Tuesday, May 14, 2024

Hello, and welcome back to TechCrunch PM. The team posted dozens of Google items today and also managed to tackle some big stories from Meta and AWS. Also, there’s a big venture round and several stories about fraud. Enjoy!

TechCrunch Top 3

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Meta shuts down Workplace: TechCrunch learned that Meta is shuttering Workplace, a version of Facebook that had been built to enable communication among business teams and wider organizations. Meta confirmed the news, saying it will instead “focus on building AI and metaverse technologies that we believe will fundamentally reshape the way we work.” Read more

Google I/O 2024: The team posted over 20 stories — and counting — related to all the announcements made at Tuesday’s event. We then put them all into a pretty package for you to find everything in one place. Read more

AWS CEO steps down: Adam Selipsky is leaving Amazon Web Services after taking the role of CEO in 2021. AWS sales chief Matt Garman will be promoted to CEO. Selipsky is perceived as having missed the boat on generative AI — which might have contributed to his ousting, according to Kyle Wiggers. Read more

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Afternoon must-reads

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Meet Glue: The David Sacks-led startup is an employee chat app that aims to fix what they call “Slack channel fatigue.” Instead of being a part of every channel in Slack, Glue arranges all communication into threads. An individual or a team can start a thread, and other teams and even Glue’s AI bot can be invited to join it. Read more

Harness grabs a $150M line of credit: Harness has built a soup-to-nuts toolset for software development teams that includes a CI/CD pipeline, code repository, developer portal and infrastructure as code support, among other things. The company hinted that it will use the financing to build or buy other pieces for the toolset. Read more

What Elon Musk said today: If you write the words “cis” or “cisgender” on X, you might be served this full-screen message: “This post contains language that may be considered a slur by X and could be used in a harmful manner in violation of our rules,” the warning says. You can continue to publish the post or delete it. Read more

Dell threat update: Not only did a threat actor scrape physical addresses from Dell support tickets, but they also nabbed some customer phone numbers as well. Read more

Apple says it stopped $1.8B in fraud last year: That stat was part of Apple’s newly released data about anti-fraud measures related to its operation of the iOS App Store. This is a decrease in fraud Apple reported preventing in 2022. It should be noted that Apple settled a developer lawsuit in 2022, which raised complaints about unfair app rejections, scams and fraud. Read more

Expedia testing AI: Expedia will soon launch an AI assistant with its features like search, itinerary building, trip planning and real-time updates like flight delays. You can chat with assistants, like Romie, which will summarize the itinerary it has built or suggest restaurants. Read more

Meta’s board overturns video decision: Meta’s external advisory group, the Oversight Board, overturned a decision to take down a news documentary revealing the identities of child victims of sexual abuse and murder in Pakistan — an exceptional case based on newsworthiness. Read more

Around the web

Image Credits: Getty Images/Patra Kongsirimongkolchai / EyeEm

AMC had a good day: CNBC reports the movie theater operator sold 72.5 million shares in an equity offering launched in March. This amounted to $250 million in a stock sale that closed during the flurry that “Roaring Kitty” generated from briefly reviving the meme stock craze this week. Read more

Regulators watching Waymo again: The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is probing Waymo, the self-driving car startup owned by Google’s parent Alphabet, following 22 reported incidents, The Wall Street Journal reported. Read more

TechCrunch Minute

Everything you need to know about OpenAI’s new GPT-4o model: Instead of announcing a search product this week, OpenAI revealed something arguably more impressive — it launched its latest model, GPT-4o. What’s different from previous models is that speech is the big addition to text and video. This means that where ChatGPT previously supported voice interactions through text-to-speech, it’s now closer to a real human assistant, with capabilities like detecting the user’s emotion and responding with emotion of its own. It can even sing. Hit play and let’s chat!