Welcome back to TechCrunch’s week in review. TechCrunch’s newsletter summarizing the biggest news of the week. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.
This week Ilya Sutskever founded a new AI company, Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), just a month after officially leaving OpenAI. Sutskever, along with Jan Leike, has played a key role in OpenAI’s efforts to improve AI safety with the emergence of “superintelligent” AI systems. But Sutskever and Leike left the company after a dramatic decline in leadership on how it approached AI safety.
In EV news, Fisker has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, ending months of trouble for the Ocean SUV, including a recall and dozens of Lemon Law lawsuits. This is Henrik Fisker’s second car company to go bankrupt. His first endeavor began in 2007 and he filed for bankruptcy protection in 2013.
This week, Change Healthcare confirmed that a ransomware attack in February resulted in the theft of medical records affecting “a significant percentage of people in the United States.” The company processes patient insurance and billing for thousands of hospitals, pharmacies and medical practices, and has access to vast amounts of health information on about one-third of all Americans.
News
Department of Justice vs. Adobe: The U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Adobe, alleging that the company hides termination fees and makes it difficult to cancel subscriptions. read more
OpenAI Acquires Rockset: OpenAI announced the acquisition of Rockset, which builds tools that power real-time search and data analytics, as the company continues to invest in its enterprise sales and technology organizations. read more
Buttons are back: Clicks has released a nostalgic BlackBerry-style phone case that adds a keyboard with physical buttons to the bottom of your iPhone. We should try it ourselves. read more
Where humans and AI coexist: Navi is a social network where humans and AI interact through posts, comments, and DMs to create more creative relationships with AI. read more
Apple will stop paying later. Apple’s Pay Later feature will no longer be available after its launch in late March 2023. Instead, Apple Pay users can access the loans through a partnership with third-party app Affirm. read more
Outlook users, please note the following: A researcher has discovered a bug that allows anyone to impersonate a Microsoft work email account. This makes phishing attempts appear more credible and increases the chances of deceiving the target. read more
An embarrassing situation strikes Google. The AI-powered search startup now displays results for factual queries like the weather and time of a place, currency conversions, and answers to simple math queries directly through cards. read more
Runway unveils Gen-3. The company’s latest AI model for video creation not only provides more control over the structure, style and motion of the generated video, but also “drastically” improves speed. read more
analyze
What should AI look like?: From black holes to colorful blobs, representing AI in user interfaces can be challenging. Although approaches to branding what is known as an all-seeing, all-knowing, all-doing intelligence are different, Devin Coldewey explains how companies are uniting around the idea that AI’s avatar should be non-threatening and abstract, but relatively simple and non-anthropomorphic. Let’s see if it’s done. read more
Why Fisker failed: With Fisker filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, many are wondering what’s next for the ill-fated EV startup. Sean O’Kane argues that no matter what happens to Fisker or its assets, the fundamental problems will not change. In other words, they were not ready to put a defective car on the market. read more
Pushing the cultural boundaries of ChatGPT: Currently, ChatGPT provides too generalized answers to specific questions tailored to specific communities, as education appears to have a Eurocentric and Western bias. With most AI models not built with people of color in mind, Dominic-Madori Davis and Tage Kene-Okafor report on Black-owned chatbots and a version of ChatGPT specifically geared toward Black and brown communities, and how the founders are making a cultural transition at OpenAI. Helps you take advantage of . read more
