Friday, March 29, 2024

Good afternoon, and welcome to your Friday TechCrunch PM. Among today’s stories is a look into how Supaglue met Stripe, an OpenAI tool you can’t use yet and an update on X’s NSFW communities. But wait, there’s more! A fun Instagram feature is on the way, a Pitch Deck Teardown candidate gets high marks and finally an explainer on Grok. Have a great weekend! — Christine

TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: Supaglue

Stripe’s latest addition: Meet Supaglue, a spunky team of four that is ready to take on the world as Stripe’s newest acquihire. The startup created an open source developer platform for user-facing integrations and will now be applying its expertise as a part of Stripe’s Revenue and Finance Automation organization. Read More

OpenAI is being a tease: OpenAI previewed its Voice Engine, which Kyle writes is “an expansion of the company’s existing text-to-speech API.” Voice Engine allows users to upload any 15-second voice sample to generate a synthetic copy of that voice. The downside? There’s no date yet when the public can use it. Read More

Yes, X is becoming (more) not suitable for work: The company confirmed that Community admins can now set an “Adult Content” label in their settings to avoid having their communities’ content auto-filtered. Communities are smaller groups on X with their own feeds outside of the main timeline. Apparently, this is only the beginning of what Communities will do. Read More

Afternoon must-reads

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

New Instagram feature: Soon, you might not have to share Reels to friends via DM on Instagram. The social network is developing what it calls “Blend,” a private feed of Reels recommended for you and a friend. Read More

Pitch Deck Teardown: Meet Plantee, a company “helping plant parents to never lose another green child ever again.” It’s rare that a pitch deck “ticks all the boxes,” Haje Jan Kamps writes. Read More

What is Grok and how do you use it?: As Kyle puts it, “Grok is willing to speak to topics that are usually off-limits to other chatbots, like polarizing political theories and conspiracies. And it’ll use less-than-polite language while doing so.” Read More

Google Deepmind’s CEO is now a knight: All hail Demis Hassabis, who was awarded a knighthood in the United Kingdom for “services to artificial intelligence.” Read More

Why is crypto so hot?: Nine venture capital investors weigh in on why the first quarter of 2024 is throwing hot water on the crypto winter of the past few years. Read More

Orbit Fab wants to build “gas stations” for satellites: No biggie, the startup will just need a gas cap and a mechanism for transferring propellant from an orbital tanker to the customer spacecraft. Meet RAFTI, the docking mechanism that is now flight qualified and on the market. Wait’ll you check out the price tag. Read More

Around the web

Image Credits: Getty Images / akindo

Waiting on your iPad Pro? It might take a bit longer. Here’s why: MacRumors reports the delay is coming down to slower production on the OLED panels.

Meanwhile, I haven’t lived in an apartment in quite some time, but I have to admit this heat pump window unit is something I would have loved to have. Wired has more.

And the Biden administration announced some new pollution rules that could have some positive effects on sales of electric trucks, The New York Times reports.

TechCrunch Minute

Sam Bankman-Fried’s sentencing marks an end to the FTX saga: After a lengthy trial and conviction, we finally learned how long former crypto baron Sam Bankman-Fried will be behind bars: up to 25 years. It’s a lengthy sentence, but one that, given the scale of the crimes he was convicted of, doesn’t come as a shock.

On the pods

On today’s Equity, Kirsten Korosec, Mary Ann Azevedo and Alex Wilhelm discuss the sentencing of former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, Robinhood’s new credit card, Fisker’s latest woes and Databricks’ new AI model that it spent $10 million to spin up. And more! Listen here

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