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Welcome back to Review Week. This week we take a look at OpenAI’s announced plans for its next AI paradigm; A buzzy new messaging app that’s a hit with Gen Z; And Tim Cook discovered that you can name a group chat in iMessage. Let’s get into it.
The Verge noted this week that OpenAI is planning to release it The next frontier AI model, codenamed Orion, is due by December. An OpenAI spokesperson denied the claim to TechCrunch, saying: “We have no plans to release a model codenamed Orion this year.” But what that means is anyone’s guess and leaves some wiggle room for OpenAI.
Character.AI is targeted in a lawsuit After a 14-year-old boy committed suicide, his mother says he became obsessed with a chatbot on the platform. The company said it is rolling out new security features, including “improved detection, response and intervention” related to chats that violate its terms of service and a notification when a user spends an hour in a chat.
More than 100 million individuals Their private health information was stolen during a February ransomware attack on Change Healthcare. It’s the first time UnitedHealth Group, the health insurer that owns the company, has put a number on how many individuals were affected by a data breach; The company previously said it expects the breach to include data on “a large percentage of people in America.”
This is TechCrunch Review Week, where we recap the week’s top stories. Want this delivered as a newsletter to your inbox every Saturday? Register here.
news
Mira Moratti’s next step: Mira Moratti, former CTO of OpenAI, has reportedly raised more than $100 million for a new AI startup, which will reportedly focus on building AI products based on proprietary models. Read more
What is in the name of (group chat)? A recent profile of Tim Cook revealed that he didn’t know you could name your group conversations in iMessage. Since then, Cook has called the group chat with his former college teammates simply “roommates.” Read more
Elon Musk’s conversations with Putin: Elon Musk has reportedly been in regular contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin since late 2022. The Wall Street Journal reported that the conversations have raised national security concerns among some intelligence officials. Read more
Let Anthropic control your PC: Anthropic has released an upgraded version of Claude 3.5 Sonnet that can understand and interact with any desktop application. The model can mimic keystrokes, button clicks, and mouse gestures, essentially simulating a person sitting at a computer. Read more
Smart glasses success: The Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses have proven to be more successful than Meta originally expected. Eyewear is the best-selling product in 60% of all Ray-Ban stores across EMEA – even before the introduction of AI features. Read more
Artificial Intelligence (Gut): Throne is an Austin-based health startup that sells a camera that attaches to the side of the toilet bowl and takes pictures of your stool. Currently in beta, the system uses artificial intelligence to scan stool and determine things like bowel health and hydration. Read more
Turn your phone into an e-reader: The Bookcase, the latest bit of tech innovation from Astropad, is a case with a MagSafe holder and an NFC chip that lets you carry a smartphone like a Kindle for a more convenient mobile e-reading experience. Read more
Midjourney comes to the web: Midjourney launches an upgraded tool that allows users to edit any images downloaded from the web using generative AI. The upgraded tool will also allow users to recompose objects in photos to “repaint” their colors and details according to the captions. Read more
Cheaper way to get gas: Amazon is offering Prime members a 10-cent-per-gallon discount at about 7,000 Amoco, AM/PM and BP gas stations across the U.S. to combat high gas prices — and challenge rival service Walmart+. Read more
Message application for the next generation: Daze is a creative, AI-powered messaging app that’s hugely popular among Gen Z users, with a waiting list of nearly 156,000 sign-ups ahead of its launch on November 4. Read more
A closer look at Apple’s hearing aid feature: TechCrunch’s Brian Heater tested Apple’s upcoming accessibility features for the AirPods Pro 2 that allow the earbuds to act as a hearing aid and perform hearing tests. Read more
analysis
23 And you and I: 23andMe faces an uncertain future amid efforts to take the company private, raising concerns about what might happen to the genetic data of the company’s roughly 15 million customers. If you ship your saliva to 23andMe, you may have assumed that this data would remain private under the law. But as Carly Page writes, 23andMe is not covered under HIPAA and is largely bound only by its own privacy policies, which it can change at any time. But there is an easy way to request that your data be deleted. Read more
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