TGIF, my friends at TechCrunch. It’s that time of the week again: Week in Review time, where we recap the past five days in tech news. As always, there was a lot going on, so let’s dig in without delay.
Well, maybe with a slight delay. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that TechCrunch Early Stage, TechCrunch’s annual founders’ summit, is right around the corner—April 20, to be exact. Located in Boston this year, Early Stage will host sessions with advice and takeaways from top experts and provide opportunities to meet entrepreneurs who go on incredible journeys. Trust me, it will be worth the walk.
Disrupt, TechCrunch’s flagship conference, will also be Well worth the hike. (And I’m not just saying that because your server will be participating, I swear!) This year, Disrupt will feature six new stages featuring industry-specific programming tracks, inspired by our popular TC Sessions series. In attendance will be experts in climate, mobility, fintech, artificial intelligence and machine learning, business, privacy and security, and hardware and robotics, who will have exciting ideas to share.
So, did you sign up for both events? Excellent. Now, here’s the recap for the week!
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ChatGPT in API form: OpenAI presented an API that will allow any company to incorporate ChatGPT technology into their applications, websites, products and services. (As a refresher, ChatGPT is the free text-generating AI that can write human-like code, emails, essays, and more.) Snap, Quizlet, Instacart, and Shopify are among the early adopters.
Become human: a start up, Figure, emerged from stealth this week promising a general-purpose bipedal humanoid robot. (Brian broke the news of the startup’s existence back in September, in case you missed it.) The alpha build of the Figure robot, which the company completed in December, is currently being tested at its Sunnyvale offices. It focuses on a wide range of manual labor tasks for now.
Warrantless Surveillance: Zack reports that the Secret Service and ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations unit repeatedly failed to obtain the correct legal documentation when conducting invasive cell phone surveillance. The findings were published last week by the inspector general for Homeland Security, charged with oversight of the US federal department and its many law enforcement units, who said agencies often used cell site simulators without obtaining the proper search warrants .
Salesforce turns it around: This week, Salesforce reported its fiscal fourth quarter earnings, including revenue that beat expectations and guidance that came in ahead of street estimates. It was a much-needed victory for the company, which was facing mounting pressure from activist investors, including Elliott Management.
Hydrogen powered: Startup Universal Hydrogen went on the air this week with the largest hydrogen fuel cell to ever fly. The 15-minute test flight of a modified Dash-8 aircraft was short, but, as Brand writes: demonstrated that hydrogen could be viable as a fuel for short-hop airliners. (However, many technical and regulatory barriers get in the way.)
Pause your streak: Ivan reports that Snapchat will allow users to pause their snap streaks, where they send a snap to their friend once every 24 hours, so they don’t have to worry about breaking them if they decide not to access the app for a while.
New non-profit organization for AI: A community-driven AI research group, eleutheraiis forming a non-profit foundation. Funded by donations and grants from backers, including AI startups Hugging Face and Stability AI, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Lambda Labs, and Canva, the nonprofit plans to investigate problems involving language models. great in the line of OpenAI ChatGPT.
Cessation of the “succession”: The official trailer for the final season of “Succession” dropped this week and it looks like the series is ending with an epic mic drop. like lauren writes, the HBO series was not only a huge success, with its 13 Emmy Awards and five Golden Globes, but it was also an interesting commentary on the media industry. Creator and showrunner Jesse Armstrong has accepted to taking inspiration from many places, including Rupert Murdoch’s playbook.
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Like Elon Musk’s meddling with Twitter, the TechCrunch podcast machine never stops. this week in Equity, maria anna, Scholarship and Alex gathered to go over the biggest startup and enterprise news of the week, including what’s happening in NFT land, AI vs. cryptocurrency in corporate hype cycles, and the unlikely Amazon partnership. And in The TechCrunch Live PodcastMatt Burns spoke with Sagi Eliyahu, CEO and co-founder of Tonkean, and Foundation Capital partner Joanne Chen about addressing leadership blind spots and the best ways for founders to work with their board of directors.
