Social

Apple ushers in a new era with Apple Intelligence

Comment

Image Credits: Apple

Welcome back to TechCrunch’s Week in Review — TechCrunch’s newsletter recapping the week’s biggest news. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.

Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference had a sizable focus on AI. Apple unveiled its generative AI offering, Apple Intelligence, which will be available in iOS later this year. iOS 18 will have a number of new features, including the ability to schedule text messages and customize your home screen, major upgrades to Siri — including ChatGPT integration — and AI-generated emojis. If you missed it, we put together a handy recap of everything Apple announced.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has secured enough shareholder votes to have his 2018 stock option compensation package approved. The vote means he could get a payout of up to $56 billion, the biggest CEO compensation package in history, but a judge in Delaware still has to issue her final decision after ruling the package was unfair. 

In funding news, Mistral AI has closed its much rumored Series B funding round. The company has secured €600 million (around $640 million at today’s exchange rate) in a mix of equity and debt. The new round values the startup at $6 billion as it continues to compete with OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI giants.

News

Former NSA head joins OpenAI: Former head of the NSA, retired army general Paul Nakasone, will join OpenAI’s board of directors and will sit on the board’s “security and safety” subcommittee. Read more

Tesla shareholders sue Elon Musk: Shareholders of Tesla are suing Elon Musk and members of the board of directors over Musk’s decision to start xAI. They argue that talent and resources are being diverted from Tesla to the new startup. Read more

BeReal gets bought: French mobile apps and games publisher Voodoo has acquired BeReal for €500 million. BeReal co-founder and CEO Alexis Barreyat will leave the company after a transition period. Read more

You can ditch the rings: Apple has finally made a way for users to pause activity rings on Apple Watches, which is especially helpful if you are sick or otherwise unable to do physical activities. Read more

Raspberry Pi goes public: The maker of tiny, cheap, single-board computers priced its IPO on the London Stock Exchange at £2.80 per share, valuing it at $690 million at today’s exchange rate, and quickly jumped to £3.70 per share. Read more

iPads finally get a calculator app: iPads will have a dedicated calculator app for the first time. But, teachers, beware. The app includes Math Notes, a new feature that does the math for you. Read more

A new distraction-free smartphone: Minimalist smartphone maker Light announced its newest model. The Light Phone III doesn’t have access to social media or the internet, but it does sport a larger OLED display and a camera. Read more

Spotify goes in-house: Spotify is venturing further into the ad space with its first in-house creative agency, Creative Lab. The company said it will also begin testing generative AI ads. Read more

Will your device have iOS 18?: Apple’s iOS 18 will be compatible with many Apple devices this fall, but you might have to upgrade if you want the full Apple Intelligence experience. Read more

Analysis

Apple Intelligence isn’t trying to be flashy: With iOS 18, Apple is taking a more cautious approach. Instead of overwhelming users with too many AI features to count, the company is carefully rolling out AI where it believes it could be actually useful. While Apple’s AI is certainly not as flashy, Sarah Perez argues that it is the company’s way of defining the table stakes for what an AI-powered device should be able to do. Read more

Tesla fans get out the vote: Tesla and its fans waged an unprecedented battle over Elon Musk’s $56 billion pay package. Over the last few months, there has been an unrelenting get-out-the-vote effort from Tesla’s biggest fans. Sean O’Kane explores the countless calls to action on X to get shareholders to vote yes — and reinforce their belief that Tesla is nothing without Musk. Read more

Why Y Combinator is encouraging small seed rounds: In 2024, many Y Combinator startups only want tiny seed rounds — but it could be repelling many institutional seed VCs. If YC startups treat these rounds more like pre-seed funding, it might not be all that bad. But as Rebecca Szkutak writes, there is a risk if companies are labeling these smaller rounds as “seed rounds” with their sights set on next raising a Series A. Read more

More TechCrunch

The pharma giant won’t say how many patients were affected by its February data breach. A count by TechCrunch confirms that over a million people are affected.

Pharma giant Cencora is alerting millions about its data breach

Self-driving technology company Aurora Innovation is looking to raise hundreds of millions in additional capital as it races toward a driverless commercial launch by the end of 2024.  Aurora is…

Self-driving truck startup Aurora Innovation to sell up to $420M in shares ahead of commercial launch

Payments infrastructure firm Infibeam Avenues has acquired a majority 54% stake in Rediff.com for up to $3 million, a dramatic twist of fate for the 28-year-old business that was the…

Rediff, once an internet pioneer in India, sells majority stake for $3M

The ruling confirmed an earlier decision in April from the High Court of Podgorica which rejected a request to extradite the crypto fugitive to the United States.

Terraform Labs co-founder and crypto fugitive Do Kwon set for extradition to South Korea

A day after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked about his newest social media experiment Threads reaching “almost” 200 million users on the company’s Q2 2024 earnings call, the platform has…

Meta’s Threads crosses 200 million active users

TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 will be in San Francisco on October 28–30, and we’re already excited! Disrupt brings innovation for every stage of your startup journey, and we could not bring you this…

Connect with Google Cloud, Aerospace, Qualcomm and more at Disrupt 2024

Featured Article

A comprehensive list of 2024 tech layoffs

The tech layoff wave is still going strong in 2024. Following significant workforce reductions in 2022 and 2023, this year has already seen 60,000 job cuts across 254 companies, according to independent layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi. Companies like Tesla, Amazon, Google, TikTok, Snap and Microsoft have conducted sizable layoffs in the…

A comprehensive list of 2024 tech layoffs

Intel announced it would layoff more than 15% of its staff, or 15,000 employees, in a memo to employees on Thursday. The massive headcount is part of a large plan…

Intel to lay off 15,000 employees

Following the recent lawsuit filed by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) against music generation startups Udio and Suno, Suno admitted in a court filing on Thursday that it did, in…

AI music startup Suno claims training model on copyrighted music is ‘fair use’

In spite of a drop for the quarter, iPhone remained Apple’s most important category by a wide margin.

iPad sales help bail out Apple amid a continued iPhone slide

Molly Alter wears a lot of hats. She’s a mocumentary filmmaker working on a project about an alternate reality where charades is big business. She’s a caesar salad connoisseur and…

How filming a cappella concerts and dance recitals led Northzone’s newest partner Molly Alter to a career in VC

Microsoft has a long and tangled history with OpenAI, having invested a reported $13 billion in the ChatGPT maker as part of a long-term partnership. As part of the deal,…

Microsoft now lists OpenAI as a competitor in AI and search

The San Jose-based startup raised $60 million in a round that values it lower than the $500 million valuation it garnered in its most recent round, according to multiple sources.

Sequoia-backed Knowde raises Series C at a valuation cut

X (formerly Twitter) can no longer be accessed in the Mac App Store, suggesting that it has been officially delisted.  Searches for both “Twitter” and “X” on Apple’s platform no…

Twitter disappears from Mac App Store

Google Thursday said that it is introducing new Gemini-powered features for Chrome’s desktop version, including Lens for desktop, tab compare for shopping assistance, and natural language integration for search history.…

Google brings Gemini-powered search history and Lens to Chrome desktop

When Xiaoyin Qu was growing up in China, she was obsessed with learning how to build paper airplanes that could do flips in the air. Her parents, though, didn’t have…

Heeyo built an AI chatbot to be a billion kids’ interactive tutor and friend

While the company was awarded a massive, $4.2 billion contract to accelerate Starliner development in 2014, it was structured as a “fixed-price” model.

Boeing bleeds another $125M on Starliner program, bringing total losses to $1.6B

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! Summer road…

Anthony Levandowski bets on off-road autonomy, Nuro plots a comeback and Applied Intuition gets more investor love

Google’s new features include Gemini in BigQuery and Looker to help users with data engineering and analysis.

Google Cloud expands its database portfolio with new AI capabilities

Rad Power Bikes, the Seattle-based e-bike startup that has raised more than $300 million from investors, went through another round of layoffs in July, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. This is…

VC darling Rad Power Bikes hit with another round of layoffs

Five years ago, as robotaxis and self-driving truck startups were still raking in millions in venture capital, Anthony Levandowski turned to off-road autonomy. Now, that decision — which brought the…

Why Anthony Levandowski returned to his off-road autonomous vehicle roots with AV startup Pronto

Commercial space station company Vast is building a private microgravity research lab as part of its wider Haven-1 station plans. The module is set to launch no earlier than the…

Vast plans microgravity lab on its Haven-1 private space station

Google Cloud is giving Y Combinator startups access to a dedicated, subsidized cluster of Nvidia graphics processing units and Google tensor processing units to build AI models. It’s part of…

Google Cloud now has a dedicated cluster of Nvidia GPUs for Y Combinator startups

StackShare is one of the more popular platforms for developers to discuss, track, and share the tools they use to build applications.

Open source startup FOSSA is buying StackShare, a site used by 1.5M developers

Featured Article

Indian startups gut valuations ahead of IPO push

Ola Electric and FirstCry are set to test investor appetite with public listing, both pricing their shares below their previous valuation asks.

Indian startups gut valuations ahead of IPO push

The European Union’s risk-based regulation for applications of artificial intelligence has come into force starting from today.

The EU’s AI Act is now in force

The company also said it has received regulatory clearance to start Phase 2 clinical trials for a new drug in the U.S. later this year.

Healx, an AI-enabled drug discovery platform for rare diseases, raises $47M

The European Commission (EC) has given the go-ahead to HPE’s planned megabucks acquisition of Juniper Networks.

EU greenlights HPE’s $14B Juniper Networks acquisition

Meta, which develops one of the biggest foundational open source large language models, Llama, believes it will need significantly more computing power to train models in the future. Mark Zuckerberg…

Zuckerberg says Meta will need 10x more computing power to train Llama 4 than Llama 3

Axle Energy is a B2B, back-end infrastructure business focused on connecting flexible assets, such as electric vehicles and home batteries, to energy markets that aren’t otherwise available for consumers to…

Axle Energy’s sprint to decarbonize the grid lights up with $9M seed led by Accel