Wednesday, October 9, 2024

Welcome to TechCrunch AM! This morning, we've got progress on the U.S. Justice Department's case to break up Google; Atlassian shaking up how Jira works; and more folks in AI raking in Nobel Prizes. We've also got a POTUS account on Reddit, Fei-Fei Li's choice of cloud provider, a startup making a GPT for biology, why VCs shouldn't only back repeat founders, and more. Let's dive in! — Rebecca

TechCrunch Top 3

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1. The feds are coming for Google: The U.S. Department of Justice proposing to force search giant Google to sell off parts of its business as a potential remedy for its monopoly in search and adtech. We've still got a long way to go on this case, but experts I spoke to recently don't think a breakup is likely. Read More

2. Jira is leveling up: Atlassian's Jira is retiring the objectively sad word "issues" as the default moniker for work tracked with the tool. Instead, users can call it a "task" or a "launch" or some other positive-sounding, action-oriented verby noun as the company looks to combine its Jira for developers and Jira for business teams into a single product. Read More

3. Nobel Prize galore in AI Land: DeepMind's CEO Demis Hassabis and director John Jumper have been awarded one half of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The other half went to David Baker, head of the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington. AI pioneers Geoff Hinton and John Hopfield won the Nobel Prize in Physics yesterday. Read More

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Morning Must-Reads

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🛹 The most interesting thing about the Boring Company's 2.4-mile underground Loop in Las Vegas is that people are trespassing. What was meant to be a high-speed autonomous transportation hyperloop is now an UrbEx destination. So grab your skateboards and pull off some fakies and five-Os. Read More

😎 The White House is on Reddit: And it's about damn time. People come together on Reddit to discuss everything from knitting to bass guitars to apartment hunting, so if the Biden administration wants to share more about the work it's doing with the public, it's the place to be. Read More

☁️ Fei-Fei Li is sticking with Google Cloud: The 'Godmother of AI' is choosing Google Cloud – where she served as chief scientist of AI – as the primary compute provider for training her startup World Labs' AI models. The deal could be worth hundreds of millions. Read More

🧬 Bio-GPT: London startup Basecamp Research has pulled in $60 million to build an AI agent that can answer biology questions and even produce new insights that humans can't on their own. The startup is building its models from the ground up. Read More

🦾 If at first you don't succeed... A risk-management platform acquired Planetly in 2021 as part of a push for ESG. Then it shut the company down and laid off staff. Former C-suite employees at Planetly, unsatisfied with that exit, are now working on another startup, Forward Earth, and using AI to improve carbon accounting. Read More

Around the Web

🚗 Baidu robotaxis enter new lands: The Wall Street Journal reports that Chinese internet company Baidu wants to roll out its driverless ride-hail service, Apollo, overseas. The company is looking at Hong Kong, Singapore and the Middle East. Read More

💰 VCs miss out when they only back repeat founders: Many VCs, particularly in Europe, only back repeat founders who are more likely to create a unicorn. But a report from Crunchbase News argues there's a risk to that strategy. Read More

🌎 Net Zero? What's that? Oil and gas companies like Shell and BP made pledges to reach net-zero carbon emissions some years ago. New Republic outlines how some of those talking points had "nothing to do" with these companies' actual business plans, and how they've abandoned their pledges altogether. Read More

Before You Go

Image Credits:Aire Images / Getty Images

😬 This feels cringe, but maybe I'm wrong: Glassdoor is launching short videos, polls and images to foster engagement with the community. LinkedIn is doing something similar (also cringe) based on the success of video platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. Will the Internet soon only be full of short videos? Read More