Hey folks, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular roundup of the week in tech. Been too criticized to follow the news cycle as closely as you want? Do not worry. This is why WiR exists. We’ll let you know in no time.
Thanks to the July 4 holiday, the work week has been somewhat disrupted. But a lot still happened. Meta launched Threads, its Twitter competitor, which quickly grew to tens of millions of users. Meanwhile, Twitter quietly removed the login requirement to view tweets that it had imposed a few days earlier. Somewhere in the middle of it all, secretive hardware startup Humane revealed the details of its first product. And OpenAI has made its GPT-4 generative AI model generally available.
Read on to find out more about the top stories of the week – and if you haven’t already, sign up here to get WiR delivered to your inbox every Saturday.
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The discussions are posted online: This week, Instagram announced the highly anticipated launch of its text-based social networking app, Threads, which allows Instagram users to authenticate with their existing credentials to post short updates. tweet-like. Within 24 hours, the app, which is available for iOS and Android in around 100 countries (but not in the EU, apparently due to local data privacy regulations), surpassed 30 million signups.
Twitter takes the gloves off: With the success of Threads, Twitter is threatening to sue Meta, which it accuses of poaching former Twitter employees to create the new platform. Shortly after Threads launched, a Twitter lawyer, Alex Spiro, sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg accusing the social media giant of engaging in unlawful misappropriation of trade secrets and other property. Twitter intellectuals.
A difficult topic to delete: In other Threads news, it turns out that deleting a Threads account also requires deleting the linked Instagram account. The rationale, Meta explains on the policy page, is that a Threads profile is part of the user’s Instagram account. The discovery of this stipulation surprised many users, unsurprisingly.
OpenAI releases GPT-4: OpenAI this week announced the general availability of GPT-4, its latest text generation model, through its paid API. GPT-4 can generate text (including code) and accept image and text input – an improvement over its predecessor GPT-3.5, which only accepted text – and works at the “human level” on various professional and academic criteria. But it’s not perfect, as we note in our previous coverage.
Humane unveils the Ai Pin: Humane, the startup launched by ex-Apple design and engineering duo Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, this week revealed details about its first product: the Ai Pin. Humane’s product is a wearable gadget with a projected screen and AI-powered functionality – like a futuristic smartphone, but in a very different form factor.
Pornhub blocks access: Pornhub blocks access to users in Mississippi, Virginia and Utah, which recently passed laws requiring age verification to access adult websites. Internet privacy advocates have long criticized these age controls, which require users to share personal information such as their government ID in order to use the Internet.
Reddit’s valuation is reduced again: Fidelity has further reduced the estimated value of its stake in social media giant Reddit. The Fidelity Blue Chip Growth Fund valued its Reddit holdings at $15.4 million as of May 31, according to the fund’s monthly disclosure released last Friday. That’s down 7.36% from the $16.6 million mark at the April close and a total decline of 45.4% since investing in August 2021. The updated value of the stock suggests a $5.5 billion valuation for Reddit.
Goldman is looking to ditch Apple: Four years after partnering with Apple to launch the Apple Card, Goldman Sachs may be considering exits. The Wall Street Journal reports that Goldman is “looking for a way out” of its high-profile deal with Apple, which was recently expanded to include savings accounts for Apple Cardholders. The investment banking firm is apparently in talks to transfer the partnership to American Express, the WSJ report added, but so far nothing seems to be set in stone, nor is it clear. whether Apple would support the transfer.
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Need a podcast to pass the time? You have come to the right place. TechCrunch has a growing list of quality shows, and this week there’s plenty of new material.
Equity featured Immad Akhund, CEO and co-founder of Mercury, who made headlines earlier this year for how he stepped in to help fill the corporate banking vacuum left in the wake of the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank.
And the Find interviewed Charles Baron, co-founder and CMO of Farmers Business Network, a startup that offers a suite of online services to farmers.
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TC+ subscribers get access to in-depth commentary, analysis and polls, which you know if you’re already a subscriber. If not, consider signing up. Here are some highlights from this week:
Europe, the fuzzy technological cloud: Haje writes about the differences between US and European boot environments. The latter, he writes, has an appetite for experimentation that fails to fully settle into a cohesive whole – unlike the handful of major centers in the United States that attract the bulk of talent and investment.
Moving to save money: For business founders and shareholders with an exit on the horizon, a move for tax reasons can make a lot of financial sense. However, quite often it is not that simple. Peyton Carr, Managing Director of Keystone Global Partners, expands on this.
To be a black founder in France: The French startup ecosystem for black founders is shrouded in mystery, but Dom is trying to pull back the curtains. She finds that deep-rooted racial stereotyping and prejudice continue to deepen in the country, manifesting in the form of economic discrimination against black entrepreneurs.
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