Tuesday, October 15, 2024

Welcome to TechCrunch AM! This morning, we're sad to say we have a couple of obituaries for two absolute legends in the tech world, one of which was TC's own Steve O'Hear. We also have notes on Tesla's sleight of hand, Google's plans to go nuclear, the Oura ring, a big new fund interested in European startups, shakeups at Microsoft, Adobe's latest genAI product, and more. — Rebecca

TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: Tesla

1. Marketing doing its thing: When Tesla first introduced its Optimus humanoid robot, we found out that it was a guy in a bot suit. Three years later, actual Optimus bots chatted up Tesla fans at last week's robotaxi reveal. But it looks like humans were controlling the vocals remotely, and Tesla conveniently failed to mention that. Read More

2. In memory of Steve O'Hear: TechCrunch is mourning the loss of a beloved former colleague, Steve O'Hear, who spent a decade helping make TC what it is today. Despite suffering from muscular dystrophy, Steve was a dogged news hound and an original, unmistakable voice. Read More

3. Google is going nuclear: Forcing small American towns to keep coal-fueled utilities alive to power ginormous data centers isn't a good look. That's why Google has signed a deal with startup Kairos Power to build small nuclear reactors by 2030. But is that timeline realistic? Read More

Morning Must-Reads

Image Credits: Brian Heater

💍 One Ring to rule them all: Oura isn't the first company to build smart rings, but it is considered the best at it. And while some say the wearable can be a replacement for your Apple Watch, TC's hardware expert Brian Heater feels that's not really the point of it. Read More

🇪🇺 Make Europe Great Again: Harry Stebbings is a U.K. podcaster who turned VC, and now he's raised a whopping $400 million for his third fund. The goal this time is to help European technology companies compete with their U.S. counterparts. Read More

💬 Say that again: French startup Gladia is able to hold its own against the big dogs with its speech-to-text tech. And it's come up with a way to simplify the technological pipeline by integrating audio intelligence and LLM-based tasks into a single API. Read More

⏰ Who doesn't want to wake up to the Donkey Kong theme? We tested out the newest gadget from Nintendo, and no, it's not the new Switch. It's a sleep-tracking alarm clock called the Alarmo, and it's very Nintendo-y in appearance. It even features sounds from popular games like the Legend of Zelda and Mario. Read More

🪑 Musical chairs in AI Land: Microsoft's former VP of generative AI research, Sebastian Bubeck, has left to join OpenAI. Bubeck co-authored papers describing Microsoft's Phi models, a series of extra-small language and vision models to help push AI applications to edge devices. Read More

Around the Web

🎨 An ode to Lillian Schwartz: Shwartz, who passed away at 97, was a pioneer in computer-generated art. She worked at Bell Labs in the late 1960s, where she made films and even arrived at a novel theory about the Mona Lisa. The New York Times has a good piece on her life. Read More

🤓 Illogical reasoning: OpenAI and Google say their LLMs' reasoning capabilities are the next step towards AGI. But a new study from six Apple engineers shows that LLMs' mathematical reasoning can be brittle and unreliable, and they aren't truly capable of "genuine logical reasoning," reports Ars Technica. Read More

📺 Adobe tries to be ethical: Reuters reports that Adobe has released an AI model that can generate video from text prompts, similar to OpenAI's Sora. The difference? Adobe's models are trained on data it has the right to use so its content can be legally used in commercial work. Read More

Before You Go

Image Credits: Spotify

📹 And… action! Spotify is testing music videos for premium users in 85 additional markets, marking it as yet another company that has seen the success of TikTok and is scheming to draw eyes to farm even more engagement. Read More