Thursday, January 23, 2025

Welcome to TC PM! Today we are learning about OpenAI's much-anticipated AI agent; we dig into a startup that is building a platform to evaluate AI agents; and we have some great news for mobile gamers.

TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: OpenAI

🤖 More AI agents: AI agents have been the talk of the proverbial AI town this year. OpenAI announced today that it is launching a research preview of Operator, a general-purpose AI agent that takes control of a web browser and can perform certain actions. Read more

😬 Subaru security flaw: Two security researchers found a vulnerability in Subaru's web portal that could allow a hacker to hijack a car's controls and track a car's location. Subaru has fixed the vulnerability but security researchers aren't sure it's enough. Read more

🔮 The future of AI: Meta's chief AI scientist Yann LeCun had quite a few things to say at Davos. He thinks that a new paradigm of AI architectures will emerge in the next five years, and he said the current large language model paradigm has a short shelf life. Read more

A Message from West Monroe

The high-tech and software industry's 2025 roadmap

An eye toward growth, reimagined data and the AI transition: What's trending.

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Afternoon must-reads

Image Credits: Coval

🔎 Speaking of AI agents: While AI agents are exploding onto the tech scene, enterprises are hesitant to adopt them because they aren't sure how reliably they work. Coval is a new startup that looks to evaluate AI agents the same way Coval's founder used to evaluate self-driving cars at Waymo. Read more

🤗 Smol models: AI developer platform Hugging Face released a set of models that it says are the smallest models able to analyze images, short videos, and text. The models are designed to work on "constrained devices" like laptops. Read more

📣 Trump puts the EU on blast: The president isn't happy with how EU regulators have treated U.S. tech giants and called the treatment "a form of taxation." Trump took particular aim at a court case last year that resulted in Apple paying €13 billion in back taxes to Ireland. Read more

👀 Another agent (kinda): It was a big day for those tracking the AI agent space. AI-powered search engine company Perplexity announced Perplexity Assistant, which will help assist users with daily tasks and sounds quite similar to an AI agent. Read more

🤑 More money for X: Elon Musk's X grew its in-app revenue over the past year despite a decline in active users. Users spent $7.6 million in the first three weeks of 2024 compared to $13.4 million in the same time period this year. Read more

Around the web

💰 CZ's next move: Just a few months after getting released from prison, Changpeng Zhao, the former founder of crypto company Binance, is turning the venture arm of Binance into a family office. The portfolio contains $10 billion of crypto-related assets. Read more

♻️ Let's try that again: I don't think I'm alone in saying I have streaming service fatigue. It seems like a new one is launched every other week. CNN is apparently developing a new streaming service that sounds a lot like the one it killed three years ago. Read more

Before you go

Image Credits: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto / Getty Images

🕹️ More games: Epic Games is adding third-party games to its mobile store and helping developers cover associated iOS fees. Epic is also launching a free games program, where new free games will hit the store each month. Read more