Monday, May 20, 2024

Good afternoon, and welcome back to a new week of TechCrunch PM. We are starting off with some layoffs over at a unicorn, and we touch on some of our favorite topics like ChatGPT and Android and learning that the U.K. loves driverless cars. Enjoy!

TechCrunch Top 3

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SeekOut layoffs: TechCrunch learned that recruiting company SeekOut, which uses AI to find candidates, laid off 30% of its staff. This is the second set of layoffs for the company in a year. In a letter to staff, company leaders noted it was "spending roughly $2 to earn $1, and this last fiscal year, we incurred significant cash burn." With the cost of acquiring customers high these days, it's not a surprise that it can be difficult to keep up, even when flush with capital. Read more

GPT-4o is OpenAI's latest moneymaker: The newest ChatGPT mobile app might be a week old, but it is already setting records. Net revenue first jumped 22% on May 13 and continued to grow in the following days, according to Appfigures. On Tuesday, net revenue was up to $900,000, nearly twice that of the app's daily average of $491,000. Read more

Don't forget about the apps: Google has a new plan to promote Android apps outside of its Play Store. That got me wondering how many apps are actually being used on the regular. Would it surprise you to know that, according to one statistic, the average millennial has 67 apps on their phone, but only regularly uses 25? Nah, me neither. To get people utilizing those apps again, Google created a series of widgets that, when tapped, would bring users to some specific task in an app. Read more

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Afternoon must-reads

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Meta's Oversight Board to hear Threads cases: Later this week, the board will begin hearing cases on Threads and make precedent-setting content moderation decisions. Read more

U.K. to get driverless cars: The U.K.'s Automated Vehicles Act got the green light, and fully self-driving vehicles could be on roads within two years. Read more

SoLo Funds sued by CFPB: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau alleges SoLo Funds, a fintech company that enables peer-to-peer lending, used "digital dark patterns" to deceive borrowers and illegally took fees while advertising to consumers that there were no fees. Read more

Rollup emerges from stealth: The Andreessen Horowitz and Thiel Capital-backed startup already proved it can get the capital. Now, after two years with heads down, the company wants to prove that its software platform can completely change how complex hardware is built. Read more

Everything you need to know about ChatGPT: And perhaps some things you didn't want to know. Read more

Inside the mind of an AI device: Jolla unveiled the first version of its personal server-based AI assistant, a privacy-focused AI device called the Jolla Mind2. It is now available for preorders. Read more

ChatGPT gets a new voice: After users likened one of the voices used by ChatGPT to that of actress Scarlett Johansson, the company announced it is pausing that voice, called Sky. Read more

Bumble acquires Geneva: The dating app found a match with the community-building app in order to expand relationships to groups and communities. Read more

Reddit inks a deal with OpenAI, and Maven wants to do away with likes: This morning on TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Reddit gives ChatGPT a window into one of the internet's more raw, conversational forums, Twitter's co-founder backs a new social network called Maven, and cybersecurity consolidation continues. For a more in-depth look at the business of startups, listen to the end to hear this week's Pitch Deck Teardown! Listen here

Around the web

Image Credits: Getty Images/Patra Kongsirimongkolchai / EyeEm

Is Jamie Dimon retiring?: The JPMorgan Chase CEO has often joked about when his retirement day might come but is now talking succession plans, Bloomberg reports. Read more

How Satya Nadella is making his mark: Fortune's profile of the Microsoft CEO looks at his successes over the past decade and how he plans to keep the company at the forefront of the AI age. Read more

Bye-bye, Cheddar Bay biscuits?: Red Lobster filed for bankruptcy Monday. The New York Times reports that the seafood chain plans "to reduce its locations as it prepares to sell most of its assets." Read more

TechCrunch Minute

Slack may be training its AI off your messages — and opting out is harder than you'd think: Slack is under fire for its shady policies around using customer data to train its AI. So we asked them what's up, and the company told us that it does not "build these models in such a way that they could learn, memorize, or be able to reproduce some part of customer data." The policy is still confusing, but we think we can explain it. Hit play and let's chat!