Welcome again to Week in Assessment. This week, we’re diving into OpenAI’s $6.6 billion fundraising spherical, the fifth Cybertruck recall in lower than a yr, and a neat challenge that’s Shazam-ing songs heard on a San Francisco road. Let’s get into it.
OpenAI closed the biggest VC spherical of all time this week. The startup introduced it raised $6.6 billion in a funding spherical that values OpenAI at $157 billion post-money. Led by earlier investor Thrive Capital, the brand new money brings OpenAI’s whole raised to $17.9 billion, in accordance with Crunchbase. As a part of the spherical, OpenAI additionally secured an enormous credit score line.
ElevenLabs is being approached by present and new traders a couple of new spherical, which may worth the corporate as excessive as $3 billion, TechCrunch has discovered. The two-year-old firm focuses on making AI instruments to generate artificial voices for narrating audiobooks in addition to real-time video dubbing into different languages.
Elon Musk’s X is now price much less than 1 / 4 of its $44 billion buy value, in accordance with a brand new estimate from investor Constancy. The asset supervisor’s Blue Chip Development Fund now values its stake in X at roughly $4.19 million, implying that it’s at the moment valuing X at about $9.4 billion total.
That is TechCrunch’s Week in Assessment, the place we recap the week’s greatest information. Need this delivered as a e-newsletter to your inbox each Saturday? Enroll right here.
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One other Cybertruck recall: This time as a result of the rearview digicam picture could also be delayed by two seconds after shifting into reverse, and the show could seem clean for as much as eight seconds when the car is in reverse. Learn extra
Generate infinite Moo Dengs: Meta’s newest Film Gen mannequin turns textual content prompts into quick, comparatively lifelike movies with sound. It’s purely an AI analysis idea, and, correctly, Meta isn’t giving it a public launch. Learn extra
SB 1047 vetoed: California governor Gavin Newsom vetoed controversial AI invoice SB 1047. The invoice that might have made corporations answerable for implementing security protocols was opposed by many in Silicon Valley, together with OpenAI. Learn extra
Analyze this: Meta has clarified that whereas photographs and movies captured with Ray-Ban Meta usually are not used to coach its AI, that media falls below a totally totally different set of insurance policies when you ask Meta AI to investigate them. Learn extra
The sounds of San Francisco: A solar-powered field with an Android cellphone operating Shazam 24/7 was put in on a San Francisco road pole to determine bops within the wild. The songs are uploaded to a web site so you may hear the sounds of the town from wherever you might be. Learn extra
A safer VPN: The perfect encrypted VPN is one that you’ve got arrange and secured your self, not one from a paid VPN service. Right here’s a useful information on methods to make one in quarter-hour. Learn extra
The anti-productive note-taking app: Serviette is a note-taking app on iOS that wishes to face out towards the remaining by specializing in mindfulness and psychological wellness moderately than productiveness and utility. Learn extra
Backlash for Y Combinator: Y Combinator is being criticized for backing PearAI. The startup’s founder has overtly mentioned that it’s a cloned copy of one other challenge, however PearAI’s misstep was to slap its personal made-up closed license on its challenge that was written by ChatGPT. Learn extra
Make iOS 18 give you the results you want: iOS 18 brings vital modifications to the Management Middle — together with the power to make use of third-party apps. Listed below are some iOS 18-ready apps that may make your Management Middle extra helpful. Learn extra
A brand new approach to work together with ChatGPT: OpenAI has a brand new “Canvas” workspace that lets customers generate writing or code and have the mannequin counsel edits and provide suggestions for a extra collaborative workflow. Learn extra
