The investor’s latest “Camp” incubator trained up and funded 9 AI agent startups they hope will take on today’s more tedious tasks.
The use cases for many of these companies sound promising, but AI tends to have trouble keeping its promises.
But are AI agents at that stage?
And it’s well within the capabilities of today’s AI agents, which would primarily be tasked with understanding natural language rather than forms.
A framework for web-based AI agents with a pay-as-you-go model so if your company’s experiment craters, you only owe a few bucks.
Tesla is laying off thousands of employees as it tries to simultaneously cut costs and boost productivity, according to an internal email sent to staff by CEO Elon Musk, Electrek and Bloomberg News reported.
The electric automaker is cutting “more than 10%” of its global headcount, Musk said in the email.
Tesla finished 2023 with over 140,000 employees, meaning the cuts could impact more than 14,000 people.
The company has warned investors that sales growth could be “notably lower” in 2024 than its stated goal of 50% growth each year.
This will enable us to be lean, innovative and hungry for the next growth phase cycle,” Musk wrote.
U.S. cybersecurity agency CISA has confirmed that Russian government-backed hackers stole emails from several U.S. federal agencies as a result of an ongoing cyberattack at Microsoft.
“Midnight Blizzard’s successful compromise of Microsoft corporate email accounts and the exfiltration of correspondence between agencies and Microsoft presents a grave and unacceptable risk to agencies,” said CISA.
CISA made details of the emergency directive public on Thursday after giving affected federal agencies a week to reset passwords and secure affected systems.
CISA did not name the affected federal agencies that had emails stolen, and a spokesperson for CISA did not immediately comment when reached by TechCrunch.
The emergency directive comes as Microsoft faces increasing scrutiny of its security practices after a spate of intrusions by hackers of adversarial nations.
Y Combinator President Garry Tan took to the social platform X Tuesday to again express his displeasure at elected officials representing San Francisco, where the storied accelerator is based.
This time, he was lambasting California state assembly member Matt Haney, over a proposed late-night email bill he authored.
Haney represents San Francisco in the state’s house-of-representatives equivalent.
Meaning they’d have the legal right to ignore calls, emails, texts or messages sent after that time, unless an emergency, and employers in violation could be subject to fines, The San Francisco Standard reported.
He went on a rant in January on X about seven San Francisco supervisors that took a violent tone.
The U.K. government has blamed China for a 2021 cyberattack that compromised the personal information of millions of U.K. voters.
The data breach began as early as 2021 but wasn’t detected until a year later.
Dowden said that a separate attempted cyberattack by a China-backed hacking group targeted the email accounts of U.K. lawmakers in 2021, but that parliamentary authorities mitigated the attempted breaches before any email accounts were compromised.
The Norwegian government previously attributed a 2018 data breach on its systems to APT31.
In 2020, Google security researchers linked APT31 to the targeting of email accounts belonging to the Trump and Biden presidential campaigns.
Users of the popular site Glassdoor, which lets anyone anonymously sign up to review companies they have worked for, say Glassdoor collected and added their names to their user profiles without their consent.
It also means this information can be obtained by legal process, such as a lawsuit or police demanding access to Glassdoor user data.
As Monica explained, Glassdoor will add a user’s real name (and potentially other information) to the user’s account without their permission if Glassdoor learns it.
As part of the acquisition deal, Glassdoor signed every user up for a Fishbowl account, meaning Glassdoor would have to change its terms of service so that every Glassdoor user could also be verified.
Mackey previously defended an anonymous Glassdoor user in court whose employer tried to unmask and identify their identity.
Autonomous vehicle technology startup Motional has secured a bridge loan that provides a temporary financial reprieve as the company searches for a longer-term source of funding, TechCrunch has learned.
Motional CEO Karl Iagnemma told staff in a companywide email viewed by TechCrunch that the company’s board of directors approved the bridge financing.
After a wave of consolidation and shutdowns in the nascent autonomous vehicle industry, Motional is one of the few companies left that’s still pursuing a commercial robotaxi service.
The company operates an autonomous vehicle taxi service in Las Vegas (still with human safety operators behind the wheel) on Uber, Lyft and Via platforms.
The autonomous vehicle company last had layoffs in December 2022, when it cut about 10% of its workforce.
Email startup Superhuman is launching an AI-powered instant replies feature today with the company looking to double down in AI-fueled functionality this year.
Instant replies are one more feature to quickly get emails out of your way.
You can think of Instant replies as equivalent to Gmail’s smart replies, but Superhuman said its feature is more contextual and personal.
The company said that users who were part of the beta test of instant replies are sending emails twice as fast.
Last year, it launched Superhuman AI, which helps users draft better emails with options to change the length or tone.
Most will have been defaulted to the “new” Gmail view long ago, so unless you have been specifically requesting the “basic HTML” view, nothing should change for you.
The company is sunsetting Gmail’s basic HTML view, which allows users to look at their emails in a bare-bones state, starting January 2024.
“We’re writing to let you know that the Gmail Basic HTML view for desktop web and mobile web will be disabled starting early January 2024.
The Gmail Basic HTML views are previous versions of Gmail that were replaced by their modern successors 10+ years ago and do not include full Gmail feature functionality,” the email reads.
The HTML version lacks a lot of features such as chat, spell checker, search filters, keyboard shortcuts, and rich formatting.
On Friday, Microsoft revealed that it had been the victim of a hack carried out by Russian government spies.
In a new blog post, Microsoft said that “the same actor has been targeting other organizations and, as part of our usual notification processes, we have begun notifying these targeted organizations.”At this point, it’s unclear how many organizations the Russian-backed hackers targeted.
Microsoft, however, said that the hackers specifically targeted the company’s senior executives, as well as people who work in cybersecurity, legal, and other departments.
The hackers were able to steal “some emails and attached documents.”Curiously, the hackers were interested in finding out information about themselves, specifically what Microsoft knows about them, the company said.
On Thursday, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) disclosed that its Microsoft-hosted email system was hacked by Midnight Blizzard.
