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BeReal, a rising social media app that emphasizes authenticity, is making its first outreach to brands and celebrities. Starting February 6, brands and celebrities will be able to sign up as “RealBrands” or “RealPeople,” and fans can watch them share behind the scenes moments from their lives that they might not share elsewhere.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/24/bereal-which-now-has-23m-daus-is-onboarding-brands-and-celebs/
“We’re not trying to kill your phone,” said CEO and founder Jesse Lyu on a call with press ahead of the Las Vegas tech show. “The phone is an entertainment device, but if you’re trying to get something done it’s not the highest efficiency machine. To arrange dinner with a colleague we needed four-five different apps to work together. Large language models are a universal solution for natural language, we want a universal solution for these services — they should just be able to understand you.”
https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/09/can-a-striking-design-set-rabbits-r1-pocket-ai-apart-from-a-gaggle-of-virtual-assistants/
On Tuesday, Elon Musk’s X wrote about a grand vision for the company in 2024, which includes launching peer-to-peer payments and more AI-powered tools. Amid all this, the company silently removed a feature for paid subscribers. They’re no longer able to set an NFT as a profile picture.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/10/x-removes-support-for-nft-profile-pictures/
Much-hyped hardware startup Humane has announced that it’s laying off 10 employees — 4% of its workforce — before it has shipped a single one of its funky new ambient computing devices. The company’s chief technology officer (CTO) is also “transitioning” into an advisor role after five years at the company. “As we begin this new chapter of Humane, going from stealth to customer facing, we are making some changes to best prepare us for continued growth,” CEO and co-founder Bethany Bongiorno wrote in a LinkedIn post (as reported by The Verge).
https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/10/humane-layoffs-ai-pin-hardware/
OpenAI plans to launch a store for GPTs, custom apps based on its text-generating AI models (e.g. GPT-4), sometime in the coming week. GPTs don’t require coding experience and can be as simple or complex as a developer wishes. For example, a GPT can be trained on a cookbook collection so that it can answer questions about ingredients for a specific recipe. Or a GPT could ingest a company’s proprietary codebases so that developers can check their style or generate code in line with best practices.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/04/openais-app-store-for-gpts-will-launch-next-week/
In a press release today, Bird confirmed that it had entered into a “financial restructuring process aimed at strengthening its balance sheet,” with the company continuing to operate as normal in pursuit of “long-term, sustainable growth.” It’s also worth noting that Bird’s Canadian and European operations are not part of this bankruptcy filing, and will “continue to operate as normal,” the company said.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/20/bird-bankruptcy/
Google’s new Gemini AI model is getting a mixed reception after its big debut yesterday, but users may have less confidence in the company’s tech or integrity after finding out that the most impressive demo of Gemini was pretty much faked. “We created the demo by capturing footage in order to test Gemini’s capabilities on a wide range of challenges. Then we prompted Gemini using still image frames from the footage, and prompting via text.” (Parmy Olsen at Bloomberg was the first to report the discrepancy.)
https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/07/googles-best-gemini-demo-was-faked/