Tuesday, August 6, 2024

Welcome to TechCrunch AM! This morning, we're wondering what's going on at OpenAI that its leadership keeps jumping ship; what will get Grok to stop spreading disinformation; and whether Lucid Motors will continue looking to its Saudi partners for support. We're also looking at Uber's autonomous vehicle efforts, Grubhub's latest buy, Nvidia's unethical video scraping, talking humanoid robots, and Apple using anti-hallucination prompts to tweak its upcoming AI features. Let's go! — Rebecca

TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

1. More OpenAI leaders jump ship: John Schulman, one of OpenAI's co-founders, has left the company for rival AI startup Anthropic, where he'll join former OpenAI safety researcher Jan Leike. Meanwhile, OpenAI president and co-founder Greg Brockman is taking an extended leave through the end of the year. The moves follow a dramatic falling out three months ago that saw co-founder Ilya Sutskever leave over concerns of AI safety. Read More

2. Grok must stop spreading election misinformation: So say five U.S. secretaries of state in an open letter addressed to Elon Musk, urging him to address the X chatbot's penchant for spreading false information about VP Kamala Harris. Specifically, Grok wrongly suggested Harris isn't eligible to appear on some 2024 U.S. presidential ballots. Musk has publicly endorsed former president Donald Trump. Read More

3. Lucid gets $1.5B from Saudi wealth fund: Saudi Arabia is investing billions more into Lucid Motors. The deal deepens the ties between Lucid, which has been struggling with losses, and its majority owner, and comes only months after Lucid's CEO Peter Rawlinson said he wanted to be careful not to rely too much on Saudis' wealth. Read More

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Morning must-reads

Image Credits: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg/Getty Images

🍳 Grubhub gets itself an order of Good Eggs: TechCrunch got the scoop that Grubhub has acquired Good Eggs, a fresh food delivery startup that has fallen on hard times. Sources with knowledge of the deal told TechCrunch it was an all-stock deal that valued Good Eggs slightly above its previous valuation of $22 million. Read More

🚘 Uber highlights autonomous vehicle efforts: Investors expressed concern ahead of Uber's Q2 earnings that Tesla was coming in hot with its October robotaxi reveal. To assuage those concerns, Uber highlighted its AV efforts, which are up 6x from the year before. It's notable that Uber chose to highlight AVs despite delivering better-than-expected results. Read More

🛰️ We all need a bit of perspective: Understandably, it's hard to predict what the weather will be like out in space — solar flares, geomagnetic storms and the like. Perspective Space wants to help reduce the number of satellites and equipment lost to such storms by using ML and AI to improve the accuracy of space weather forecasting. Pretty cool, eh? Read More

🇮🇳 Amazon's India chief resigns: Manish Tiwary, head of Amazon's Indian operations, is leaving the firm. Amazon has been facing lots of competition in the world's most populous country, and Tiwary's exit follows Amazon shifting its focus to cloud business in India. The company has also shuttered several other initiatives, including its food delivery venture. Read More

🖥️ Quantum computing gets a boost: Riverlane, a specialist in quantum error correction tech, has raised $75 million to further build its tech that promises to reduce error rates in quantum computing and aims to scale computation by a huge amount. Read More

Around the Web

😵‍💫 Whatever you do, don't hallucinate: The Verge took a look at the instructions Apple has programmed into its Apple Intelligence features, which are headed to iPhones, iPads and Macs. These instructions include positive affirmations like, "You are a helpful mail assistant," and direct orders like, "Do not hallucinate." Cool, but if that latter prompt solves hallucinations in AI, I'll eat my shoe. Read More

📺 Nvidia scraped YouTube to build AI models: 404 Media has found that Nvidia scraped videos from YouTube, Netflix and several other sources – "a human lifetime of videos per day," actually – to train a yet-to-be-released video foundational model. My fear is that we'll see so many of these instances that we'll eventually stop being shocked enough to act. Read More

🫣 Tech's to blame for at least some problems: By forcing everyone to stay indoors, the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated a societal shift that was already underway: we're now increasingly afraid of the outside world while staying indoors becomes ever more appealing. Technology is the main culprit, according to an essay from The New Humanist, as it fuels divisiveness while sedating populations with endless games, TV streaming and Zoom calls. "Slippers may be comfortable, but will you, on your deathbed, really wish you'd spent more time in them?" Read More

Before you go

Image Credits: Figure

🤖 Tell me, robot: What is your purpose? Figure's latest humanoid robot, Figure 02 is impressive because not only can it walk around and carry stuff (helpful in factories and warehouses), it also has speakers and microphones so it can talk back to you using OpenAI models. Read More