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Revisiting the Ruling that Led to Tesla’s Crucial Shareholder Vote

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There has been a silly amount of drama in the run-up to Tesla‘s annual shareholder meeting on Thursday. It will also hold a vote whether the company will change the location where it is incorporated from Delaware to Texas. Some of Tesla’s biggest boosters are calling on the company’s “retail army” of shareholders to vote in favor of both, but with special focus on Musk’s compensation. “A deal is a deal,” Tesla posted to its CEO’s social media platform X. At the very least, it’s a primer for the legal battles that are sure to continue after Thursday’s vote.

The Unexpected Downfall of India’s Most Successful Startup: From Riches to Ruin

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In a research note, HSBC estimates that the Indian edtech giant, once valued at $22 billion, is now worth nothing. The write-down in its estimation makes Byju’s one of the most spectacular startup slides in recent memory and follows a very rough year for what was India’s most valuable startup not long ago. After raising $100 million, AI mortgage startup LoanSnap is facing an avalanche of lawsuits and has been evicted from its main office. At least seven creditors, including Wells Fargo, have collectively alleged that the company owes them more than $2 million. Read MoreTurns out, AI models have favorite numbers: Engineers at Gramener performed an informal experiment where they asked several major LLM chatbots to pick a random number between 0 and 100.

OpenAI to Establish New Tokyo Office, Tesla’s Workforce Reduction Impacts Thousands of Employees

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Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast and airs every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. You can subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads at @EquityPod. For the full interview transcript, for those who prefer reading over listening, read on, or check out our full archive of episodes over at Simplecast.

“2024 Google Cloud Next: What’s Been Revealed?”

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Google VidsLeveraging AI to help customers develop creative content is something Big Tech is looking for, and Tuesday, Google introduced its version. Read moreImagen 2In February, Google announced an image generator built into Gemini, Google’s AI-powered chatbot. “Vertex AI Agent Builder allows people to very easily and quickly build conversational agents,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said. Read moreNvidia’s Blackwell platformOne of the anticipated announcements is Nvidia’s next-generation Blackwell platform coming to Google Cloud in early 2025. This, Kyle Wiggers writes, is “Google’s most capable generative AI model,” and is now available in public preview on Vertex AI, Google’s enterprise-focused AI development platform.

“All You Need to Know: The Latest Updates from Google Cloud Next 2024”

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Don’t have time to catch the Google Cloud Next livestream? Here’s whyNvidia’s Blackwell platformOne of the anticipated announcements is Nvidia’s next-generation Blackwell platform coming to Google Cloud in early 2025. Read moreImagen 2In February, Google announced an image generator built into Gemini, Google’s AI-powered chatbot. Read moreChrome Enterprise PremiumMeanwhile, Google is expanding its Chrome Enterprise product suite with the launch of Chrome Enterprise Premium. This, Kyle Wiggers writes, is “Google’s most capable generative AI model,” and is now available in public preview on Vertex AI, Google’s enterprise-focused AI development platform.

Netflix Under Fire: Meta (Again) Refutes Accusations of Reading Private Facebook Messages from Users

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Meta is denying that it gave Netflix access to users’ private messages. Meta’s communications director, Andy Stone, reposted the original X post on Tuesday with a statement disputing that Netflix had been given access to users’ private messages. However, The New York Times had previously reported in 2018 that Netflix and Spotify could read users’ private messages, according to documents it had obtained. “No third party was reading your private messages, or writing messages to your friends without your permission. Many news stories imply we were shipping over private messages to partners, which is not correct,” the blog post stated.

“AI-Powered Summaries Now Extend Across Meetings and Messages: Introducing Read AI”

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And he would: He’s the co-founder of Read AI, which summarizes video calls across platforms such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet. Shim, previously the CEO of Foursquare, co-founded Read AI with Rob Williams and Elliott Waldron in 2021. Prior to Read AI, the trio worked together at Foursquare, Snapchat and Shim’s previous startup, Placed (which Foursquare acquired in 2019). “What makes Read unique is that its AI agents work quietly in the background, enabling your meetings, emails and messages to interact with each other,” Shim said, adding that the average summary from Read AI condenses 50 emails across 10 recipients into a single summary. “This acceleration in growth can directly be attributed to the quantifiable return users see in terms of time savings when using Read AI in their meetings.”

Undercover Project: Facebook Monitored Snapchat Traffic Without Users’ Knowledge, According to Confidential Documents

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In 2016, Facebook launched a secret project designed to intercept and decrypt the network traffic between people using Snapchat’s app and its servers. The goal was to understand users’ behavior and help Facebook compete with Snapchat, according to newly unsealed court documents. The newly released documents reveal how Meta tried to gain a competitive advantage over its competitors, including Snapchat and later Amazon and YouTube, by analyzing the network traffic of how its users were interacting with Meta’s competitors. Given that Snapchat encrypted the traffic between the app and its servers, this network analysis technique was not going to be effective. Later, according to the court documents, Facebook expanded the program to Amazon and YouTube.

“Enhance Your Insta-DM Game: Edit Sent Messages Up to 15 Minutes Later!”

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Instagram announced today that it’s rolling out the ability for users to edit their direct messages for up to 15 minutes after sending them. The ability to edit your DMs lets you fix a typo or change things around if your message doesn’t quite sound right. To edit a message, you need to press and hold it, and then then choose “edit” from the dropdown menu. The feature works similar to Apple’s edit feature for iMessage, which launched nearly two years ago. Instagram also recently started allowing all users to turn read receipts off, for all of their chats or specific ones.

Speechify App Introduces Gmail Integration and Revolutionary Voice Cloning Feature

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The new update has a scan feature, which lets users scan a physical document and import the text to listen to it later. The company is introducing a feature to let users read their emails by integrating their Gmail accounts. The app can also help users import their PDF attachments into the Speechify app. For instance, read later app Pocket, which is owned by Mozilla, has an in-app text-to-speech feature. Speechify wants to stand out in this market and wants to become a one-stop shop for anyone thinking about reading experiences by offering all kinds of integrations.