Meta Connect 2024 took place this weekshowcasing recent hardware and software to support two of the company’s biggest ambitions: artificial intelligence and the metaverse. CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced recent Quest headsets, updates to Meta’s Llama AI model, and real-time video capabilities in Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses. But the biggest discovery was Orion, an actual AR glasses prototype touted as “the most advanced glasses the world has ever seen.”

OpenAI CTO Mira Murati announced this week that he’s leaving the company after greater than six years. Hours after the announcement, OpenAI’s chief research officer Bob McGrew and vp of research Barret Zoph also left the company. The high-level departures come lower than per week before the start of OpenAI’s annual developer conference.

One of the first CloudKitchens employees is suing this company. In her lawsuit, Isabella Vincenza alleges wrongful termination, gender discrimination and a hostile work environment, including an intense “brother culture” at the company. Vincenza also claims that after her pregnancy and subsequent maternity leave, she faced “retaliation for standing up for herself.”

News

Talk to me, ChatGPT: OpenAI has implemented advanced voice mode after some delays and controversy. This feature has an updated blue, spherical design, five recent voices, and improved accent capabilities for clients in the ChatGPT Plus and Teams tiers. Read more

YC Demo Day: Y Combinator kicked off a two-day “Demo Day” event showcasing what YC’s newest batch manufacturing firms are constructing. Here are the firms price being attentive to beyond the event. (Spoiler alert: almost everyone uses AI.) Read more

Amazon staff vs. RTO: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced that by 2025, employees are expected to work in the office five days per week. However, an anonymous survey conducted by employees shows that many individuals who’ve turn out to be accustomed to the hybrid work structure are “definitely dissatisfied”. Read more

How much can a phone wallpaper cost? Marques Brownlee, often known as MKBHD on YouTube, has launched the Panels app where he collects high-quality digital wallpapers from artists. However, to access high-resolution wallpapers without ads, users have to spend around $50 per yr. Read more

WordPress vs. WP engine: A heated legal dispute is brewing between WordPress founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg and WP Engine – the company that operates web sites built on WordPress – after Mullenweg wrote a blog post calling WP Engine “the cancer of WordPress.” Read more

X toggles the locking function: X will soon change the way the blocking feature works, so blocked accounts will still have the opportunity to see your public posts. Elon Musk explained that blocked accounts will still not have the opportunity to contact the users who blocked them. Read more

RevenueCat turns up the heat: Subscription management platform RevenueCat has acquired Dipsea, a “spicy” audiobook subscription app. The idea is to create a subscription-based application that can function a testing ground for brand spanking new RevenueCat features. Read more

RIP, TikTok music: ByteDance is shutting down its music streaming service TikTok Music in November. TikTok Music originated from a ByteDance product called Resso, and the service was later available in Indonesia, Brazil, Australia, Singapore, and Mexico. Read more

Meta is punished with one other penalty for violating privacy: Meta was reprimanded and fined $101.5 million (at current exchange rates) by the Irish Data Protection Commission for a 2019 breach that exposed lots of of hundreds of thousands of Facebook passwords. Read more

Practical use of Plaud’s NotePin: TechCrunch’s Brian Heater tests Plaud’s $169 NotePin, powered by ChatGPT, for transcribing meetings and taking notes. Unlike other AI pins, Plaud’s product appears to be an answer to real-world problems, he argues. Read more

Analysis

Altman himself goes into “god mode”: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has long presented artificial intelligence as the solution to the world’s problems, despite its significant impact on the environment. In a brand new post on the rose-colored glasses blog, Altman offers an especially positive update on the state of artificial intelligence, highlighting its potential to change the world. However, as TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez notes, much of what she writes seems to be intended to make skeptics aware of the importance of artificial intelligence, which could have the opposite effect. Read more

X (formerly Twitter) could soon resume operations in Brazil if it agrees to pay an additional fine.

This was reported by Reuters and other publications by order of the country’s Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes stating that Elon Musk’s social networking site can “immediately return to its operations in the country” if it pays a fine of 10 million reais (about $1.9 million).

This is in addition to the 18.3 million reais ($3.4 million) for which X has already been fined. Brazil froze accounts belonging to X and Musk’s satellite web company Starlink to pay the fine, but Moraes said that to proceed operating, Starlink must withdraw its appeal against the payment.

For most of the 12 months, X was engaged in a legal dispute over Moraes’ try to block some accounts he accused of publishing election disinformation. (Musk said that Moraes “should resign or be impeached”). The company ultimately ceased operations in Brazil and was banned from entering the country at the end of August.

The ban resulted in an increase in the popularity of competing services, including Bluesky.

However, X recently appeared to reverse course, agreeing to freeze the designated accounts, pay the required financial penalties and appoint a legal representative in Brazil. Moraes is making the company pay this additional fine after X apparently bypassed the ban earlier this month and resumed services in the country – apparently a “coincidence” attributable to X switching to Cloudflare’s infrastructure.

The X Global Government Affairs account appeared to substantiate his approval fasting on Thursdaywriting: “We recognize and respect the sovereignty of the countries in which we operate” and asserting that providing access to Brazilian users “is essential to a thriving democracy.”

When the US Fed cut interest rates by half a percentage point last week, it was excellent news for enterprise capitalists backing one particularly beleaguered class of startups: fintechs, especially those that depend on loans to run their businesses.

These firms include corporate bank card providers reminiscent of Ramp or Coast, which offer cards to fleet owners. Card issuers earn cash from interchange rates, that are the transaction fees charged to merchants. “But they have to hand over the money when they get the loan,” said Sheel Mohnot, co-founder and general partner at Better Tomorrow Ventures, a fintech company.

“The terms of this loan have just improved.”

case study is Affirm, a buy now, pay later (BNPL) company founded by famous PayPal mafia member Max Levchin. While Affirm is not any longer a startup — it went public in 2021 — as interest costs have risen, the company’s share price has fallen from around $162 in October to below $50 per share as of February 2022.

BNPLs pay merchants the full amount upfront; they then allow the customer to pay for the item in several installments, often without interest. Many BNPLs generate revenue primarily by charging sellers a fee for every transaction processed on their platform, relatively than interest on the purchase. Their business model didn’t allow them to pass on the drastically higher costs they incurred.

“BNPL banks were making rapid profits when interest rates were zero,” Mohnot said.

Affirm competes with many BNPL startups. For example, Klarna is a player that has been expected to go public for years but it surely still is not ready in 2024, its CEO told CNBC last month. Some BNPL startups didn’t survive in any respect, reminiscent of ZestMoney, which shut down in December. Meanwhile, other lending fintechs have also gone out of business on account of high interest rates, reminiscent of the business-building bank card Fundid.

While it could seem counterintuitive, lower rates are also good for fintechs offering loans. Auto loan refinancer Caribou, for instance, falls into this segment, predicts Chuckie Reddy, partner and head of growth investing at QED Investors. Caribou offers loans with terms starting from one to 2 years.

“Their whole business is based on being able to move you from a higher rate to a lower rate,” he said. Now that Caribou’s financing costs are lower, they need to have the opportunity to scale back the fees they charge borrowers.

GoodLeap, a provider of solar panel loans, and Kiavi, a lender specializing in fix-and-flip loans for home investors, are other short-term lenders that will profit. Like Caribou, they may potentially pass on a few of their interest savings to customers, resulting in a surge in lending volume, said Rudy Yang, fintech analyst at PitchBook.

No sector needs to be helped by lower interest rates as much as the fintech startups that are taking the mortgage industry by storm. However, it might take a while for this recently devastated space to recuperate. While the Fed’s cut was large, interest rates are still high in comparison with the long ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) era that preceded it, when Fed rates were near zero. The latest Fed interest rates are currently in the range of 4.5% to five%. So the loans available to consumers will still be several percentage points above the Fed’s base rate.

If the Fed continues to lower interest rates, as many investors hope it’ll, many individuals who bought homes during the period of high interest rates will likely be on the lookout for higher deals.

“The refinancing wave will be huge, but not tomorrow or in the next few months,” said Kamran Ansari, enterprise partner at VC firm Headline. “It may not be worth refinancing at half a percent, but if rates drop by a percent or a percent and a half, we will start to see a flood of refinances from everyone who has been forced to take the plunge on a mortgage at higher rates over the last few years.”

Ansari predicts a significant rebound for mortgage fintechs like Rocket Mortage and Better.comafter poor results in recent years.

Next, VC investor dollars will almost actually flow. Ansari also predicted a surge in latest mortgage tech startups if interest rates turn into more attractive.

“Any time you see a space that has been dormant for four or five years, there are probably opportunities to reinvent and update the algorithms, and now you can get into AI-centric underwriting,” he said.