Latest AI stories

Models, products, infrastructure, data, and the companies shaping AI.

AINews07/11

OpenAI bets on families as ChatGPT goes deeper into households

More than three years after ChatGPT’s launch brought generative AI into the mainstream, OpenAI is broadening its focus beyond individual users to families. OpenAI is hiring a dedicated product manager in San Francisco to build experiences for families, caregivers, and older adults across its products. The role calls for experience building products for parents and families, and other trust-sensitive consumer experiences, according to the job posting. The hiring comes as ChatGPT’s audience continues to broaden beyond younger users. According to Sensor Tower estimates shared exclusively with TechCrunch, the share of ChatGPT users aged 35 and older globally rose to 31% in Q2 from 26% a year ear…

AINews07/10

Meta removes controversial AI feature on Instagram after backlash

Meta has axed a controversial feature that allowed users to modify photos from public Instagram accounts using AI. The feature, which was rolled out earlier this week along with a batch of other AI tools, “missed the mark” and is no longer available, according to the company. Earlier this week, Meta announced Muse Image, a new AI image generator built by Meta Superintelligence Labs, its dedicated AI unit. Meta promoted one feature that allowed individuals to generate images by @-mentioning public Instagram accounts that they wanted to reference. The feature, which wasn’t designed to alert a user if their photos were used in this way, prompted immediate backlash. TechCrunch wrote its own guid…

AINews07/10

Apple sues OpenAI over alleged trade secret theft

Apple filed a lawsuit Friday against OpenAI over allegations of trade secret theft and breach of contract. The iPhone maker alleges that this misconduct, which it says reveals a pattern of theft from OpenAI employees who previously worked at Apple, was directed by OpenAI’s senior leadership, including Chief Hardware Officer Tang Tan . The lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, accuses Tan of using Apple’s confidential project code names during OpenAI’s recruiting process, asking job candidates to bring in Apple hardware components to their interviews, coaching departing Apple employees on how to evade the company’s security procedures, an…

AINews07/10

Open source AI matters more than ever, according to Hugging Face’s Clem Delangue

Open source AI is booming, according to Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue . The company has grown into something like a GitHub for AI in recent years, where AI builders can share and download open models and datasets, now used by roughly half the Fortune 500. Delangue has seen the same story play out again and again: companies start out on frontier APIs, but as they scale, the costs push them towards open source models. On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan talked to Delangue about why the open vs closed source fight matters in the wake of Anthropic’s halted Fable release, and why he’s worried about the possibility that a handful of big companies could end up controllin…

AINews07/10

SK Hynix raises $26.5B in the biggest foreign IPO in US history, is urged to build new US fabs

The AI chip boom just produced its biggest Wall Street moment yet. SK Hynix, a South Korean memory chip giant, said Friday it has raised $26.5 billion (KRW 40 trillion) in its U.S. market debut. SK Hynix sold 177.9 million American depositary shares (ADRs) at $149 each, structured so U.S. investors can buy in at roughly a tenth of what a full share costs in Seoul. This deal, the largest-ever U.S. debut by a non-American company, topped Alibaba’s $25 billion IPO in 2014. The company begins trading on the Nasdaq today, Friday, July 10, under the temporary ticker SKHYV. Regular trading opens Monday, July 13, when the ticker officially becomes SKHY. So far, U.S. investors are lapping it up. The…

AINews07/10

Hugging Face’s CEO on why companies are done renting their AI

Loading the player… Open source AI is booming, according to Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue . The company has grown into something like a GitHub for AI in recent years, where AI builders can share and download open models and datasets, now used by roughly half the Fortune 500. Delangue has seen the same story play out again and again: companies start out on frontier APIs, but as they scale, the costs push them towards open source models. On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan talked to Delangue about why the open vs closed source fight matters in the wake of Anthropic’s halted Fable release, and why he’s worried about the possibility that a handful of big companies cou…