Thursday, June 13, 2024

Welcome to TechCrunch PM! This afternoon, we learned the fate of Elon Musk’s compensation package. Also enjoy learning about how young startup GPTZero became profitable in its first year, Amazon’s big bet on generative AI and a battery company leaning in on sodium. See you tomorrow!

TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: Tesla (screenshot)

Elon’s pay package: Tesla shareholders voted today to approve the CEO’s 2018 stock option compensation package. But it’s not a done deal yet. Read more

Elon sued: A new lawsuit alleges Musk and the Tesla board breached their fiduciary duties by allowing the CEO to start xAI, which they say is a competing AI company, and divert resources and talent to it. Read more

One VC above them all: GPTZero has been watched by top venture capital firms since December 2022, when it launched the initial version of its detection tool that helps identify whether a piece of content was AI generated. After fielding call after call, co-founders Edward Tian and Alex Cui made a choice of who was going to lead their Series A. Read more

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Afternoon must-reads

Image Credits: Gabe Ginsberg/SOPA Images/LightRocket / Getty Images

Amazon’s $230M bet on generative AI: The investment aims to position AWS as an attractive cloud infrastructure choice for startups developing generative AI models to power their products, apps and services. Read more

Every time Elon Musk posted on X, someone’s job got harder: Tesla has its fanboys, and each time Musk engaged with them, including the push to “re-ratify” his compensation package, Tesla’s regulatory team became busier than maybe ever. Read more

Missing something?: Apple executives talked about a lot this week at WWDC, but they couldn’t fit everything into the keynote speech. More features came later, and we’ve put them into this helpful guide. Read more

Charging up sodium: Lithium-ion batteries continue to be quite expensive to make, so manufacturers have started to explore sodium-ion batteries as a complement to lithium-ion. Unigrid raised $12 million in new capital to bring this strategy mainstream. Read more

Spotlight on search: Apple’s Spotlight has been able to search for content in developers’ apps, but it would only return results when search terms matched exactly. With this year’s addition of semantic search capabilities, people will be able to search for content in apps using search terms that are similar in meaning. Read more

Now it’s a party: WhatsApp updated the video calling experience across devices to introduce screen sharing with audio support and a new speaker spotlight feature. It’s also increasing the limit for video call participants to up to 32 people. Read more

Yahoo’s AI push: After launching AI-powered features for Yahoo Mail, including its own take on Gmail’s Priority Inbox and AI summaries of emails, the company unveiled an AI-powered version of its Yahoo News app. There’s more to come, including adding AI to Yahoo’s homepage. Read more

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TechCrunch Minute 🕒

Apple sherlocks third-party apps at WWDC 2024: To be clear, an app isn’t doomed just because it’s sherlocked. But it’s probably not a great day for app developers when they realize they’re about to be competing with Apple’s resources and built-in advantage. Hit play and let’s chat!

Around the web 🌐

Amazon should have dominated AI, employees say: Fortune spoke with over a dozen employees who say the delivery giant “Schruted” its opportunity to be the biggest player in artificial intelligence with Alexa. Read more

Ripple’s price is trending down: The cryptocurrency, which goes by XRP, has lost nearly 10% of its value this week, AMBCrypto reports. Read more