Sam Altman handles security, dating apps deteriorate, and a look to the past
Also, Canva’s big day, AI may resolve human loneliness, and xAI valuation reaches $18 billion
Welcome to Tech Pills, the weekly newsletter about technology, innovation and startups. My name is Jose, and you can follow me on LinkedIn. Let’s begin!
🔐 OpenAI has a new security team led by Sam Altman. Following recent events, the company takes this step in response to security concerns. We’ll see if Altman can handle everything he has going on at the moment and take care of security on top of that.
Meanwhile, Anthropic hired a former OpenAI employee as their new head of security.
Jan Leike, the person in question, has openly criticized the creators of ChatGPT for their lack of security.
By the way, this week we found out why Sam Altman was fired. According to Helen Toner, who was on the board at the time of the dismissal, Sam Altman lied and withheld information from the other members about the launch of new products.
📉 The popularity of dating apps is declining. Concerns about safety and the fact that using them might be very time consuming are the main reasons. Tinder and Bumble, industry leaders, are working on improving content moderation and offering new features.
The gender disparity is another major issue these services face. Women receive significantly more messages than men, which can be overwhelming. On the contrary, receiving few messages can increase insecurity among men. This causes them to send more messages, creating a negative feedback loop.
🔙 If you want to travel back in time, this article reviews previous versions of designs of the most famous tech companies' websites. After reading this, it’s incredible how much graphic design has advanced in such a short time. There are notable sites that were very popular in the 90s and are now either nonexistent or barely relevant, like AltaVista or AOL.
👨⚖️ The judge dismisses Google’s arguments in the lawsuit against Epic Games, creators of Fortnite. The conflict arose from the commissions imposed by Google on in-app purchases. Initially, the judge sided with Epic. Google responded by suggesting that altering the conditions of its app store could result in a “chaotic and terrifying world.” For some reason, the judge found their argument a bit exaggerated.
This isn’t the only conflict involving the creators of Fortnite. In 2020, they sued Apple for the same reason. Although the trial isn’t over yet, things don’t look good for Apple.
💸 $6 million fine for a phone scam using AI-generated voice. The scammer duplicated Joe Biden’s voice to interfere in the New Hampshire primary elections. These generative tools are accessible to anyone, but that doesn’t mean they’re undetectable.
🎬 Ted Sarandos, Netflix CEO, doesn’t believe AI can replace content creators. As for other jobs, he believes that positions affected will be offset by new jobs arising from the need to manage these new AI tools.
🚘 The first prototypes of Apple’s electric car project have been leaked. A few weeks ago, they decided to ditch this project and pivot to robots, but it’s interesting to see the influence of their products on the car design.
Following up, this week Apple explained why the latest iOS update made deleted photos reappear. As we mentioned last week, some users reported finding photos on their iPhones that they had deleted years ago. It seems the problem was a corrupt locally stored database. This issue doesn’t affect photos stored in iCloud and only occurred in cases where the photos were stored on the same phone.
Innovation & Startups
🖥️ Canva presents its new features. This new update will target businesses. Their goal is to improve and simplify the workflow experience for employees when collaborating, just as they did with graphic design. Some features this version will offer include SSO (single sign-on), enhanced security, and the ability to manage a brand centrally.
This proposal is Canva’s response to the platform’s popularity growth within large organizations that have greater requirements.
🤖 Artificial intelligence could help combat human loneliness. This problem affects millions of people worldwide, and AI can be trained to learn social interactions. Experts say it could help improve self-esteem and social skills, but reciprocal human connections are necessary for health and well-being.
💰 Elon Musk raises $6 billion for his AI startup, xAI. This funding round is backed by well-known investors like Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. The money will be used to launch xAI’s first products, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate research and development of future technologies. According to Musk, xAI is currently valued at $18 billion.
One of the investments will be in creating a supercomputer. Their intention is to use it to improve Grok, their AI chat tool. In the long run, the master plan would be to combine Tesla, X, and SpaceX technologies to train their AI model. Will they be able to compete with Google and OpenAI?
💬 Also regarding AI, this week we learned about an engineer who created an AI chatbot to talk to his deceased father. James Vlahos used recordings he had of his father to train the system to specifically talk like him. Nowadays, companies like HereafterAI and DeepBrain offer similar services.
Byte-Sized News
A facial recognition system wrongly accused a woman of stealing from a store.
Microsoft announces it will stop supporting Windows 10 in October 2025.
A robot smashes the world record for solving a Rubik's cube. It solves it in 0.3 seconds, and you have to watch the video in slow motion to see it properly.