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.
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.
TechCrunch Mobility: Apple layoffs, an EV price reckoning and another Tesla robotaxi promise Plus, more Fisker problems and a Waymo-Uber Eats tie-upWelcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation.
The average price of an EV in 2023 was $61,702, while all other vehicles stood at $47,450.
This downward pressure has forced automakers like Ford to delay future EV launches and put more resources toward hybrids.
Even Tesla, a bellwether in the EV world, fell well below analysts’ expectations with deliveries down 20% from Q4 2023.
What vehicles — including the two-wheeled variety — are you interested in reading about?
Faraday Future has avoided getting evicted from its Los Angeles headquarters — for the time being.
The resolution comes as Faraday Future is once again strapped for cash.
There, BXP Realty claimed that Faraday Future stopped making lease payments in December and that it owed $127,311.16.
Faraday Future does not appear to have formally responded to the lawsuit, and in early March, a default order was entered.
It’s unclear if Faraday Future still occupies the space.
Cynicism is a quality taken almost for granted in tech journalism, and certainly we are as guilty as the next publication.
“A Brief History of the Future,” hosted by Ari Wallach, also has the compelling quality of, as a PBS production, being completely free.
But now we’re at a point that if we continually do that, we’re going to we’re going to lose the thread.
And everyone seems to be relieved to be able to talk about the promise of the future rather than the threat of it.
In case you’re wondering what moneyed special interest is trying to placate you with this beneficent presentation of a kindlier, wiser future… don’t worry, I asked.
Watch: Elon Musk, Sam Altman and the rest of the billionaires are fighting over the future of AIThe scrap over who should run OpenAI, and how it should be managed is still the hottest topic in tech.
Most recently, former co-founder and backer Elon Musk sued the AI company best known for ChatGPT and its work with Microsoft for what he considers to be an abandonment of its founding principals.
That suit kicked off a storm of discussion amongst tech investors, some of whom have a stake in OpenAI.
Is his view hurting work on open-source AI?
Buckle up, everyone, it’s going to be one hell of a year for tech drama.
Troubled EV startup Faraday Future has issued its first recall, covering all 11 vehicles it built last year, as it fights to hold onto its Los Angeles headquarters.
The recall centers around a problem with the warning light for the airbags in Faraday Future’s FF91 SUV.
Faraday Future says it will “schedule concierge pick up, and redelivery, of the owners’ vehicles” to fix the software.
The landlord of its LA headquarters is trying to evict the startup after Faraday missed multiple lease payments.
Still, it is remarkable that after nearly 10 years and close to $4 billion in losses, Faraday Future has even made it to the point that it needs to issue a recall at all.
Swayy is an iPhone app startup that allows you to share not your current location, but your next intended location.
I also liked the way the Swayy app allows me to create custom groups.
As Westropp pointed out, as a female founder, she’s acutely aware that being able to control precisely who can see her future location is something she hard-wired into the app.
Of course, Swayy is likely to struggle against the tech giants already toying with location as feature.
It will also be an opportunity for Instagram to appeal to people who were fans of Zenly, a social map app that Snap acquired and then shut down in 2022.
As crucial as the ocean is to countless industries, we lack the kind of systematic knowledge of it that we have of the surface.
This is partly due to the simple fact that the ocean is gigantic and there’s simply no way (or need) to monitor all of it.
Cheap solutions like buoys are great but limited to surface measurements, and are subject to the whims of weather and currents.
“There is such a clear need for safe, reliable and continuously updated data about water quality,” said Ester Strommen, CEO and co-founder of Syrenna.
Free-floating, free-divingI saw a prototype of the WaterDrone, as they call it, while visiting startups last spring in Oslo, where Syrenna is based.
The Supreme Court could decide the future of content moderation — or it could puntThe Supreme Court is considering the fate of two state laws that limit how social media companies can moderate the content on their platforms.
The two laws were both crafted by Republican lawmakers to punish social media companies for their perceived anti-conservative bias.
“Supreme Court cases can fizzle in this way, much to the frustration in most cases to other parties,” Barrett said.
“It’s clear that the Supreme Court needs to update its First Amendment jurisprudence to take into account this vast technological change,” Barrett said.
“… The Supreme Court often lags behind society in dealing with these kinds of things, and now it’s time to deal with it.”
