Monday, November 18, 2024

Welcome to TC PM! I hope you had a relaxing weekend. Today we've got Sam Altman joining the new San Francisco mayor's transition team; French AI startup Mistral's new features; and Partiful's reason to party. Let's make it a great week!

TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: Stefano Guidi / Getty Images

🌁 Transition team: San Francisco recently elected Daniel Lurie to be the city's new mayor. OpenAI's Sam Altman was selected to co-chair the new mayor's transition team. Read more

🎨 More Mistral features: French AI startup Mistral announced a whole host of new features today for its Le Chat chatbot, including the ability to search the web with citations and a "canvas" tool that lets users modify and edit content. Read more

🎉 Praise for Partiful: Partiful, the event-planing app that's very popular with Gen Z, has been named Google's app of the year for 2024. As someone who uses this app almost weekly, this doesn't surprise me one bit. Read more

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Afternoon must-reads

Image Credits: Tayfun Coskun / Anadolu / Getty Images

🔓 Open source Salesforce: Twenty is looking to build an open source CRM meant to rival tech giant Salesforce. While Twenty doesn't have all the same capabilities as Salesforce's suite of tools, it's attracting quite the community of contributors. Read more

🫵 You get new users! And you get new users! So it turns out the post-election exodus from X is the tide lifting all social media boats. Decentralized social network Mastodon reported that it, too, is seeing a rise in new users and app downloads. Read more

👓 New AI for AR glasses: Meta has started rolling out new AI features for its Ray-Ban Meta AR glasses in France, Italy, and Spain. The glasses can now tap Meta AI to answer questions, and Meta AI can understand a handful of new languages. Read more

📂 Data breach details: Maxar, an operator of image satellites and manufacturer of spacecraft, confirmed that its data was breached, exposing its employees' personal information. The company discovered the breach on October 11. Read more

🔑 Speaking of security: Jen Easterly, the director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, will depart on January 20, after three years. The agency's deputy director, Nitin Natarajan, is also departing. Read more

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Around the web

📸 Info on influencers: Men who lean toward the conservative side now make up the largest group of news influencers. Taylor Lorenz dives into new research from the Pew Research Center on what influencers look like today. Read more

🩺 Dr. X: Elon Musk posted on X that users should upload X-rays and other medical results to Grok for analysis, and people are apparently doing it. There are potential consequences for sharing this type of information. The New York Times breaks it down. Read more

Before you go

Image Credits: DW

🗣️Chatbot confessional: A church in Switzerland is using an "AI Jesus" to dispense spiritual advice to those coming to its confessional. This is dystopian, but do you think people are more willing to share their secrets with an AI chatbot or a priest? Read more