Welcome back to the week in review. This week we have a look at OpenAI’s reported plans for its next AI model; a vibrant recent messaging app that is change into a hit with Gen Z; and Tim Cook discover that you could name a group chat in iMessage. Let’s get on with it.

The Verge noted this week that it is reportedly planning to release OpenAI its next pioneering artificial intelligence model, codenamed Orion, by December. An OpenAI spokesperson denied TechCrunch’s claims, saying: “We have no plans to release a model codenamed Orion this year.” But what this means is anyone’s guess and leaves OpenAI considerable room for maneuver.

Character.AI is the goal of a lawsuit following the suicide of a 14-year-old boy whose mother claims he was obsessive about a chatbot on the platform. The company said it is rolling out recent security measures, including “improved detection, response and intervention” for chats that violate terms of service and notification when a user spends an hour chatting.

Over 100 million people their private health data was stolen in a February ransomware attack on Change Healthcare. For the primary time, UnitedHealth Group, the health insurer that owns the corporate, has released the number of individuals affected by the info breach; the corporate previously said it expected a data breach affecting “a significant portion of people in America.”

News

Mira Murati’s next move: Former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati is reportedly raising greater than $100 million for a recent artificial intelligence startup that will reportedly give attention to constructing artificial intelligence products based on proprietary models. Read more

What’s in a (group chat) name? A recent profile of Tim Cook revealed that he didn’t know you might name group chats in iMessage. Cook has since dubbed the group chat along with his former college roommates simply “Roommates.” Read more

Elon Musk’s conversations with Putin: According to reports, Elon Musk has been in regular contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin for the reason that end of 2022. The Wall Street Journal reports that the talks raised national security concerns amongst some intelligence officials. Read more

Let Anthropic control your computer: Anthropic has released an improved version of Claude 3.5 Sonnet that may understand and interact with any desktop application. The model can imitate keystrokes, button clicks and mouse gestures, essentially emulating a person sitting at a computer. Read more

Smart Glasses Success: Ray-Ban Meta’s smart glasses are proving to be a larger success than Meta initially expected. The glasses are the best-selling product in 60% of all Ray-Ban stores in Europe, the Middle East and Africa – even before the introduction of AI features. Read more

Artificial intelligence (gut): Throne is an Austin-based health startup that sells a camera that attaches to the side of your toilet bowl and takes photos of your poop. Currently in beta, the system uses artificial intelligence to look at stools and determine aspects equivalent to gut health and hydration. Read more

Turn your phone into an e-book reader: Bookcase, the most recent technological innovation from Astropad, is a case with a MagSafe mount and an NFC chip that permits you to hold your smartphone like a Kindle, providing more convenient mobile e-book reading. Read more

Midjourney is obtainable online: Midjourney releases an improved tool that permits users to edit any images uploaded from the Internet using generative artificial intelligence. The improved tool will also allow users to retexture objects in images to “repaint” their colours and details in response to the captions. Read more

A less expensive method to buy gasoline: Amazon is offering Prime members a 10-cent-per-gallon discount at roughly 7,000 Amoco, AM/PM and BP gas stations across the U.S. to combat high gas prices and challenge competing service Walmart+. Read more

Messaging app for the subsequent generation: Daze is a creative AI-powered messaging app that’s growing in popularity amongst Gen Z users, with a waiting list of roughly 156,000 sign-ups ahead of its November 4 launch. Read more

A more in-depth have a look at Apple’s hearing aid feature: TechCrunch’s Brian Heater tested Apple’s upcoming accessibility features for AirPods Pro 2, which permit the earbuds to operate as a hearing aid and perform hearing tests. Read more

Analysis

23iMe and You: 23andMe faces an uncertain future amid efforts to make sure its privacy, heightening concerns about what might occur to the genetic data of the corporate’s roughly 15 million customers. If you sent your saliva to 23andMe, you’ll have assumed that, by law, that data would remain private. However, as Carly Page writes, 23andMe isn’t covered by HIPAA and is basically subject only to its own privacy policy, which it can change at any time. However, there may be a straightforward method to request deletion of your data. Read more

According to. software engineers, programmers, and academic researchers have serious concerns about transcription from OpenAI’s Whisper report within the Associated Press.

While there has been no shortage of debate about generative AI’s tendency to hallucinate – essentially make things up – it’s somewhat surprising that that is a problem in transcription, where one would expect the transcription to closely follow the transcribed audio.

Instead, investigators told the AP that Whisper planted every part from racist comments to imaginary treatments within the transcripts. And this could possibly be especially devastating because Whisper is adopted into hospitals and other medical facilities.

A University of Michigan researcher examining public meetings found hallucinations in eight out of 10 audio transcripts. A machine learning engineer studied greater than 100 hours of Whisper transcripts and located hallucinations in greater than half of them. The developer reported finding hallucinations in almost the entire 26,000 transcripts he created using Whisper.

An OpenAI spokesman said the corporate is “continuously working to improve the accuracy of our models, including reducing hallucinations,” and noted that its terms of use prohibit the usage of Whisper “in certain high-stakes decision-making contexts.”

“We thank the researchers for sharing their findings,” they said.

Ask any VC if we are still in a enterprise capital bear market and the investor will almost actually say no, that funds are still flowing into good corporations.

This may sound like a stretch, as there are loads of anecdotes about how difficult this task is for those currently upping the ante. And for good reason. Downside rounds, which are raises at a lower valuation than the previous one which founders wish to avoid unless they haven’t any selection, continued to stay at near-record levels in the first half of 2024, in response to the data. Beacon of the Aumni Expedition report. According to Aumni’s report, roughly 39% of late-stage deals failed. This applies to series B and subsequent ones, with the highest percentage of rounds lost in series C and later.

Even Stripe – whose success nobody disputes – hasn’t fully recovered to its $95 billion valuation for 2021, stemming from a big secondary transaction that took place in July. Although by then it had grown to $70 billion.

But despite this sort of gloom, the statistics for the end of 2024 are also filled with excellent news. For example, recent data from Crunchbase it actually shows a boom in megadeals – financing rounds price $100 million or more.

Crunchbase has recorded almost 240 mega rounds for US startups this 12 months, which is already greater than the 210 raised in all of last 12 months.

What’s much more interesting is that Crunchbase’s most popular category for these deals wasn’t AI. Biotech and healthcare startups closed 87 mega-deals, in comparison with 26 for the second-place AI category.

Some of those rounds are admittedly cross-border: corporations working on artificial intelligence for healthcare. For example, Crunchbase lists AI drug discovery company Xaira Therapeutics as certainly one of its notable medtech megadeals. Xaira launched in April with a large $1 billion round led by ARCH Venture Partners and Foresite Labs (each known for biotech), but the round also included classic Silicon Valley VCs comparable to NEA, Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners , SV Angel, and others.

We’d probably call Xaira an AI company and put it on our current list tracking AI startup megadeals.

But there have been also offers like: Superluminal Medicines’ $120 million Series A roundhosted by Eli Lilly. While it also uses machine learning to speed up drug development, its focus is on finding drugs for specific small molecule receptors on cell membranes. This is a hot area in biotech at once – no AI cleanup required. The deal was backed by classic tech investors Insight Partners and Gaingels, in addition to NVentures (Nvidia’s enterprise capital arm), which appears to be in all places today.

Other Series A and B biotech megadeals include the finalized $120 million Series B deal field therapy, who also works on small molecule drugs; and 100 million series A Judah Bio landed to cope with kidney meds. It looks like every week a brand new biotech megadeal is announced.

Apart from medical technologies and artificial intelligence, one other sector that is having fun with great interest is cybersecurity – 16 such transactions have been concluded up to now this 12 months. Examples include email security startup Kiteworks, which raised $456 million, data security startup Cyera, which raised $300 million, and cloud security startup Wiz, which raised a whopping $1 billion.

There are several other trademarks for earlier stage founders. Aumni found that pre-launch valuations improved barely for seed and Series A deals in the first half of the 12 months.

Deal closing in 2024 also appears to be at an identical pace to 2023, in response to the Q3 survey. Venture PitchBook-NVCA monitor. In 2023 almost 16,000 transactions were concludedwhich is barely higher than the average annual activity before the pandemic and ZIRP-fueled madness in 2020-2021.

For those concerned about learning more, TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 will feature a session on the Builders Stage titled “What You Need to Raise a Series A Today” and one other on “How to Raise in 2025 If You’ve Broken, Failed or Round extending.”