We’re less than two weeks away from Google’s next Pixel event, but that hasn’t stopped insiders from flooding the internet with new leaks, and the company is also teasing its next-generation devices. Now, according to Android Headlines, the Pixel 9 Pro Fold will have an interesting design as it’ll simultaneously be one of the thinnest and heaviest foldable smartphones on the market.Their source claims the device measures “155.2 x 77.1 x 10.5 mm when [closed] and 155.2 x 150.2 x 5.1 mm when [open].” When folded, it is 1.6mm thinner than the first Pixel Fold, and unfolded it is 0.7mm slimmer. The report states that the next foldable even lost a little bit of weight, clocking in at 257g, almost 30g lighter than the previous generation.However, as mentioned earlier, the Pixel 9 Pro Fold will still be one of the heavier contemporary foldables. Android Headlines points out that the Galaxy Z Fold 6 and the OnePlus Open both weigh less, at just 239g each. Big screen phoneNot only is the phone lighter than before, but it’ll also reportedly have “the largest display for a foldable” when it is released. The publication says the inner screen will be an “8-inch Super Actua Flex Display” capable of hitting a peak brightness of up to 2,700 nits. Currently, the most recent foldable with the largest inner screen is the Xiaomi MIX Fold 4 at 7.98 inches, although if you look at older models, the MIX Fold 2 is even bigger at 8.02 inches.On the flipside, the Pixel 9 Pro Fold’s outer screen is a 6.3-inch Actua Display. It’s certainly larger than the Pixel Fold, but it’s no industry behemoth. Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 6 sports an outer screen of the same size.Now, you may be thinking, “What’s the catch?” Did Google make serious concessions during development to achieve a large yet lightweight foldable? Looking at the leaks, there don’t appear to be any major downsides, as far as we can tell. The Pixel 9 Pro Fold will be one of the heftier options among its contemporaries, but even then, it still weighs less than the Pixel Fold.Sign up for breaking news, reviews, opinion, top tech deals, and more.Another report by Android Headlines claims the smartphone houses a 4,560mAh battery, which could be the smallest in the Pixel 9 series. It is said to last 24 hours on a single charge, although with Extreme Battery Saver, that number stretches up to 72 hours. That’s not a bad battery life, but the other three may have it beat, as they can hit 100 hours under the same mode.Additionally, the foldable is rumored to have limited storage capacity, peaking at 512GB, while the Pixel 9 Pro and Pro XL may offer a full terabyte of space.As always, take this information with a grain of salt. We will not know how the slim design or the huge inner display will impact the smartphone until we get our hands on it and Google spills all the details. Be sure to stay tuned for our coverage of the August 13 launch event.Til then, check out TechRadar’s list of the best Pixel phones for 2024.You might also like
Everything
How to enable Apple Intelligence on your iPhone
Apple is finally releasing some of the Apple Intelligence features it announced at its Worldwide Developers Conference in June.
However, the rollout is currently restricted to developer beta versions of iOS 18.1. So if you don’t want to deal with early-stage buggy software, you might want to wait for the Apple Intelligence feature release of public betas or the stable release later this year.
If you are on the developer beta, you can only use Apple Intelligence features if your language is set to U.S. English and your region is set to U.S. This doesn’t affect your App Store regions or purchases.
Here is how you can start using Apple Intelligence features:
Open the Settings app.
Go to the Apple Intelligence & Siri menu.
Tap on the “Join the Apple Intelligence waitlist” option.
Once your waitlist position is approved, you will get a notification. It might take a while for the system to download all models and data necessary to run Apple Intelligence. You can toggle off the Apple Intelligence feature from the menu at any point in time.
Image Credits: Apple
Apple’s AI suite features work through a combination of on-device and Apple Private Cloud requests. Apple said that the waitlist is to ensure sufficient service capacity.
At the moment, Apple Intelligence is only compatible with iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, and iPads and Macs that run on M1 chips.
Available features
New Siri: Apple Intelligence-powered Siri has a new animation. Plus, you can always double tap on the bottom bar to text Siri when you are in a loud place or a meeting. Siri can also handle stumbling words, so when you say, “Hey Siri, set a 10-minute, no, 15-minute timer,” it will set a 15-minute timer.
How-to questions: You can also ask Siri about Apple’s system-related how-tos such as “How do I take a screen recording?”
Writing tools: You can now reformat any text across the system. You can use “Proofread” to check for spelling mistakes or grammatical errors and “Rewrite” to rewrite the selected text without changing the meaning a lot. You can also choose to change the tone of the text through three options: “Friendly,” “Professional” or “Concise.” You can summarize the text to generate a list, key points or a table.
Mail app: The Mail app now shows summaries of emails in one line without opening them. Apple Intelligence also shows important emails on top of the inbox. Plus, you can use AI-generated smart replies to quickly respond to emails.
Photos: You can now search for photos through natural language queries. Additionally, you can also create memories via prompts.
Notification summaries: Apple Intelligence also shows summaries of some mail and message notifications.
Call transcriptions: Apple Intelligence now powers call recording with the tap of a button. The recordings are stored under a new “Call Recordings” folder in the Notes app.
Notes app audio support: You can also record and transcribe audio directly into the Notes app. Apple’s AI suite will also automatically produce a summary.
Apple Intelligence doesn’t yet have features such as the ability to remove unwanted objects in photos, emoji, image playground, and ChatGPT interactions. There is no fixed timeline for when we will get to test these features.
This Week in AI: Companies are growing skeptical of AI’s ROI
Hiya, folks, welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter.
This week in AI, Gartner released a report suggesting that around a third of generative AI projects in the enterprise will be abandoned after the proof-of-concept phase by year-end 2025. The reasons are many — poor data quality, inadequate risk controls, escalating infrastructure costs and so on.
But one of the biggest barriers to generative AI adoption is the unclear business value, per the report.
Embracing generative AI organization-wide comes with significant costs, ranging from $5 million to a whopping $20 million, estimates Gartner. A simple coding assistant has an upfront cost between $100,000 and $200,000 and recurring costs upward of $550 per user per year, while an AI-powered document search tool can cost $1 million upfront and between $1.3 million and $11 million per user annually, finds the report.
Those steep price tags are hard for corporations to swallow when the benefits are difficult to quantify and could take years to materialize — if, indeed, they ever materialize.
A survey from Upwork this month reveals that AI, rather than enhancing productivity, has actually proven to be a burden for many of the workers using it. According to the survey, which interviewed 2,500 C-suite execs, full-time staffers and freelancers, nearly half (47%) of workers using AI say that they have no idea how to achieve the productivity gains their employers expect while over three-fourths (77%) believe that AI tools have decreased productivity and added to their workload in at least one way.
It seems the honeymoon phase of AI may well be ending, despite robust activity on the VC side. And that’s not shocking. Anecdote after anecdote reveals how generative AI, which has unsolved fundamental technical issues, is frequently more trouble than it’s worth.
Just Tuesday, Bloomberg published a piece about a Google-powered tool that uses AI to analyze patient medical records, now in testing at HCA hospitals in Florida. Users of the tool Bloomberg spoke with said that it can’t consistently deliver reliable health information; in once instance, it failed to note whether a patient had any drug allergies.
Companies are beginning to expect more of AI. Barring research breakthroughs that address the worst of its limitations, it’s incumbent on vendors to manage expectations.
We’ll see if they have the humility to do so.
News
SearchGPT: OpenAI last Thursday announced SearchGPT, a search feature designed to give “timely answers” to questions, drawing from web sources.
Bing gets more AI: Not to be outdone, Microsoft last week previewed its own AI-powered search experience, called Bing generative search. Available for only a “small percentage” of users at the moment, Bing generative search — like SearchGPT — aggregates info from around the web and generates a summary in response to search queries.
X opts users in: X, formerly Twitter, quietly pushed out a change that appears to default user data into its training pool for X’s chatbot Grok, a move that was spotted by users of the platform on Friday. EU regulators and others quickly cried foul. (Wondering how to opt out? Here’s a guide.)
EU calls for help with AI: The European Union has kicked off a consultation on rules that will apply to providers of general-purpose AI models under the bloc’s AI Act, its risk-based framework for regulating applications of AI.
Perplexity details publisher licensing: AI search engine Perplexity will soon start sharing advertising revenue with news publishers when its chatbot surfaces their content in response to a query, a move that appears to be designed to assuage critics that’ve accused Perplexity of plagiarism and unethical web scraping.
Meta rolls out AI Studio: Meta said Monday that it’s rolling out its AI Studio tool to all creators in the U.S. to let them make personalized AI-powered chatbots. The company first unveiled AI Studio last year and started testing it with select creators in June.
Commerce Department endorses “open” models: The U.S. Commerce Department on Monday issued a report in support of “open-weight” generative AI models like Meta’s Llama 3.1, but recommended the government develop “new capabilities” to monitor such models for potential risks.
$99 Friend: Avi Schiffmann, a Harvard dropout, is working on a $99 AI-powered device called Friend. As the name suggests, the neck-worn pendant is designed to be treated as a companion of sorts. But it’s not clear yet whether it works quite as advertised.
Research paper of the week
Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is the dominant technique for ensuring that generative AI models follow instructions and adhere to safety guidelines. But RLHF requires recruiting a large number of people to rate a model’s responses and provide feedback, a time-consuming and expensive process.
So OpenAI is embracing alternatives.
In a new paper, researchers at OpenAI describe what they call rule-based rewards (RBRs), which use a set of step-by-step rules to evaluate and guide a model’s responses to prompts. RBRs break down desired behaviors into specific rules that are then used to train a “reward model,” which steers the AI — “teaching” it, in a sense — about how it should behave and respond in specific situations.
OpenAI claims that RBR-trained models demonstrate better safety performance than those trained with human feedback alone while reducing the need for large amounts of human feedback data. In fact, the company says it’s used RBRs as part of its safety stack since the launch of GPT-4 and plans to implement RBRs in future models.
Model of the week
Google’s DeepMind is making progress in its quest to tackle complex math problems with AI.
A few days ago, DeepMind announced that it trained two AI systems to solve four out of the six problems from this year’s International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), the prestigious high school math competition. DeepMind claims the systems, AlphaProof and AlphaGeometry 2 (the successor to January’s AlphaGeometry), demonstrated an aptitude for forming and drawing on abstractions and complex hierarchical planning — all of which have been historically challenging for AI systems to do.
AlphaProof and AlphaGeometry 2 worked together to solve two algebra problems and a number theory problem. (The two remaining questions on combinatorics were left unsolved). The results were verified by mathematicians; it’s the first time AI systems have been able to achieve silver medal-level performance on IMO questions.
There are a few caveats, however. It took days for the models to solve some of the problems. And while their reasoning capabilities are impressive, AlphaProof and AlphaGeometry 2 can’t necessarily help with open-ended problems that have many possible solutions, unlike those with one right answer.
We’ll see what the next generation brings.
Grab bag
AI startup Stability AI has released a generative AI model that turns a video of an object into multiple clips that look as though they were captured from different angles.
Called Stable Video 4D, the model could have applications in game development and video editing, Stability says, as well as virtual reality. “We anticipate that companies will adopt our model, fine-tuning it further to suit their unique requirements,” the company wrote in a blog post.
Image Credits: Stability AI
To use Stable Video 4D, users upload footage and specify their desired camera angles. After about 40 seconds, the model then generates eight five-frame videos (although “optimization” can take another 25 minutes).
Stability says that it’s actively working on refining the model, optimizing it to handle a wider range of real-world videos beyond the current synthetic datasets it was trained on. “The potential for this technology in creating realistic, multi-angle videos is vast, and we are excited to see how it will evolve with ongoing research and development,” the company continued.
Over 100 VCs pledge support for Kamala Harris
More than 100 VCs, including Reid Hoffman, Vinod Khosla and Mark Cuban have pledged to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris in the upcoming U.S. presidential election.
Mobilizing under the group VCsForKamala, the VCs are also soliciting donations for Harris’ campaign. But the organizers say the effort isn’t meant to align with any one political party.
According to the group’s website, signing on is a commitment to “strong, trustworthy institutions.”
“We believe that strong, trustworthy institutions are a feature, not a bug, and that our industry — and every other industry — would collapse without them,” a statement on the VCsForKamala site reads. “That is what’s at stake in this election. Everything else, we can solve through constructive dialogue with political leaders and institutions willing to talk to us.”
VCsForKamala, along with recent open-letter tech worker campaigns like Tech for Kamala, aim to push back against the notion that Silicon Valley has largely embraced ormer President Donald J. Trump.
Over the past few weeks, Tesla and X head Elon Musk and investors Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and David Sacks have endorsed Trump, the Republican presidential nominee. Musk created a new pro-Trump super PAC, and Sacks spoke at the Republican National Convention. The billionaire Winklevoss twins, founders of cryptocurrency company Gemini, also donated to Trump’s campaign (in bitcoin).
Trump’s Silicon Valley base argues that the Republican party — and Trump himself — are generally more favorable to the startup ecosystem. Andreessen and Horowitz have said that they believe, for example, that President Joe Biden and his administration have stifled tech businesses through overregulation and potentially needless taxation, and that their policies threaten to slow gains in the AI and crypto spaces.
Harris has held varying positions on tech regulation as California’s attorney general, in the U.S. Senate, and as VP. In 2019, as a state senator, she advocated for a breakup of Meta (then Facebook). And last year, she hosted four tech CEOs — Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai — at the White House “to share concerns about the risks associated with AI.”
Harris has at different times in her career drawn praise and financial support from tech leaders such as Box CEO Aaron Levi, Marc Benioff, Sheryl Sandberg and Jony Ive. Hoffman, Laurene Powell Jobs and venture capitalist John Doerr are among those who backed Harris’ last presidential bid that ended in December 2019, when she dropped out of the race to endorse Biden.
Harris and her allies, looking to muster support among Silicon Valley elite who haven’t cast their lot, have launched a blitz of behind-the-scene lobbying campaigns. According to The New York Times, Harris is planning a fundraising trip in the San Francisco Bay Area as soon as next month.
This has proven to be a winning strategy so far. Per NBC, Harris is on track to raise over $100 million from tech donors, including Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, across her campaign, PACs and so-called “dark money” groups.
TechCrunch Minute: Investors pour money into non-alcoholic beverages
Startups are attracting serious funding to provide fun, alcohol-free drink options at the bar and in other social contexts.
Earlier this year, canned water company Liquid Death announced that it has raised $67 million in new funding at a $1.4 billion valuation. And Athletic Brewing Company, which describes itself as America’s largest non-alcoholic brewery, said it raised $50 million.
Even though tech isn’t necessarily the differentiator for either company, you can still see them as disruptive startups because they’re trying to create new beverage categories, rather than just another cola or another craft beer.
There’s also a newer startup called Not Beer, which offers sparkling water. And beyond the companies that are branding themselves as alternatives to alcohol, there’s also mushroom drinks from Odyssey, healthier sodas from Olipop, and lemonade alternatives from Lemon Perfect, just to name a few.
Hit play to learn more, then let us know what you think.
Match Group cuts 6% of staff as it shuts down livestreaming in dating apps
Match Group announced Tuesday that it has discontinued livestreaming services in its dating apps, resulting in a 6% reduction in workforce. The news was delivered during the dating app giant’s second-quarter earnings report.
The move finds Match shifting its focus to other offerings, including generative AI.
The decision to end livestreaming will directly impact dating apps Plenty of Fish (POF) and BLK, which launched a free livestreaming feature — “Live!” — in 2020. The offerings were a bid to encourage users to date virtually during the COVID-19 lockdown. Users could also purchase “Live Credits” to send virtual dates to streamers, similar to TikTok Live.
According to posts on their respective help pages, BLK’s Live feature ends on August 19, whereas POF users will be unable to livestream after August 31.
Additionally, Match is shutting down the Hakuna app, acquired through its purchase of social networking company Hyperconnect in 2021. The app featured livestreams where hosts engaged with users primarily in Korea and Japan.
The company stated that ending livestreaming in a post-pandemic world makes sense, as it was a popular feature when users craved connection during isolation. As the world moves beyond the pandemic, the company has seen a shift in user behavior.
In its earnings call to investors, Match Group CFO Gary Swidler emphasized how customer behavior has changed since 2020.
“When we entered in livestreaming a few years ago, you know the world was different — it was pre-COVID and everything else — but livestreaming at that point, we thought provided attractive kind of adjacent additional source of revenue for us,” Swidler said.
Hinge, another Match-owned dating app, quietly ended its in-app audio and video calling feature last year for similar reasons, as more users have returned to in-person dates.
Revenue sharing also played a role in Match’s decision.
“Livestreaming has the same types of expenses as we see in our other dating businesses, but there’s one significant difference, which is we need to provide a revenue share to the livestreamers,” said Swidler. “And that can be 20% or more of the revenue, so that’s an extra expense that we really don’t see in our dating businesses.”
There is also significant competition with social media platforms like TikTok.
“This year we expected roughly a $60 million revenue contribution from livestreaming, but growing that revenue base has become much more challenging in the face of the competition and the changed landscape and dynamics that we’re facing. Not only that but to reach the scale that we need to reach to achieve even reasonable margins from our perspective, was going to take a significant amount of investment for a significant number of years, even in the best-case scenario,” Swindler added.
This decision to end livestreaming is expected to result in approximately $60 million in annual revenue loss. Yet it’s also estimated to result in $13 million in annual cost savings.
Match tells investors that this shift will allow Match to focus on businesses where it has “proven advantages,” such as generative AI.
Regarding the job cuts, Match Group plans to redeploy some of the Hyperconnect employees who have expertise in artificial intelligence to popular apps Tinder and Hinge. The company has increased its focus on AI in recent years, including an AI-powered photo selector for Tinder profiles.
Speaking of Tinder, the app experienced declines in paid users for the seventh quarter in a row. The figure declined 8% to 9.6 million in Q2, compared to 10 million in the prior quarter.
In February 2023, Match laid off 8% of staff, or 200 employees.
Neura shows off humanoid robot 4NE-1
German robotics manufacturer Neura this week released video of a humanoid robot, called 4NE-1, performing a variety of activities, like ironing and moving boxes. The promotional video arrives as Nvidia is showcasing a slew of new tools for humanoids at the Siggraph conference in Colorado.
Neura is one of a baker’s dozen of firms that were given early access to Nvidia’s humanoid development and deployment tools. The list also includes 1X, Boston Dynamics, ByteDance Research, Field AI, Figure, Fourier, Galbot, LimX Dynamics, Mentee, RobotEra and Skild AI.
Some, including 1X, Figure and Boston Dynamics, have been among the most prominent names in the emerging form factor. Neura has been teasing the cheekily named 4NE-1 for some time now, but the project has appeared to be in early stages, as the company focused on more traditional form factors in the industrial setting.
When I spoke with Neura CEO David Reger during a humanoid robotics panel at Automate that also included Boston Dynamics, Agility and Apptronik, he promised a closer look at the bot in July. Several of the robots were present on the floor of that event, but none actually functioned, making them little more than photo opportunities for attendees.
This week’s video shows 4NE-1 doing a lot; in some sense, it’s doing more than we’ve seen from other humanoids in the space. Every humanoid needs to be taken with a grain of salt, however — particularly one with a number of short shots and commercial edits. As we’ve noted in the past, these videos in particular don’t represent the system’s capabilities.
Neura, for its part, is using the video to announce its presence on the scene and work with Nvidia’s robotics portfolio. “By combining Neura’s innovative cognitive robotics solutions with Nvidia’s advanced computing power and simulation platforms, we will push the boundaries of humanoid robotics even faster,” Reger said in a comment tied to the news.
The video showcases simulation used to test and train these systems, intercut with shots of the bot in real-world scenarios. Until we’re able to see systems perform repeatable tasks in real-world scenarios at scale, these sorts of videos should always be approached with a degree of skepticism.
As with any company working on a humanoid, I would love to see a lot more raw video of 4NE-1 in the field, doing its thing. Even those humanoids that are out in the field are currently in the pilot stage, with the exception of Agility’s partnership with logistics giant GXO. Even that deal, however, is a ways off from true wide-scale deployment of the kind of magnitude we’ve seen with autonomous mobile robots.
Even so, Nvidia’s commitment to humanoids is a strong vote of confidence for the nascent category. It will also, no doubt, go a long way toward both accelerating development and opening things up to even more new entrants.
“The next wave of AI is robotics, and one of the most exciting developments is humanoid robots,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a release. “We’re advancing the entire Nvidia robotics stack, opening access for worldwide humanoid developers and companies to use the platforms, acceleration libraries and AI models best suited for their needs.”
Bending Spoons acquires file transfer service WeTransfer
Italy-based company Bending Spoons, which owns apps such as Evernote and Meetup, said Wednesday it has acquired file transfer service WeTransfer. The companies didn’t disclose the terms and valuation of the deal.
WeTransfer CEO Alexandar Vassilev said that in the last decade the platform development resulted in 600,000 subscribers and 80 million monthly active users.
“Nurturing creative communities and amplifying their voices has been key to our success. Some of Bending Spoons’ most successful products are tools that serve creativity; therefore we are confident that this milestone will complement both businesses, supercharge our growth, and help us create even more value for creative industries at large,” Vassilev said in a statement.
The Dutch company last raised $25 million from Highland Capital Partners Europe in 2015 to expand its footprint. In 2019, the company raised €35 million in a Series B round from European growth equity firm HPE Growth, with significant backing from Highland Europe through secondary sales. The startup also considered going public at one point in time but withdrew its plans because of volatility in the market.
“WeTransfer is a highly respected name in the technology and creative spaces. We’re enthusiastic about becoming its new owner, and we feel a strong sense of responsibility to help the brand and the business thrive for many years to come,” Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari said in a statement.
Bending Spoons said that it will continue reserving 30% of WeTransfer’s advertising space to give back campaigns and editorial content.
Earlier this year, WeTransfer added a new feature for creators to sell digital files directly on its platform, supporting more than 100 currencies.
What does this mean for WeTransfer?
Bending Spoons typically transforms the business models of companies it acquires. For instance, Evernote restricted its free plan to just 50 notes in November 2023. Currently, WeTransfer’s Pro plan is priced at $10 a month with 1TB of storage and the ability to send and receive files of up to 200GB. There is also a $19 per month premium plan with no limits. This might change under Bending Spoons’ leadership.
The Italy-based company also regularly lays off staff of companies it acquires. In February 2023, it laid off 129 employees from Evernote’s staff. In December 2023, Bending Spoons slashed all people working at Filmic, the popular photo and video editing app that it acquired in 2022.
Bending Spoons didn’t immediately comment on plans for changing pricing or layoffs with regards to WeTransfer.
Bending Spoons raised $155 million in equity financing earlier this year from Durable Capital Partners along with existing investors, including Baillie Gifford, Cox Enterprises, NB Renaissance, NUO Capital and StarTIP (controlled by Tamburi Investment Partners).
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