Wednesday, June 25, 2024

Welcome to TechCrunch AM! It's Ram again, taking over for Rebecca today. This morning, we're reading about Kodiak Robotics tapping remote-driving tech for its driverless trucks; an effort to make AI more empathetic; Facebook's moderation snafu; reusable satellites; AI with an eye for fashion, and much more. Let's dive in!

TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: Kodiak Robotics/Vay

1. The humans behind the robots: Kodiak Robotics' self-driving trucks are not as driverless as the marketing implies: TC's Kirsten Korosec reports that the company's trucks use some remote-driving tech made by a German driverless car-sharing startup called Vay. Read More

2. Yes, please: AI benchmarks usually focus on how good new models are at logic, knowledge retrieval, and completing tasks, but there's a quiet movement to make AI models more empathetic. Open source group LAION has released a suite of tools called EmoNet that focus on interpreting emotions from voice recordings or facial photography. Read More

3. AI with the banhammer? Thousands of Facebook groups were banned yesterday due a glitch in Meta's systems, not long after users on Instagram and Facebook were banned in masses. Meta's calling it a "technical error," though some people think it might have to do with AI being used for moderation. Read More

Morning Must-Reads

Image Credits: Synthflow AI

💰 There's always money in customer support: Synthflow, a startup out of Berlin, has raised a cool $20 million Series A for its no-code platform that lets companies build and customize voice-enabled AI customer service agents. The company launched in early 2024 and now processes over five million calls a month. Read More

🌳 Going green in space: You've heard of astronauts recycling water. How about satellites? Denver-based Lux Aeterna has designed a reusable satellite that it aims to launch in 2027. If it's viable, the project would help slash the cost of launching satellite payloads into space. Read More

👠 The AI wants you to wear Prada: E-commerce veteran Julie Bornstein's Daydream's much-touted AI shopping assistant is now available in public beta. Users can ask the chatbot for suggestions and it'll surface relevant apparel and accessories based on a "style passport," which it builds according to users' preferences. Read More

🚨 What could go wrong: Ring doorbells and cameras can now provide AI-powered text descriptions of motion that they detect around your property. Hopefully it'll be an improvement over the vague notifications the devices have given so far, and any biases are being accounted for. Read More

A Message from Onshape

Accelerate Your Hardware Startup with Onshape's Startup Program

The Onshape Startup Program supports founders with cloud-native CAD—whether you need robust product development or ITAR/EAR-ready workflows on AWS GovCloud.

Around the Web

📺 More pixels than you can see: Get ready for even more expensive TVs. The new HDMI 2.2 spec is out, and it supports a maximum of 16K resolution at 60 frames per second, reports The Verge. That's nuts, but thankfully 16K content is still several years away. Read More

☀️ Yay for climate: Klarna co-founder Niklas Adalberth's venture firm Norrsken VC is planning to pour €300 million into AI startups that are working on the climate crisis so many people have forgotten about, Bloomberg reports. Ideal investments would include companies trying to improve data center power efficiency, the firm says. Read More

Before You Go

🔧 Putting tools in the workshop: In a bid to get more developers to use its AI products, Google has launched Gemini CLI, an "agentic" AI tool that can run within the terminal itself and connects AI models to your codebases directly. Read More