Friday, August 30, 2024

Welcome to TC PM! Today we are looking into new AI safeguards that Google released in preparation for the upcoming election; a new crypto hack; and why Apple is doubling down on its decision to ban a group of developers from the App Store. Happy Friday!

TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

🤖 AI safeguards: Today Google announced a new slate of restrictions to its AI products in light of the upcoming election. The company previously announced it would restrict questions about the election to its Gemini model, and now it's adding safeguards to its other AI products. Read more

💻 Crypto hack: Today Microsoft released a report that stated it found evidence that Citrine Sleet, a North Korean hacking group, had exploited a previously unknown bug on Chrome with the mission to steal cryptocurrency. Read more

😮 WWDC developer banned: Apple is causing quite the kerfuffle in the app developer community this week. The company stood by its decision to ban one of its winning student developer teams from its 2021 Worldwide Developers Conference with claims the group's app violated its App Store policy. Read more

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Afternoon must-reads

Image Credits: Josh Edelson / AFP / Getty Images

🚗 Long road: Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi announced today that the company plans to double down on its ride-sharing business in South Korea. While Uber has seen double-digit growth in the region, it will be an uphill battle to take market share from local ride-hailing company Kakao Taxi. Read more

📱 Today's topic: TikTok is giving its users more control over what posts they see in their "For You" feed. The company announced a new feature today that allows users to manage the topics they see by using a slider to adjust how much they want to see of a certain topic. Read more

🎙️ Equity: On today's episode of Equity, the gang got into the recent arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov, the drama over at Fluid Truck and the recent rise of acquihires. Read more

🍵 Generative Jam: Video game studios continue to embrace generative AI. Jam & Tea Studios is implementing the tech for the non-playable characters in its games. This will allow these NPCs to converse with a game player as opposed to sticking to a predetermined script. Read more

🧸 KidGPT: Google and Amazon alumni have launched Hello Wonder, an AI-powered web browser for children. Hello Wonder's child-safe search engine was partially inspired by the Montessori method of learning, which involves letting children learn through the topics they are interested in. Read more

🗞️ Valuation haircut: Indian tech startup VerSe, which operates popular news aggregator Dailyhunt, isn't getting much love from its investors. One of the company's backers, 360 One, just internally marked the company's valuation down by 42%. Read more

🏠 Fee fight: Wow. Redfin moves fast. After TechCrunch posted a story yesterday about Landian, a startup offering a flat fee to folks looking at and putting offers on homes, Redfin spoke out today about why that model doesn't work. Read more

🤐 Come clean: Back in January, Carta was accused of using its customers' cap table data to support its secondary trading business. Investors got mad, and Carta shut down its secondary trading strategy. Today, Public announced it bought Carta's brokerage accounts. Read more

Around the web

🚦 Proceed with caution: Elon Musk is apparently a bit shaken up by the arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov. Today, Business Insider reported that Musk is going to be more cautious about where he travels and plans to stick to countries that have freedom of speech laws. Read more

📰 AI versus publications: The Verge has an interesting story out today that looks at the recent licensing deals between large AI models like OpenAI and the publications the AI companies already stole the data from to build their models. Read more