Thursday, April 4, 2024

Welcome back to TechCrunch PM! Today, we are getting into why Agility Robotics laid off some folks and what OpenAI is up to. Meanwhile, TikTok tells us how they helped small businesses, fintech funding didn’t look so good in the first quarter and one India-based quick-commerce company is doing well. Let’s dig in! — Christine

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Image Credits: Amazon

Agility Robotics changes focus: The company said it is leaning into commercialization efforts, which means it had to let go of “a small number” of people “not central to core product development and commercialization.” Read More

OpenAI gets specific: OpenAI is expanding Custom Model, its program to help enterprise customers develop tailored generative AI models using its technology for specific use cases, domains and applications. Read More

TikTok tries to prove its worth: The social network is hoping to stall a ban on itself in the United States by providing statistics showing how valuable it has been to over 7 million small businesses. Read More

Afternoon must-reads

Fintech funding slows: Our resident fintech guru Mary Ann Azevedo read CB Insights’ Q1 2024 State of Venture Report and shares why fintech funding slid by 16% quarter-over-quarter during the three-month period. Read More

A warning from X: The social media platform is doing another bot sweep, so expect your follower count to go down. Read More

Net neutrality under Trump: Devin Coldewey writes, “If Biden wins reelection, the rules the FCC are currently putting in place have a good chance of being solidified as a form of law. If Trump wins, net neutrality is dead for one of several reasons.” Read More

Zepto delivers: The Indian quick-commerce startup proves it has the right recipe for this challenging industry. In 29 months of existence, the company surpassed the annualized sales milestone of $1 billion. Read More

Rooms gets a face-lift: Now that the 3D design platform made by ex-Google employees hit 250,000 users in beta, the app is getting some new features. Read More

DataStax acquires LogSpace: DataStax, which made a name for itself by commercializing the open source Apache Cassandra NoSQL database, is thinking bigger. Its acquisition of the startup behind Langflow shows its aim to build a “one-stop GenAI stack.” Read More

YC Demo Day, Day 2: Find out who the favorites were in Thursday’s batch of Y Combinator startups. Read More

Money, money, money

Jobs for the Future’s new $50 million fund looks to invest in underrepresented founders. Read More

SiMa.ai secures $70 million in funding to introduce a multimodal GenAI chip. Read More

Around the web

If you decide to check your investments today, it shouldn’t give you as many heart palpitations as it may have done a few days ago. Reuters reports that stocks rallied Thursday amid an interest rate cut outlook.

Meanwhile, this week, Amazon shut down its grocery “Just Walk Out” technology, and now Axios tells us where AI came up short.

And did a Microsoft engineer come across something that stopped what could have been a major cyberattack? The New York Times thinks so.

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How Anthropic found a trick to get AI to give you answers it’s not supposed to: Anthropic and its latest research demonstrate an interesting vulnerability in current large language model (LLM) technology. Basically, if you keep at a question, you can break guardrails and wind up with LLMs telling you stuff that they are designed not to share. Like how to build a bomb. Let’s talk about what Anthropic recently shared. Hit play!

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