommendation features

Spotify will no longer allow developers building third-party apps with its Web API to access several features within the music streaming platform, such as song and artist recommendations, the company announced in a developer blog post on Wednesday. The company appears to be limiting third-party developers from building AI apps using data from Spotify listeners. […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Published: 2024-11-27 21:22:12

Investigators think a Chinese ship purposefully cut critical data cables

European investigators believe that a Chinese commercial ship purposefully dragged its anchor in order to slash through two critical data cables. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Published: 2024-11-27 21:01:31

DIY and synth-curious? Try putting together the analog POM-400 from Teenage Engineering

The Pocket Operator Modular 400 from Teenage Engineering is an analog modular synthesizer that you put together yourself. If you’re at all interested in DIY kits or synths, this might be a great weekend project. You bend the bright yellow chassis into shape to start, mounting the various modules into place with tiny little screws. […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Published: 2024-11-27 20:55:50

T-Mobile says telco hackers had ‘no access’ to customer call and text message logs

The phone giant said hackers did not access the contents or logs of customer phone calls or text messages, during an industry-wide attack on phone and internet companies. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Published: 2024-11-27 20:19:28

Threads now lets you swipe between different feeds right from the home screen

Threads is rolling out a redesign that keeps your feeds visible on the home screen, Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced on Wednesday. The redesign allows you to quickly swipe between different feeds just like you can on X. The change is rolling out on Android on Wednesday, and will launch on iOS in the coming […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Published: 2024-11-27 20:15:30

Google Gemini’s Imagen 3 lets players design their own chess pieces

Google Labs, the experimental arm of the tech giant, has introduced a new online project that offers an entertaining variation of the game of chess. The web experiment is named GenChess, which, as the name implies, uses Gemini Imagen 3, Google’s image generation model, allowing players to customize their own chess pieces using text prompts. […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Published: 2024-11-27 18:18:37

This Week in AI: AI gets creative in the kitchen

Hiya, folks, welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. If you want this in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. It’s nearly Thanksgiving, and you know what that means: stuffing your face to the point of comatosis. Well, that and entertaining all the unsavory relatives you manage to keep at bay the rest of the year. […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Published: 2024-11-27 18:05:00

Meta’s Threads is developing its own take on Bluesky’s ‘Starter Packs’

Hoping to quell some of the momentum behind social network Bluesky, a competitor to X and Meta’s Threads, Meta is developing a feature that takes inspiration from one of Bluesky’s more popular additions: the concept of “Starter Packs,” or hand-curated lists of suggested users that help newcomers find people to follow. Meta’s version of these […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Published: 2024-11-27 17:37:26

OpenAI moves to trademark its o1 ‘reasoning’ models

OpenAI has filed a trademark application for its latest AI model, o1, as the firm moves to shield its IP. On Tuesday, OpenAI submitted paperwork to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to register the trademark “OpenAI o1.” Interestingly, the documents reveal that OpenAI filed for a foreign trademark application in Jamaica in May, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Published: 2024-11-27 17:17:19

Marc Andreessen, Joe Lonsdale, and all the other VCs reportedly in the running for DOGE and other Trump committees

With Elon Musk playing such a high-profile role in Donald Trump’s transition team, Musk’s buddies, many of them Silicon Valley venture capitalists, are reportedly being tapped to help out. For instance, VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, and in particular co-founder Marc Andreessen, is repeatedly being mentioned. He, along with Antonio Gracias and Joe Lonsdale, are reportedly […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Published: 2024-11-27 17:10:37

ElevenLabs’ new feature is a NotebookLM competitor for creating GenAI podcasts

Voice AI startup ElevenLabs on Wednesday introduced a feature that lets you upload different types of content to create a multispeaker podcast for you, similar to Google’s NotebookLM. The feature, called GenFM, can be found on the company’s ElevenLabs Reader iOS app. Currently, GenFM supports 32 languages, including English, Hindi, Portuguese, Chinese, Spanish, French, German, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Published: 2024-11-27 17:00:00

TuSimple co-founder demands liquidation, sues company for control of his shares

Xiaodi Hou, the co-founder and former CEO of self-driving truck startup TuSimple, is demanding that the board immediately liquidate the company and return all remaining funds — roughly $450 million — to shareholders “on a pure pro-rata basis, regardless of share class,” according to a letter that TechCrunch has viewed. Hou is also suing TuSimple […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Published: 2024-11-27 16:48:45

Elon Musk’s AI company may release a consumer app

Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, is reportedly preparing to release a stand-alone consumer app. That’s according to The Wall Street Journal, which reports that the upcoming app will be similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, allowing users to access xAI’s Grok chatbot from their personal devices. The app will likely arrive after xAI closes its next funding […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Published: 2024-11-27 16:46:29

TikTok will restrict some beauty filters for people under 18

TikTok is now the go-to social network for more than a billion users, bringing it to the attention of 14 U.S. attorneys general, who recently announced they were suing the company over its negative impact on minors’ mental health, as well as for harvesting their data. A subsequent report indicated that the company’s own research […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Published: 2024-11-27 13:11:55

Scaling startups is top priority as EU reboots its top team

Europe must get much better at scaling startups. That’s the prognosis of the European Union’s president, Ursula von der Leyen, who’s on the cusp of taking up her second five-year term steering the bloc of some 449 million people — with a December 1 start date now locked in. Giving a speech to the European […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Published: 2024-11-27 12:34:06

Bluesky’s open API means anyone can scrape your data for AI training

Bluesky might not be training AI systems on user content as other social networks are doing, but there’s little stopping third parties from doing so. Per a report by 404 Media, Daniel van Strien, a machine learning librarian at AI firm Hugging Face, pulled 1 million public posts from Bluesky via its Firehose API for […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Published: 2024-11-27 11:06:03

Audio platform Pocket FM taps into AI tools to help it expand its content catalog

India-based audio platform Pocket FM has more than 200,000 hours of content on the service. However, the company’s CEO, Rohan Nayak, believes that the platform still has room to grow in terms of creating original content and expanding its library to multiple genres and subgenres. The fastest way to do that is to tap into […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Published: 2024-11-27 10:01:00

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