Welcome back to Week in Review. This week, we’re diving into OpenAI’s $6.6 billion fundraising round, the fifth Cybertruck recall in less than a year, and a neat project that’s Shazam-ing songs heard on a San Francisco street. Let’s get into it.
OpenAI closed the largest VC round of all time this week. The startup announced it raised $6.6 billion in a funding round that values OpenAI at $157 billion post-money. Led by previous investor Thrive Capital, the new cash brings OpenAI’s total raised to $17.9 billion, according to Crunchbase. As part of the round, OpenAI also secured a massive credit line.
ElevenLabs is being approached by existing and new investors about a new round, which could value the company as high as $3 billion, TechCrunch has learned. The 2-year-old company specializes in making AI tools to generate synthetic voices for narrating audiobooks as well as real-time video dubbing into other languages.
Elon Musk’s X is now worth less than a quarter of its $44 billion purchase price, according to a new estimate from investor Fidelity. The asset manager’s Blue Chip Growth Fund now values its stake in X at approximately $4.19 million, implying that it is currently valuing X at about $9.4 billion overall.
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News
Another Cybertruck recall: This time because the rearview camera image may be delayed by two seconds after shifting into reverse, and the display may appear blank for up to eight seconds when the vehicle is in reverse. Read more
Generate infinite Moo Dengs: Meta’s latest Movie Gen model turns text prompts into short, relatively realistic videos with sound. It’s purely an AI research concept, and, wisely, Meta isn’t giving it a public release. Read more
SB 1047 vetoed: California governor Gavin Newsom vetoed controversial AI bill SB 1047. The bill that would have made companies liable for implementing safety protocols was opposed by many in Silicon Valley, including OpenAI. Read more
Analyze this: Meta has clarified that while images and videos captured with Ray-Ban Meta are not used to train its AI, that media falls under a completely different set of policies once you ask Meta AI to analyze them. Read more
The sounds of San Francisco: A solar-powered box with an Android phone running Shazam 24/7 was installed on a San Francisco street pole to identify bops in the wild. The songs are uploaded to a website so you can hear the sounds of the city from wherever you are. Read more
A more secure VPN: The best encrypted VPN is one that you have set up and secured yourself, not one from a paid VPN service. Here’s a handy guide on how to make one in 15 minutes. Read more
The anti-productive note-taking app: Napkin is a note-taking app on iOS that wants to stand out against the rest by focusing on mindfulness and mental wellness rather than productivity and utility. Read more
Backlash for Y Combinator: Y Combinator is being criticized for backing PearAI. The startup’s founder has openly said that it’s a cloned copy of another project, but PearAI’s misstep was to slap its own made-up closed license on its project that was written by ChatGPT. Read more
Make iOS 18 work for you: iOS 18 brings significant changes to the Control Center — including the ability to use third-party apps. Here are some iOS 18-ready apps that can make your Control Center more useful. Read more
A new way to interact with ChatGPT: OpenAI has a new “Canvas” workspace that lets users generate writing or code and have the model suggest edits and offer feedback for a more collaborative workflow. Read more