Product announcements

Good morning,

Here are the most important things that happened this week in tech…

Top 5 hits

• OpenAI debuts its newest flagship generative AI model called GPT-4o which can reason across voice, text, and vision. The “o” stands for “omni”.

• OpenAI’s Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever departs from the company. Its Head of Alignment Jan Leike also departs shortly after.

• Uber announces new features in its annual Go Get event that include shuttle services, caregiver accounts, social lists, and more.

• Google announced a ton of new products and services at its annual event Google I/O that focuses on its Gemini AI models and how they’ll be integrated into apps like Workspace and Chrome.

• Real Estate mogul Frank McCourt (also former owner of the LA Dodgers) plans to build a consortium to bid for TikTok’s US business but has no interest in its algorithm.

This week’s videos

Other news

• OpenAI has reached a deal with Reddit to use the social news site’s data for training AI models.

• Netflix hits 40M subscribers for its ad-supported tier, up from 5M just a year ago.

• Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger joins Anthropic as its Chief Product Officer.

• Waymo’s robotaxis are under another investigation after 22 reports of crashing and potentially violating traffic safety laws.

• David Sacks, one of the hosts of the All In podcast, launches a Slack alternative called Glue to fix “Slack channel fatigue”. It’s powered by AI of course.

• Expedia starts testing AI-powered features for search and travel planning.

• Motional, the autonomous vehicle startup, cuts 550 employees (around 40% of its workforce) in a restructuring plan. This comes as it paused commercial operations and delayed its robotaxi service until 2026.

• Reddit introduces new tools for ‘Ask Me Anything,’ its Q&A feature.

• Meta is exploring developing AI-powered earphones with cameras, which it hopes could be used to identify objects and translate foreign languages.

• Arm, a semiconductor and chip design company, will set up an AI chip unit to build a prototype by spring 2025 to capture explosive demand.

• Walmart lays off hundreds of tech staff and tells some workers in tech hubs in Dallas, Atlanta, and Toronto, to relocate or lose their jobs. This comes as the company grapples with slowing growth and prepares to open up a massive new campus at its Bentonville, AR headquarters.

• The former founder and CEO of Cruise, Kyle Vogt, announces his new robotics startup called Bot Company to focus on household chores. He’s already raised $150M.

• Chinese authorities tell local tech firms, including ByteDance, Tencent, Alibaba, and Baidu, to buy fewer Nvidia chips and more domestically-made chips.

• OpenAI competitor Anthropic expands its AI assistant app Claude into Europe. The startup has raised nearly $8B to date at an $18.4B valuation.

• Apple and Google agree on a standard to alert people when unknown Bluetooth devices may be tracking them.

• Apple will soon begin paying Hollywood studios based on how their series or movies perform. Netflix and Amazon have also been developing plans for performance-based compensation.

Deal flow

• Figma employees and early shareholders collectively will be able to sell as much as $900M of their shares in a deal that values the startup at $12.5B.

• Stability AI is in talks to raise money from an investor group that includes Facebook’s first president Sean Parker.

• Gamma raises a $12M Series A round led by Accel.

• Plenty, a wealth-building platform for couples, raises $5M.

• Active Surfaces, a startup developing lightweight flexible solar panels, raises a $5.6M pre-seed round.

• Pepper, an eCommerce platform for food distributors, raises a $30M Series B.

• Canopy, an accounting OS startup, raises $35M.

• Harness, a software delivery platform, raises $150M in debt financing—a line of credit the company can draw on as needed.

• Uber is acquiring the Taiwan business of Delivery Hero-owned Foodpanda for $950M in cash. In a separate agreement, Delivery Hero will also sell $300M in newly issued ordinary shares to Uber.

• EV-maker Fisker will raise up to $150M by selling convertible notes and will pause production of its EVs for six weeks. This comes as it tries to navigate a cash crunch and weak demand for its cars.

• The White House proposes up to $120M in federal funds for Polar Semiconductor to expand its chip manufacturing facility in Minnesota.

• Squarespace will go private in a $6.9B all-cash deal with private-equity firm Permira, after nearly 3 turbulent years on the public market.

• VC firm Accel has raised $650M to back startups from seed to Series A across the UK, the Continent, and Israel.

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That’s it for this week. Let me know what you think!

🌜 Loryn from Dark Mode Digest