Following a keynote presentation at WWDC 2024 that both introduced Apple Intelligence and confirmed a partnership that brings GPT access to Siri through an deal with OpenAI, SVP Craig Federighi confirmed plans to work with additional third-party models.
The first example given by the executive was one the companies with which Apple was exploring a partnership.
“We’re looking forward to doing integrations with other models, including Google Gemini, for instance, in the future,” Federighi said during a post-keynote conversation.
Apple says users will be able to access the system without having to sign up for an account or paying for premium services.
“Now you can do it right through Siri, without going through another tool,” the Apple executive said.
Tesla drops prices, Meta confirms Llama 3 release, and Apple allows emulators in the App StoreHeya, folks, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter that recaps the past few days in tech.
Google’s annual enterprise-focused dev conference, Google Cloud Next, dominated the headlines — and we had plenty of coverage from the event.
Lorenzo wrote about how hackers stole over ~340,000 Social Security numbers from government consulting firm Greylock McKinnon Associates (GMA).
Elsewhere, Sarah had the story on Spotify’s personalized AI playlists, which lets users create a playlist based on written prompts.
Emulators in the store: Apple updated its App Store rules to globally allow emulators for retro console games an option for downloading titles.
“Our goal over time is to make a Llama-powered Meta AI be the most useful assistant in the world,” said Joelle Pineau, Vice President AI Research.
Most notably, Meta’s Llama families, built as open-source products, represent a different philosophical approach to how AI should develop as a wider technology.
But Meta is also playing it more cautiously, it seems, especially when it comes to other generative AI beyond text generation.
Ironically — or perhaps predictably (heh) — even as Meta works to launch Llama 3, it does have some significant generative AI skeptics in the house.
It’s not generative AI,” he said.
A day after researchers surfaced X’s plans to test NSFW adult communities on the platform formerly known as Twitter, the company confirmed that Community admins can now set an “Adult Content” label in their settings to avoid having their communities’ content auto-filtered.
Otherwise, all NSFW content will be soon filtered across X’s Communities by default.
Check out the latest updates and improvements for X Communities.👇 Updates (With the latest version of the app):– [All] Admins can now add topics to their Communities, and you can see topics linked to Communities on all devices.
– [All] Soon, NSFW content will… — Dongwook (@DongWookChung2) March 28, 2024Now, included in a long list of updates to X’s Communities is the confirmation that NSFW-focused communities will be allowed to designate themselves as such to keep from having their content filtered automatically, as in other Communities.
The X executives had not shared any plans for NSFW Communities at that time.
The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has confirmed that it’s launching a formal “phase 2” investigation into the planned merger between Vodafone and Three UK.
The CMA says that the deal could lead to higher prices for consumers, while also impact future infrastructure investments.
However, the CMA has given both parties a token five working days to address its concerns with “meaningful solutions” before it formally progresses the investigation.
Such a scenario is precisely why the U.K. introduced the National Security and Investment Act back in 2022, with previous form in blocking deals between U.K. entities and Chinese companies.
“This case has more moving parts than the CMA’s other recent big decisions, and is arguably more important for the U.K. economy,” Smith said.
TechCrunch has learned that the search giant has started to restrict queries made Gemini when they relate to elections, in any market globally where elections are taking place.
The search giant confirmed to TechCrunch that it started rolling out the restrictions on Gemini to limit surfacing answers about election-related queries globally.
TechCrunch found the AI tool did show answers when passing on queries with typos.
The AI tool, responding to a query about whether Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was a fascist, responded that Modi had been accused of implementing policies that some had characterized as fascist.
It is unclear whether Google will unblock Gemini for answering election-related queries after the elections end later this year.
Several social media websites are experiencing outages on Tuesday morning.
YouTube confirmed that some users are having trouble loading videos on the platform; meanwhile, platforms like Discord and Meta’s Threads, Facebook and Instagram are down as well.
YouTube also shared an update on its X account, which links to the support page.
thanks to everyone who sent notes about loading issues with YouTube: we're on it!
🔍 will follow up here once things are back to normal, you can also follow our Help Community post for details ➡️ https://t.co/4Ezmtku3Em — TeamYouTube (@TeamYouTube) March 5, 2024The root cause of these widespread outages remains unclear.
New report confirms Europe’s tech investment doldrums, but there are signs of lifeEurope is suffering from a big hangover after the tech investment party of the 2020-2021 period.
That said, compared to pre-pandemic levels, VC investment in European startups is up, historically speaking, and reached $60 billion, according to a new report.
2023 marked a reset and major correction in investment levels globally.
According to the report, Europe is sitting on “record levels of dry powder” and “producing more new founders than the U.S.”, funding remains slow.
Climate Tech overtook FinTech as Europe’s most popular sectorAI’s share of total investment in Europe soared to a record high of 17%5.
American health insurance giant UnitedHealth Group has confirmed a ransomware attack on its health tech subsidiary Change Healthcare, which continues to disrupt hospitals and pharmacies across the United States.
“Based on our ongoing investigation, there’s no indication that except for the Change Healthcare systems, Optum, UnitedHealthcare and UnitedHealth Group systems have been affected by this issue.”In a post on its dark web leak site on Wednesday, ALPHV/BlackCat took credit for the cyberattack at Change Healthcare.
Change Healthcare merged with U.S. healthcare provider Optum in 2022 as part of a $7.8 billion deal under UnitedHealth Group, the largest health insurance provider in the United States.
Change Healthcare said it took much of its systems offline to expel the hackers from its systems.
Do you work at Change Healthcare, Optum or UnitedHealth and know more about the cyberattack?
Three local councils in the United Kingdom continue to experience disruption to their online services, a week after confirming a cyberattack had knocked some systems offline.
Robert Davis, a spokesperson for Canterbury City Council, told TechCrunch last week that the council’s initial investigation suggests that no customer data was accessed.
However, the U.K.’s Information Commissioner’s Office told TechCrunch on Friday that the data regulator has received a breach report from the three councils.
Thanet District Council spokesperson Clare Winter shared an updated statement with TechCrunch, which has also been published on the council’s website.
“Thanet District Council is currently limiting access to a number of its online systems,” the statement reads.
