Category: Enterprise
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Meta takes aim at ex-employee’s memoir ‘Careless People’
Meta won a legal victory this week against Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former employee who recently published a memoir of her time at the company titled “Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism.” An arbitrator ruled that the company has made a valid argument that Wynn-Williams, who worked at Facebook (now Meta)…
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Apple reportedly considered building the iPhone 17 Air without ports
After reporting in January that Apple is adding an “Air” option to its iPhone lineup, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman is offering more details about the upcoming slimmer iPhone. The iPhone 17 Air will launch this fall, Gurman says — and like the MacBook Air, it will be thinner than standard models, while combining high-end and low-end…
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People are using Google’s new AI model to remove watermarks from images
Users on social media have discovered a controversial use case for Google’s new Gemini AI model: removing watermarks from images, including from images published by Getty Images and other well-known stock media outfits. Last week, Google expanded access to its Gemini 2.0 Flash model’s image generation feature, which lets the model natively generate and edit…
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Baidu launches two new versions of its AI model Ernie
Chinese search engine Baidu has launched two new AI models — Ernie 4.5, the latest version of the company’s foundational model first released two years ago, as well as a new reasoning model, Ernie X1. According to Reuters, Baidu claims that Ernie X1’s performance is “on par with DeepSeek R1 at only half the price,”,…
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Photo calorie app Cal AI, downloaded over a million times, was built by two teenagers
Cal AI has generated over 5 million downloads in 8 months, it says. Founders Zach Yadegari and Henry Langmack are just 18. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. Cal AI has generated over 5 million downloads in 8 months, it says. Founders Zach Yadegari and Henry Langmack are just 18.…
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VC Aileen Lee highlights how the broader investor exodus is worsening woes for unicorn companies
In this week’s episode of the StrictlyVC Download podcast, veteran VC Aileen Lee was direct about a major consequence of the recent boom-and-bust cycle: many companies stuck in limbo aren’t just struggling to regain their footing after raising too much money at unsustainable valuations; they’ve also lost the champions who once backed them. Lee was…
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Joby Aviation and Virgin Atlantic partner to launch electric air taxis in the UK
Joby Aviation is partnering with Virgin Atlantic to launch electric air taxis in the U.K., marking the seventh country in which the startup hopes to one day commercialize. Joby, which went public in 2021 via special purpose acquisition merger, did not provide a timeline for when it plans to launch its partnership with Virgin in…
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Amazon’s Echo will send all voice recordings to the cloud, starting March 28
Amazon Echo users will no longer have the option to process their Alexa requests locally, which means all of their voice recordings will be sent to the company’s cloud. Ars Technica reports that on Friday, Amazon sent an email to customers who have “Do Not Send Voice Recordings” enabled on their Echo smart speakers and…
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Week in Review: SXSW week comes to a close
Welcome back to Week in Review! I’m Karyne Levy, TechCrunch’s deputy managing editor, and I’ll be writing this newsletter from here on out. Thrilled to be here! This week we’re checking out everything at SXSW; Waymo’s expansion into Silicon Valley; Intel’s new CEO; TikTok’s new suitor; and why DeepSeek isn’t taking VC money. Let’s get…
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Bluesky users debate plans around user data and AI training
Social network Bluesky recently published a proposal on GitHub outlining new options it could give users to indicate whether they want their posts and data to be scraped for things like generative AI training and public archiving. CEO Jay Graber discussed the proposal earlier this week, while on-stage at South by Southwest, but it attracted…