Also: The unexpected hurdle in Canoo's bankruptcy sale
Welcome to TechCrunch AM! It's Dom, and I'm your guest writer this morning. We're looking at ChatGPT's lowered guardrails; Yelp's voice agent for restaurants; what's stopping Canoo's bankruptcy sale; Alibaba's latest slate of AI models; what to expect from LlamaCon, and more. | | | Image Credits: Silas Stein / picture alliance / Getty Images | 1. A little can be a lot: OpenAI's intent to relax guardrails around ChatGPT may have backfired. TechCrunch testing revealed that ChatGPT happily writes erotica even for accounts where the user was registered as a minor. The company told us it is "actively deploying a fix." Read More 2. A mystery man steps in: Charles Garson, an investor with no clear ties to bankrupt EV startup Canoo, is trying to stop the sale of the startup's assets to its former CEO. Garson called the sale a flawed process, saying he's offering $20 million for Canoo's assets, more than Canoo CEO Anthony Aquila's $4 million bid. He isn't the only one protesting the sale, however. Read More 3. More competition: Alibaba has released a group of AI models called Qwen3, which it says can match and even outperform some of the flagship models from Google and OpenAI. The models are set to be released on Hugging Face and GitHub. Read More | | | Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch | ☮ Reminiscent of the 60s: New research from Google has found that hackers working for governments were responsible for the majority of zero-day exploits used in real-world cyberattacks last year. Read More 📜 You've been served: Deel's CEO Alex Bouaziz has been served legal papers amid its ongoing suit with Rippling. The latter's bailiffs previously said they couldn't find Deel execs to serve, but things came to a head in court and Deel chose to be formally served via representatives in Ireland. Read More 🤙 How can AI help you? Yelp is deploying "voice agents" to help restaurants and service providers handle some customer service tasks, like answering calls or adding people to waitlists. Read More 🍀 Playing matchmaker: London-based startup Dex wants to make companies' lives easier by using AI to find them talent. It's raised a $3.1 million pre-seed from names like a16z's Speedrun fund, Meta board member Charlie Songhurst, and Deliveroo COO Eric French. Read More 🤗 Why give your data only to Meta? A company called Grouphug is looking to add some AI magic to WhatsApp chats. GroupHug can take a WhatsApp chat and generate memes and other funny content from the text right now, but the company plans to launch a platform to generate more value out of WhatsApp groups using generative AI. Read More 🇮🇳 Reddit takes on another language: Reddit users can now automatically translate posts and comments into Hindi, and they'll soon be able to do that in Bengali, too. The social platform is really trying hard to woo users in India, which boasts one of the world's largest internet user base. Read More | | | 🤑 Gotta have skin in the game: The New York Times has a deep dive on President Trump's crypto firm, World Liberty Financial, which seemingly blurs the lines between private business and government policy. Read More 🔋 An unlikely source: Authorities have ruled out the possibility of a cyberattack for the blackouts in Spain and Portugal, the worst Europe has seen in 20 years. But, some think it might have been caused by a disruption to their solar power supply, per Financial Times. Read More | | | 🦙 Meta is hosting its first AI developer event, LlamaCon, today. The company will livestream some big keynotes and firesides, so we've put together a list of what you can expect. Read More | | | Featured jobs from CrunchBoard | | | Has this been forwarded to you? Click here to subscribe to this newsletter. | | | Update your preferences here at any time | | Copyright © 2024 TechCrunch, All rights reserved.Yahoo Inc. 680 Folsom Street,San Francisco,CA | | | | |
