Tuesday, October 22, 2024

Good afternoon, everyone, I'm Dominic-Madori Davis, your guest writer today. We have some big stories to round up, including the latest news regarding Anthropic's AI model, the SEC's fines, and the bug that caused some LinkedIn users to lose a bunch of followers.

TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: Anthropic

🚀 Claude updates: Anthropic released an update of its Claude 3.5 AI model, which can interact with desktop apps. The company told investors last spring that it intended to build an AI assistant that can perform tasks such as answering emails and research; it seems that tech is well on its way. Read more

💰 First time's a charm: Customer automation platform Interface.ai raised $30 million to help banks automate customer service requests. This is the first time the company has raised outside capital. Read more

📍 Goodbye, old friend: Foursquare is shutting down its famous City Guide on December 15, according to founder Dennis Crowley. The web version of Foursquare's City Guide app is also set to shut down soon. Read more

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Afternoon must-reads

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

📸 Better images? Stability AI released an updated model that will generate more diverse images, including those that depict people with different skin tones and features. It also released two other models, including one that generates images faster and another that is better optimized to run on devices like smartphones. Read more

😬 More hacks: Security researchers have linked one of the year's biggest digital supply chain attacks to a company that was redirecting internet users to some copycat gambling sites. The researchers released a report mapping out what happened and what the attackers were after. Read more

💸 Fines and more fines: The SEC handed down fines totaling $7 million to four companies for making misleading disclosures during the 2019 SolarWinds data breach. The SEC said each company tried to downplay the severity of its breach. Read more

📉 Numbers go down: LinkedIn users today noticed that their follower counts were dropping. Many speculated that LinkedIn was purging bots from the platform, until LinkedIn announced later in the day that it was a bug, not on purpose. Read more

🔨 Making it official: More than 60 companies, nonprofits, and universities signed a letter calling on Congress to codify the U.S. AI Safety Institute, which studies AI risk, before the end of the year. OpenAI was among those that signed. Read more

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Around the web

🙋 What's up with SoLo Funds? The company has run into legal challenges in the past few years, and most recently is facing a class-action lawsuit alleging misleading business practices that are deceiving consumers. Bloomberg has more

🍿 Netflix's changes: The streaming giant is no longer trying to build a legacy video game, like Microsoft's Halo or Sony's God of War, and has laid off the team of around 30 people who were building it. The Wall Street Journal reports that Netflix will, however, focus on building more "casual" games. Read more