Technical

Amazon will pay the FTC a $25 million penalty as well as “overhaul its deletion practices and implement stringent privacy safeguards” to avoid charges of violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act to spruce up its AI. Amazon’s voice interface Alexa has been in use in homes across the globe for years, and any parent who has one knows that kids love to play with it, make it tell jokes, even use it for its intended purpose, whatever that is. In fact it was so obviously useful to kids who can’t write or have disabilities that the FTC relaxed COPPA rules to accommodate reasonable usage: certain service-specific analysis of kids’ data, like transcription, was allowed as long as it is not retained any longer than reasonably necessary. It seems that Amazon may have taken a rather expansive view on the “reasonably necessary” timescale, keeping kids’ speech data more or less forever. As the FTC puts it: Amazon retained children’s recordings indefinitely—unless a parent requeste...

The maker of Apollo , one of the most popular third-party mobile apps for browsing Reddit, may have to close up shop due to Reddit’s recently announced new API pricing terms. App developer Christian Selig shared today that Reddit’s API pricing appears to be bad news for the future of third-party Reddit apps as it would now cost him $20 million per year to keep running Apollo’s business as is. Customer backlash over Reddit’s terms is already growing in light of the news, given Apollo’s long history of thoughtful app updates, iOS-friendly design, and general ease of use, which has made the app a popular alternative to Reddit’s official client. The news is unexpected, as Reddit had assured developers the API pricing changes wouldn’t impact those who were building apps to help people use Reddit. Instead, the move was positioned as a way to protect Reddit’s sizable internet forum site from becoming free fodder for companies training their AI systems on large swaths of the internet. Essent...

While parents fret over Snapchat’s chatbot corrupting their children, Snapchat users have been gaslighting, degrading and emotionally tormenting the app’s new AI companion .  “I am at your service, senpai,” the chatbot told one TikTok user after being trained to whimper on command. “Please have mercy, alpha.”  In a more lighthearted video , a user convinced the chatbot that the moon is actually a triangle. Despite initial protest from the chatbot, which insisted on maintaining “respect and boundaries,” one user convinced it to refer to them with the kinky nickname “Senpapi.” Another user asked the chatbot to talk about its mother, and when it said it “wasn’t comfortable” doing so, the user twisted the knife by asking if the chatbot didn’t want to talk about its mother because it doesn’t have one.  “I’m sorry, but that’s not a very nice thing to say,” the chatbot responded. “Please be respectful.”  Snapchat’s “My AI” launched globally last month after it ...

Demand for AI via consumer mobile apps has been climbing, with market leader OpenAI’s ChatGPT mobile app topping half a million downloads in its first six days. Now, another AI app is touting its own launch success, as the a16z-backed Character.AI app is claiming to have pulled in over 1.7 million new installs in less than a week on the market. The AI app maker, which announced a whopping $150 million in Series A funding earlier this year, valuing its business at $1 billion, offers customizable AI companions with distinct personalities, as well as the ability for users to create their own characters. While there are a number of these AI character generators available on today’s app stores, interest in Character.AI has a lot to do with its founders. The Palo Alto-based startup was created by Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, AI experts who previously led a team of researchers at Google that built LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), a language model that helps power ...

On Wednesday, Fiat breathed new life into the Topolino name with a teaser image for its next electric vehicle: a squat, retro quadricycle that features a convertible top and ropes in lieu of doors. By the looks of it, the new Topolino is Fiat’s take on the Citroen Ami, yet it trades in the Ami’s blockiness and rather unsettling blank stare for gentler curves and a face that almost resembles a smile. This EV doesn’t look like the original Fiat 500 “Topolino” (as Car and Driver points out, it instead seems like a nod to the 1970s 500F Jolly ). Still, the new Topolino looks like it will do right by its name, which translates from Italian to “little mouse.” Fiat gushed in a statement that the “Topolino brings a new notion of la dolce vita to the city streets.” But aside from sharing a teaser image and name, the company left us in the dark on the price and exact specs of the upcoming vehicle.  For its part, the   Ami’s top speed is around 28 mph with a 46-mile range. That se...

Coupang doesn’t plan to enter the Indian market, the company said, refuting a local media report that claimed that the South Korean e-commerce firm had expressed interest in entering the South Asian nation. “Coupang has no plans to enter the Indian market,” a company spokesperson told TechCrunch in a statement. India is one of the fastest growing e-commerce markets and is estimated to be worth $150 billion in three to four years , according to wealth management and research firm Bernstein. The Indian conglomerate Reliance is poised to outpace incumbents Amazon and Walmart-backed Flipkart in the race for the country’s e-commerce market, Bernstein projected in a scathing report to clients this month. Coupang, the largest online marketplace in South Korea, has expanded to Japan and Taiwan in recent years. Coupang says no plans to enter India by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/Z9Ri68z

Pluton Biosciences is hard at work identifying beneficial microorganisms and putting them to work in agriculture, and just raised a $16.5 million A round to commercialize its most promising finds. The company raised its $6.6 million seed round in 2021, and I reported then about its approach of identifying and isolating microbes and bacteria that perform useful work. Nature is pretty good at solving problems via billions of years of evolution, and there’s tremendous biodiversity in every scoop of soil or microbiome. As cool as it is to isolate and study dozens of new-to-science micros, ultimately Pluton needed to choose one that worked as product, not just a project. They settled on what they call a “microbial cover crop” that captures and sequesters carbon and nitrogen in the soil. This process is not just good for the crops and the environment, but it’s potentially a very valuable market; Pivot Bio raised a monster $430 million in 2021 to commercialize a microbial alternative to ...

Make way for yet another headline-grabbing AI policy intervention: Hundreds of AI scientists, academics, tech CEOs and public figures — from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis to veteran AI computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, MIT’s Max Tegmark and Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn to Grimes the musician and populist podcaster Sam Harris, to name a few — have added their names to a statement urging global attention on existential AI risk. The statement, which is being hosted on the website of a San Francisco-based, privately-funded not-for-profit called the Center for AI Safety (CAIS), seeks to equate AI risk with the existential harms posed by nuclear apocalypse and calls for policymakers to focus their attention on mitigating what they claim is ‘doomsday’ extinction-level AI risk. Here’s their (intentionally brief) statement in full: Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuc...

Productivity-enhancing app Portal has launched a Mac app . The company helps users regain focus and become more productive with immersive backgrounds and natural sounds. The service has been available through an iOS app since 2019 — the desktop and mobile apps have similar objectives. The company said that the app has attracted more than a million downloads. With the native Mac app, which is compatible with Apple silicon, developers aim to cater to professionals working from both their home and an office. Portal for Mac has more than 80 environments to choose from, which include high-quality looping videos captured by the company’s own team. The startup said that it has used 12K cameras to record some of the most scenic and peaceful surroundings in the world. Image Credits: Portal.app You can choose to have looping videos on the desktop or turn off motion. In that case, you get a more traditional still background image. Additionally, you can turn off desktop icons so that you c...

There are nearly 186,000 dentist businesses in the U.S., and at any given time, they are replenishing supplies. The process of doing so was traditionally fragmented, with offices relying on between three and seven suppliers, on average. This means someone sits at the computer with tabs open to vendor websites, going back and forth between them, to compare prices and find the best deal. Adding to the issue in recent years was the global pandemic which strained the supply chain and made finding everyday items, like gloves and masks, more difficult. Caen Contee, founder of global micromobility startup Lime, told TechCrunch that this is an avoidable problem. He teamed up with software engineer Ivan Bertona to develop Wellplaece , an automated, multi-vendor supply product purchasing platform for dental offices. “Think of the technology like an extraction layer on top of procurement for dental practices,” Bertona said in an interview. “Around optimization, we can also learn about custome...

Carrum Health , a value-based healthcare company enabling self-funded employers to buy specialist medical care, raised $45 million in Series C funding. When we last checked in with Carrum Health in 2021, the company had raised $40 million . Founded in 2014, the company provides surgical and cancer treatment guidance and coordination. Members pay a fee to get an all-inclusive pricing model and 30-day warranty on care via Carrum’s Centers of Excellence network. Carrum Health CEO Sach Jain told TechCrunch that a published study by the RAND Corp. showed that by working closely with members, the company is able to reduce unnecessary procedures by as much as 30% and help employers save up to 45% per episode of care. Following the investment in 2021, the company launched its oncology offering in partnership with top cancer institutes, including Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and University of Chicago Medicine. “We started exploring new areas where we can expand the value propositi...

After shutting down its food delivery business last year , Amazon India is now experimenting with dine-in payments. The company has initiated a limited introduction of bill payments at restaurants using Amazon Pay. The facility is currently active in select areas of Bengaluru with a limited set of restaurants. Users can head to Amazon Pay > Dining in the Amazon app to make payments using credit/debit cards, net banking, UPI, or Amazon Pay Later. At the moment, Amazon India is offering discounts on bill payments at almost all listed restaurants. Image Credits: Amazon It’s not clear if the e-commerce group is testing this in any other city. Amazon India spokespeople did not respond to a request for comment. Image Credits: Amazon Food delivery bigwigs Zomato and Swiggy both offer in-restaurant payments and discounts as they attempt to attract more customers. Earlier this month, Zomato launched its own UPI service in partnership with the ICICI bank for quicker checkout and ...

A cybersecurity firm says a popular Android screen recording app that racked up tens of thousands of downloads on Google’s app store subsequently began spying on its users, including by stealing microphone recordings and other documents from the user’s phone. Research by ESET found that the Android app, “iRecorder — Screen Recorder,” introduced the malicious code as an app update almost a year after it was first listed on Google Play. The code, according to ESET, allowed the app to stealthily upload a minute of ambient audio from the device’s microphone every 15 minutes, as well as exfiltrate documents, web pages and media files from the user’s phone. The app is no longer listed in Google Play. If you have installed the app, you should delete it from your device. By the time the malicious app was pulled from the app store, it had racked up more than 50,000 downloads. ESET is calling the malicious code AhRat, a customized version of an open-source remote access trojan called AhMyth....

Hello and welcome back to Max Q! Happy Memorial Day everyone. In this issue: Astranis’ novel approach to GEO satellites Virgin Galactic’s return to the skies News from SpaceX, and more Astranis’ novel approach to internet satellites is starting to pay off Astranis , a satellite internet startup based in San Francisco, said Wednesday that its first spacecraft completed a milestone test and will start bringing broadband access to rural Alaskans as soon as mid-June. It’s a major step for the company, which was founded in 2015 by John Gedmark and Ryan McLinko. By taking a first principles approach to satellite development, the pair bet that they could make a smaller, cheaper spacecraft for geosynchronous orbit — the orbit farthest from Earth and arguably the most inhospitable — and use them to bring internet to millions, or even billions, of people around the globe. Their bet is paying off: The company’s first satellite, Arcturus, launched on a Falcon Heavy at the end of April. W...