TechCrunch Industry News

This week’s cover of WSJ Magazine is extremely minimalistic. That’s not surprising given that the main story is an in-depth interview with Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple and the king of minimalistic design; Instagram and Threads accounts that track the private jets of celebrities – including Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Kim Kardashian, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Kylie Jenner – were suspended on Monday, according to the owner of many such accounts, Florida college student, Jack Sweeney. Links to Instagram/Threads accounts tracking the flights of the former President; Zoom is partnering with Suki, an AI medical note-taking app, to let doctors use an AI scribe that will take notes of their consultations with patients; Earlier this year, Medal, a startup known for its video game clipping features, launched a cross-platform AI assistant called Highlight. Now, the company is spinning off Highlight into a new entity, which has raised $10 million in a funding round. General Catalyst led the funding round with Valor, SV Angel, and Conviction Embed Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Meta is expanding tests of facial recognition as an anti-scam measure to combat celebrity scam ads and more broadly, the Facebook owner announced Monday. Monika Bickert, Meta’s VP of content policy, wrote in a blog post that some of the tests aim to bolster its existing anti-scam measures Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

AI search engine Perplexity is in fundraising talks and hopes to raise around $500 million at an $8 billion valuation, according to the Wall Street Journal. If a deal happens with those terms, it would more than double Perplexity’s valuation from its $3 billion valuation when it raised from SoftBank over the summer; Uber and Lyft need to do more to support disabled passengers, especially those who are blind or visually impaired, according to protesters who gathered outside the companies’ headquarters on October 15; Drone-maker DJI filed a lawsuit Friday against the US Department of Defense over its inclusion on a DoD list of “Chinese military companies.” A DJI spokesperson said the company filed the suit after “attempting to engage with the DoD for more than sixteen months” and deciding “it had no alternative other than to seek relief; AI companies claim to have robust safety checks in place that ensure that models don’t say or do weird, illegal, or unsafe stuff. But what if the models were capable of evading those checks and, for some reason, trying to sabotage or mislead users? Turns out they can do this, according to Anthropic researchers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

OpenAI quietly published a statement on its website pledging not to use its patents offensively. Asserting its commitment to the principles of “broad access” and “collaboration,” OpenAI said that it would only use its patents in a way that supports innovation Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Worldcoin, the Sam Altman co-founded “proof of personhood” crypto startup that scans people’s eyeballs, announced on Thursday that it dropped the “coin” from its name and is now just “World.” The startup also unveiled its next generation of iris-scanning “Orb” and other tools at a live event in San Francisco Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Instagram is introducing a series of new safety features to protect users from sextortion scammers, the company announced on Thursday. Most notably, the company is no longer going to allow people to screenshot or screen record ephemeral images or videos sent in private messages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Amy Wu, founder of the AI-based mental health app Manifest, has a bold prediction for the next wave of tech. “Separately from the AI trend, I think so many people are seeing this loneliness epidemic that’s happening with Gen Z,” she said. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The United Kingdom’s NHS — the world’s largest public health service — is working on creaking IT infrastructure. In any sector, that’s a ticking time bomb. But when you consider that the NHS holds medical records for nearly 67 million people, a breach of that system could become a meltdown; Sophia Tung set up a livestream this past summer, showing self-driving Waymo cars honking from the San Francisco parking lot near her apartment at all hours of the night; Meta’s X rival Threads is rolling out a new “activity status” feature that will let you see when someone on the social network is online. Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced the feature on Tuesday in a Threads post, noting that it’s meant to act as “a way to help you find others to engage with; and if you like open-source, decentralized social networks that put the power in the hands of the people instead of billionaires, you can now support that cause…by buying toys. On Tuesday, Mastodon, a decentralized alternative to X, began selling its own merchandise in the form of cute, plushie mastodons – the proto-elephants with long tusks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

During Tesla’s much-hyped robotaxi reveal event last week, CEO Elon Musk said he expects Tesla to release an “unsupervised” version of FSD, the automaker’s advanced driver assistance system, in Texas and California in 2025 on certain Model 3 and Model Y vehicles.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

During Tesla’s “We, Robot” event last week, which TechCrunch covered late into the night,, sources on the ground sent me a handful of videos of the automaker’s Optimus humanoid robots walking around the party, dancing, mixing drinks, and talking to guests. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices