Hey, folks, welcome to the Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular roundup of the week in tech. Are you nervous about following the news cycle as closely as you want? Don’t worry. That’s why WiR exists. We will let you know as soon as possible.
Thanks to the 4th of July holiday, the work week has been somewhat disrupted. But still a lot happened. Meta released Threads, its Twitter competitor, which quickly grew to tens of millions of users. Meanwhile, Twitter has quietly removed the login requirement for viewing tweets that it imposed just a few days ago. Somewhere in the midst of it all, secretive hardware startup Humane has revealed details of its first product. And OpenAI has made the GPT-4 generative AI model generally available.
Read on for more of the top stories from the week — and if you haven’t already, sign up here to get WiR in your inbox every Saturday.
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Threads will be live: This week, Instagram announced the long-awaited launch of its text-based social networking app, Threads, which allows Instagram users to authenticate their existing credentials to post short updates such as tweets. . Within 24 hours, the app, available for iOS and Android in almost 100 countries (but not the EU, reportedly due to local data privacy regulations), passed 30 million sign- up.
Twitter took off the gloves: With the success of Threads, Twitter threatened to sue Meta, which it accused of poaching former Twitter employees to create the new platform. Shortly after the launch of Threads, a Twitter lawyer, Alex Spiro, sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg accusing the social media giant of engaging in unlawful abuse of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.
A difficult thread to remove: In more Threads news, it turns out that deleting a Threads account also requires deleting the linked Instagram account. The reason, Meta explains on the policy page, is that the Threads profile is part of the user’s Instagram account. The discovery of this stipulation shocked many users, not surprisingly.
OpenAI launches GPT-4: OpenAI announced this week the general availability of GPT-4, its latest text generation model, via a paid API. GPT-4 can generate text (including code) and accept image and text inputs — an improvement over its predecessor GPT-3.5, which only accepted text — and performs at the “human level” in various professional and academic benchmarks. But it’s not perfect, as we noted in our previous coverage.
Humane Reveals Ai Pin: Humane, the startup launched by ex-Apple design and engineering duo Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, this week revealed details about its first product: the Ai Pin. Humane’s product is a wearable gadget with a projected display and AI-powered features – like a futuristic smartphone, but in a very different form factor.
Pornhub blocks access: Pornhub blocked access to users in Mississippi, Virginia and Utah, which recently passed laws requiring age verification to access adult websites. Internet privacy advocates have long been critical of these age checks, which require users to share personal information such as their ID with the government in order to use the internet.
Reddit’s valuation is cut, again: Fidelity further cut the estimated value of its holdings in social media giant Reddit. Fidelity Blue Chip Growth Fund valued its holdings in Reddit at $15.4 million as of May 31, according to the fund’s monthly disclosure released Friday. That’s down 7.36% from the $16.6 million mark at the close of April and overall a slide of 45.4% since its investment in August 2021. The updated value of the share suggests a $5.5 billion appreciation for Reddit.
Goldman looks to take down Apple: Four years after partnering with Apple to launch the Apple Card, Goldman Sachs may be eyeing the exits. The Wall Street Journal reports that Goldman is “looking for an exit” from its high-profile deal with Apple, which was recently expanded to include savings accounts for Apple Card holders. The investment banking firm is apparently in talks to offload the partnership with American Express, the WSJ report added, but so far nothing is set in stone, nor is it clear whether Apple will support the handoff.
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Need a podcast to pass the time? You have come to the right place. TechCrunch offers a growing roster of quality movies, and this week, there’s plenty in the way of new material.
Equity featured Immad Akhund, the CEO and co-founder of Mercury, who made headlines earlier this year for how the move was to help fill the void in the banking business left after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank .
And the Found crew interviewed Charles Baron, the co-founder and CMO of Farmers Business Network, a startup that offers a suite of online services to farmers.
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TC+ subscribers have access to in-depth commentary, analysis and surveys — which you already know if you’re a subscriber. If you’re not, consider signing up. Here are some highlights from this week:
Europe, the fuzzy tech cloud: Haje writes about the differences between the US and European startup environments. The latter, he writes, have an appetite for experimentation that has failed to fully settle into a coherent whole — unlike some of the larger US hubs that attract most of the talent and investment.
Switch to save money: For company founders and shareholders with an exit on the horizon, a move for tax reasons can make a lot of financial sense. However, many times it is not that simple. Peyton Carr, managing director of Keystone Global Partners, expanded on this.
Become a Black founder in France: The French startup ecosystem for Black founders is shrouded in mystery, but Dom is trying to pull back the curtains. He found that deep racial stereotypes and prejudices still persisted in the country, manifesting in the form of economic discrimination against Black entrepreneurs.
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