Two internal whistleblowers at Faraday Future claim the troubled EV company has been lying about some of the few sales it has announced to date.
What’s more, they claim Faraday Future has been performing repairs on these early customer vehicles without proper documentation or work authorization, which he says could put the company’s license with the California Bureau of Automotive Repair at risk.
Faraday Future allegedly fired Guerrero on January 18 in retaliation for speaking up, according to his complaint.
Jia’s control over Faraday Future has always been a thorny issue.
Jia is still not CEO, but Guerrero and Xie claim in their lawsuits that he “heads a shadow organization” that controls the company’s destiny.
The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) has warned key planks of the bloc’s data protection and privacy regime are under attack from industry lobbyists and could face a critical reception from lawmakers in the next parliamentary mandate.
Any shift of approach by incoming lawmakers could have implications for the bloc’s high standard of protection for people’s data.
But he particularly highlighted industry lobbying, especially complaints from businesses targeting the GDPR principle of purpose limitation.
Wiewiórowski did not explicitly blame generative AI for driving the “strong attacks” on the GDPR’s purpose limitation principle.
So any AI-driven weakening of EU data protection laws in the near term is likely to have long term consequences for citizens’ human rights.
WordPress.com owner Automattic is acquiring Beeper, the company behind the iMessage-on-Android solution that was referenced by the Department of Justice in its antitrust lawsuit against Apple.
One of the reasons why there are no other people building this type of app is it costs a surprisingly large amount of money to build a damn good chat app,” Migicovsky noted.
As for Beeper’s products, the company has now briefed the DOJ on what happened when Apple blocked its newer app, Beeper Mini, which aimed to bring iMessage to Android.
Beeper on Android launches to allThe company is instead releasing an updated version of its core app, Beeper, on Android.
In this rewritten version of Beeper, the company is starting to roll out fully end-to-end encrypted messages across Signal.
Lucid Motors delivered more EVs in the first quarter of 2024 than it has in any other quarter, though it set the record by a very slim margin.
The Saudi-backed, California-based electric vehicle company said Tuesday morning that it shipped 1,967 luxury sedans in the quarter.
That’s just a few more than it shipped in the fourth quarter of 2022, when it set its previous record of 1,932 deliveries.
Lucid’s new delivery record comes as the company is struggling to find consistent demand for its pricey luxury sedan, the Air.
But it has not specified how many Air sedans have made it to the Kingdom to date.
Gemini 1.5 Pro, Google’s most capable generative AI model, is now available in public preview on Vertex AI, Google’s enterprise-focused AI development platform.
Gemini 1.5 Pro launched in February, joining Google’s Gemini family of generative AI models.
Gemini 1.5 was incredibly able to find the specific perfect 50 dunk and details from just its long context video understanding!
Gemini 1.5 Pro doesn’t process a million tokens at the snap of a finger.
Google previously said that latency is an area of focus, though, and that it’s working to “optimize” Gemini 1.5 Pro as time goes on.
Kiki World, a beauty startup launched last year, wants consumers to co-create products and co-own the company with the help of web3 technology.
Kiki co-founder Jana Bobosikova said she believes that being a loyal user of a brand in the Web 2.0 world could be a net negative experience.
Kiki is flipping that model by allowing its community members to vote on the features they want before the beauty products are made.
Although members’ product votes are recorded on Ethereum, Bobosikova said some participants don’t need to know they are taking action on blockchain.
But, as Simpson pointed out, Kiki has plans to eventually expand beyond the world of beauty.
The United States Department of Commerce Monday proposed investing as much as $6.6 billion to fund a third Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC) fab in Arizona.
The move represents a broader push to bring more manufacturing to the U.S., but unspoken in the fanfare around today’s announcement is the potential escalation of tensions with China.
TSMC Arizona — the subsidiary behind the proposed construction — has stated that it will build the facility before the end of the decade.
The United States and allies would be at a massive disadvantage should China seize control of Taiwan and its manufacturing capabilities.
For all the money the United States government continues to invest, Intel is simply playing catch-up to TSMC’s multiyear technological head start.
Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech!
One thing that stood out to me was just how much fintech representation in their cohorts is shrinking.
So there was one-third the percentage of fintech companies this year compared to two years ago.
Analysis of the weekFintech funding slid by 16% quarter-over-quarter during the three-month period ended March 31, according to CB Insights’ Q1 2024 State of Venture Report.
During the three-month period, 904 investments were made into fintech startups, which was higher than 786 in the previous quarter, signaling smaller deal sizes.
EarliTec Diagnostics just raised fresh capital to expand its system that helps clinicians diagnose children as young as 16 months old.
According to EarliTec, children with autism won’t focus on the video the same way that kids without autism will.
The Autism Impact Fund closed a $60 million fund, 20% higher than its $50 million target, this week.
Divergent Ventures raised a $10 million fund in 2021 that focuses on early-stage companies across the neurodiversity space.
Opya, a digital therapy platform for autism, has raised more than $19 million from backers including SoftBank’s Open Opportunity Fund.
Social network X is rolling out access to xAI’s Grok chatbot to Premium tier subscribers after Elon Musk announced the expansion to more paid users last month.
The company said on its support page that only Premium and Premium+ users can interact with the chatbot in select regions.
Last year, after Musk’s xAI announced Grok, it made the chatbot available to Premium+ users — people who are paying $16 per month or a $168 per year subscription fee.
Earlier this week, X rolled out a new explore view inside Grok where the chatbot summarizes trending news stories.
Last month, xAI open-sourced Grok but without any training data details.
