Monday, June 17, 2024

Welcome back to TechCrunch PM. This afternoon, we have a look at the Department of Justice's suit against Adobe, Runway's video-generating AI model, and new research on what happens to your body in space. Let's get into it.

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The Department of Justice vs. Adobe: The U.S. Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against Adobe alleging that the company deceives consumers by hiding the early-termination fee and making it difficult for people to cancel their subscriptions. The government says Adobe pushed consumers toward the "annual paid monthly" subscription without informing them that canceling the plan in the first year would cost hundreds of dollars. Read more

The AI-generated video race is heating up: Runway unveiled Gen-3, its latest AI model for generating 10-second video clips from text prompts and images. The company says Gen-3 delivers a "major" improvement in generation speed and fidelity over Runway's previous flagship video model, in addition to more control over the structure, style and motion of the videos it creates. Read more

Perplexity takes another shot at Google: In a move to stop Perplexity users from going to other search engines, the AI-powered search startup now displays results for factual queries such as weather and time at a certain location, currency conversions, and answers to simple math queries directly through cards. Read more

A MESSAGE FROM AWS

Applications now open for the AWS Generative AI Accelerator

The AWS Generative AI Accelerator supports the most promising generative AI startups with up to $1 million in AWS credits, personalized mentorship, and access to a global network of experts. Over 10 weeks, startups will accelerate their growth, innovate with AWS technology, and redefine the future of generative AI.

Learn More

Afternoon must-reads

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Apple kills Pay Later: After launching in late March 2023, Apple's U.S.-only Pay Later feature is no more. The move isn't too surprising, though, as Apple announced at its Worldwide Developers Conference that Apple Pay users would be able to access loans through the third-party app Affirm. Read more

Stop playing games with digital security: Signal president Meredith Whittaker warned that a controversial EU legislative proposal to scan the private messages of citizens to detect child sexual abuse material is a risk to the future of web security and called the plan an attempt to use "rhetorical games" to rebrand technology often criticized by security experts. Read more

DeepMind is developing AI to score videos: Google's AI research lab DeepMind says it's developing AI models that can generate music and even dialogue to match the tone and style of videos. While plenty of organizations have developed video-generating AI models, they can't yet create sound effects to sync with the videos that they generate. Read more

Bringing home the (fake) bacon: Plant-based meat startup Tender Food got a new cash infusion of $11 million in Series A funding and a fast-food chain contract in the Boston area. CEO Christophe Chantre told TechCrunch that it believes Tender's technology beats its competitors in taste, texture, nutrition and cost. Read more

A close-up photo of a discarded rocket stage: Astroscale's space junk observation satellite has moved within striking distance of a discarded rocket upper stage that's been floating around Earth for nearly 20 years. The satellite took close-up pictures of the object from just 50 meters away. The ambitious program aims to eventually remove debris from orbit. Read more

Black founders are customizing ChatGPT as crypto makes a comeback: Today's episode of Equity looks at how Black founders are creating tailored ChatGPT experiences. We also discuss TikTok's AI actors, IPO news from Tempus and Shein, and the return of crypto, and we close out the show with another Pitch Deck Teardown. Listen here

TechCrunch Minute

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What does space tourism do to our bodies?: The journal Nature recently published a package of 44 papers about aerospace medicine and space biology. New data from the all-civilian crew of the Inspiration4 gives us a much better understanding of how the human body reacts to the stress of space travel. Hit play and let's chat!

Around the web

McDonald's ends its AI drive-thru test: McDonald's is ending its two-year experiment with IBM on automated order taking in its restaurants and drive-thrus, Restaurant Business reports. The company plans to remove the technology from the more than 100 restaurants in the program by July 2024 as it explores "voice ordering solutions more broadly." Read more

How ChatGPT is impacting freelancers: We're getting more data about how AI is impacting jobs. An analysis of nearly 2 million job postings found that since ChatGPT's launch in 2022, the demand for digital freelancers in areas like writing, coding and app development has declined by 21%. Read more