Monday, June 24, 2024

Welcome to TechCrunch AM! This morning, we have an illuminating interview with the founder of Khosla Ventures, some more terrible news for Byju’s, a new social platform for retail investors, rumors of Apple and Meta in talks over AI, and how a couple of teenagers raised half-a-million just weeks out of high school. Let’s dive in! — Rebecca

TechCrunch Top 3

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1. Vinod Khosla is wary of too much regulation: TechCrunch’s Connie Loizos recently got to pick the Khosla Ventures founder’s brains, and the resulting conversation is chock-full of insights about how AI is changing tech today. Among other things, Khosla talked about what concerns him with AI, FTC Chair Lina Khan, and why he thinks Europe is regulating itself out of leading the AI race. Read More

2. More bad news for Byju’s: Prosus Ventures, one of Byju’s largest investors, has written off its 9.6% stake in the edtech startup. This follows months of financial, governance and legal issues at Byju’s, some of which led to the venture firm leaving the startup’s board. Prosus says it is still hopeful that Byju’s can be salvaged, though. Read More

3. Journalists don’t like AI media deals: A handful of publishers have signed content and licensing agreements with OpenAI, and more will follow. But almost none of these deals were signed with the consent of the journalists whose writing will be used to train these large language models. Now, some journalists are starting to demand AI protections in their contracts. Read More

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Morning Must Reads

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Sir Jack a Lot wants to help you avoid grifters: If you’ve ever hesitated to follow the seemingly mad investing advice that’s thrown around on Reddit, you were right to. But a lot of people have fallen victim to pump-and-dump investing scams. Sir Jack a Lot, known for making millions off meme stocks and sharing investing advice, wants to change that, and he has launched a startup that aims to foster a community for retail traders that encourages accountability and trust. Read More

I swear, founders are getting younger by the day: What did you do after graduating high school? Whatever it was, you probably didn’t raise half-a-mil for your AI startup. That’s exactly what two recent high school grads, Christopher Fitzgerald and Nicholas Van Landschoot, have done with their startup APIGen, which wants to build an AI that can churn out custom APIs just with natural language prompts. Read More

OmniAI transforms business data: The majority of business data goes unused for analytics because it’s simply too unorganized, but AI is here to solve that problem. OmniAI has raised a fresh seed round to offer tools that transform unstructured enterprise data into something that data analytics apps and AI can understand. Read More

Apple 🤝Meta AI?: Apple and Meta are apparently in talks to bring the latter’s AI to a revamped version of Siri, the Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend. Neither Meta nor Apple have yet confirmed the plans, but it makes sense for Apple to diversify its AI partnerships and for Meta to seek external validation. Apple already has a deal with OpenAI to do the same with ChatGPT. Read More

The EU wants to bring ID cards into the 21st century via a universal identity system that will, among other things, let citizens of member countries use a EU Digital Identity Wallet to store their official docs and access public and private services. The move could be seen as a reaction to how much Big Tech controls people’s data today. Read More

The future of TV looks a lot like its past: According to a report by the New York Times, all the big streaming companies are focusing on profitability, and to get there, they want more ads and are planning to push subscription prices higher. Inevitably, that could mean the future of streaming will see more content that advertisers like: washed out cop shows and procedurals. Maybe it’s time to look to the high seas again for quality content? Read More

Meta’s AI chatbot comes to India: Meta is bringing its Llama-3-powered AI chatbot to India. Indians will start seeing the AI chatbot in their search bars across WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger and Facebook. Read More

Will AI start sounding like people or like itself? In our latest edition of the Women in AI series, Dominic-Madori Davis interviewed Anika Collier Navaroli, who is, among other things, a Technology Public Voices Fellow with the OpEd Project. One of her biggest fears about AI? When models have trained themselves on all human-made data and start training on synthetic data, it’s going to result in a feedback loop to hell. Read More

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Around the Web

ByteDance secures chips from U.S.: China’s ByteDance is working with U.S. chip designer Broadcom to develop an advanced AI processor and secure its supply of high-end chips, reports Reuters. ByteDance is no doubt working to bring more AI content, like AI avatars, to its apps, and it’s going to need all that processing power to do that. Read More

The gig economy is no good for anyone: In Seattle and New York, new laws have guaranteed higher wages for gig workers. But that’s resulted in fewer orders because the companies have pushed their higher costs on to customers, reports The Wall Street Journal. Read More

Shein may IPO in London: After struggling to get approval from Beijing, fast-fashion company Shein has reportedly confidentially filed for a potential London listing, reports Reuters. The company was valued at $66 billion in a fundraising round last year. Read More

Before You Go

Image Credits: X / Rebecca Bellan

None can escape the bots on X: A bunch of TechCrunch writers last week noticed that we were being impersonated on X by bots that were mainly just reposting TechCrunch stories. All of them had/have blue checkmarks next to their names, which just goes to show that X’s subscriber model continues to make it easy for bad actors to abuse the system. Read More