Friday, May 17, 2024

Good afternoon, and welcome back to TechCrunch PM. We made it to Friday, and your reward is some great stories by my colleagues. I invite you to sit back, relax and take in some of the happenings at Slack, OpenAI, Microsoft and YouTube. There is also a Pitch Deck Teardown and news of a security bug giving students free laundry.

TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: TechCrunch

Slack users at odds with company’s AI strategy: What started off with a note on Hacker News about how Slack trains its AI services ended up turning into a lesson in reading the fine print. Read more

This OpenAI team found itself “sailing against the wind”: Kyle Wiggers got a scoop that OpenAI’s “Superalignment team” was promised 20% of the company’s compute resources, but often had requests for a fraction of that compute denied, blocking the team from doing their work. Read more

Two UC Santa Cruz students walk into a laundry room: And discovered they could remotely tell the machines to run laundry cycles for free. They tried contacting the laundry machine operators about the security bug, but to no avail. The vulnerability seems to continue today. Read more

Afternoon must-reads

Image Credits: Dave Whitney / Getty Images

WebTPA discloses data breach: It happened in December 2023 and affected almost 2.5 million people, some of whom had their Social Security number stolen. Little more is known except that the breach occurred on a network server. Read more

Inside IndieBio’s latest cohort: Devin Coldewey thought some of the startups in the accelerator program were making some “major, bordering on ludicrous, claims that could pay off in a big way.” He spoke with IndieBio’s chief science officer, Wes Dang, about it. Read more

Microsoft’s Mistral AI dodges a U.K. probe: The country’s Competition and Markets Authority concluded that the partnership “does not qualify for investigation under the merger provisions of the Enterprise Act 2002.” However, Microsoft’s Inflection hires and Amazon’s Anthropic deal were not so lucky. Read more

Pitch Deck Teardown: Haje digs into Goodcarbon’s $5.5 million seed deck. Find out what about the carbon credits company has him saying, “abso-frickin-lutely.” Read more

YouTube expands “multiview” feature: The feature, which first launched in March 2023, is aimed at sports viewers who want to keep up with more than one live game at a time without having to constantly change channels. This new multiview feature for watching four streams at once is now available on Android phones and tablets. Read more

AI’s busy week, and why the heck are so many VCs leaving their firms?: If there was one thing we heard about this week, it was AI. TechCrunch’s Equity podcast is breaking down what you missed from OpenAI’s and Google’s events, key startup raises from the week, and why some VCs are leaving their firms behind. Listen here

Around the web

Image Credits: Getty Images/Patra Kongsirimongkolchai / EyeEm

Mark Cuban hearts this startup: Forbes reports on Genetesis, a company out of Cincinnati that measures signals from the heart. Read more

Boeing shareholders not ready to say goodbye: CNN reports that Boeing shareholders voted to give almost $33 million in pay to outgoing CEO Dave Calhoun and said he can stay on the airplane maker’s board. Read more

Microsoft has got game: “Call of Duty,” to be exact. The Wall Street Journal reports Microsoft will release the next installment of the popular game as part of its subscription service rather than à la carte. Read more

TechCrunch Minute

Here’s why the video portal between NYC and Dublin shut down: Come to find out, the real world is … well, real. That’s right, humans did their human thing and took advantage of what was meant to be an artistic connection between two cities. Sadly, due to poor behavior, the Portal didn’t last six days when it was supposed to be up for six months. Some people are working to get the Portal up and running again. Hit play and let’s chat!