Wednesday, July 24, 2024

Welcome to TechCrunch PM! If you received one of the CrowdStrike Uber Eats gift cards, please let us know: Did it work or was it expired? Also on tap: Learn how AI may be at risk of "model collapse" and why VCs still love it, and we look at Microsoft's new tool that uses it. Plus, Astranis' Omega satellite project gets a major cash infusion. Enjoy!

TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: David L. Ryan/The Boston Globe / Getty Images

CrowdStrike's gift kept on giving: CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm whose botched update crashed millions of computers all over the world, offered its partners a $10 Uber Eats gift card as an apology. However, when they went to use it … Read more

Reworkd reworks itself: Reworkd's founders went viral on GitHub last year with AgentGPT, a free tool that builds AI agents. After that success, they wanted to do something more specific, so Reworkd is now a web-scraping company, specifically building AI agents to extract structured data from the public web. Read more

Preventing "model collapse": It seems there is a mythical Ouroboros going on in artificial intelligence. You know, the symbol of swallowing your own tail. A new study suggests AI may be at risk of "model collapse" after a few rounds of being trained on data it generated itself. Read more

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Afternoon must-reads

Image Credits: Lumi

Colin Kaepernick gets creative: The former NFL quarterback and civil rights activist knows a thing or two about losing control of your own narrative. Now Kaepernick is launching an AI storytelling platform, Lumi, to help creators tell and own their stories. Read more

VCs are still gaga over AI: New data from Crunchbase shows that generative AI companies are on track to match or exceed the roughly $21.8 billion they raised in 2023. Read more

Extra, extra! TikTok Lite content is harmful: That's what a new Mozilla study is saying at least. It's saying TikTok Lite, a low-bandwidth version of the video platform popular across Africa, Asia and Latin America, is exposing users to harmful content because of its lack of safety features compared to the flagship version of the app. Read more

Amazon, Meta and Microsoft walk into a room … together: It's not often you'll find those three companies in the same room, collaborating on the same goals. But that's exactly what we have with the Overture Maps Foundation, an initiative to develop interoperable and open map data. Read more

Meet Bing generative search: It's Microsoft's answer to Google's AI-powered search experience that aggregates info from around the web and generates a summary in response to search queries. Read more

MONEY, MONEY, MONEY 💰

Astranis' Omega project gets a $200M boost: Astranis develops and operates small broadband communications satellites in geostationary orbit. This new investment means Astranis has fully funded its next-generation satellite program. Read more

CityRock launches second fund: CityRock closed on a $24 million Fund II to invest in founders from diverse backgrounds. The fund, which is part of H/L Ventures, will seek to back companies in areas such as climate, healthcare and the future of work. Read more

Lakera raises $20M: The Swiss startup is building technology to protect generative AI applications from malicious prompts and other threats. Prompts can sometimes trick an application into doing something it's not supposed to. Lakera's "low-latency AI application firewall" secures traffic into and out of generative AI applications. Read more

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Around the web 🌐

CrowdStrike's oops likely to cost its clients billions: The Guardian reports the faulty update may cost companies like Microsoft, all the major airlines, and some banks and healthcare companies $54 billion in losses. Read more

Women in VC: The number of female partners at U.S. venture capital firms doubled since 2018, according to PitchBook figures. Bloomberg has more

Score another one for Google: 404 Media reports that Google is the only search engine that can return search results from Reddit. Others do, too, just not anything new. Read more