Monday, June 10, 2024

Welcome back to TechCrunch PM. If you were watching Apple's WWDC keynote this morning, no doubt you heard the excitement about a calculator for iPad. The team was also watching for all the updates on Apple Intelligence and Siri, and the keynote did not disappoint. In today's newsletter, we also have some funding, climate tech and data breach news to update you on. Proceed!

TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: Apple

The big news today, of course, revolved around Apple unveiling some new features. You can read everything that was announced today in our roundup. In the meantime, here are three audience favorites from the day:

Apple Intelligence is the company's new generative AI offering: "Most importantly, it has to understand you and be grounded in your personal context, like your routine, your relationships, your communications, and more," CEO Tim Cook noted. "And of course, it has to be built with privacy from the ground up together. All of this goes beyond artificial intelligence. It's personal intelligence, and it's the next big step for Apple."

Apple debuts visionOS 2: The release of visionOS 2 brings with it productivity enhancements and "new immersive experiences," as Apple describes them. One lets you "spatialize" photos from regular photos, leveraging AI and machine learning tech to turn photos into interactive experiences. Another is a new navigation option: visionOS 2 lets you switch to the home screen by just tapping, and you can flip your hand over to pull up the control center with access to notifications, shortcuts and more.

Apple is launching its own password manager app: Yes, you can already use your iCloud account to store and sync passwords across your devices; however, it's not necessarily the easiest way. With the Passwords app, there's a new column on the left that lets you more easily navigate your password collection.

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Afternoon must-reads

Image Credits: Joan Cros / NurPhoto / Getty Images

Mandiant is working with Snowflake to mitigate data breach: Some financially motivated cybercriminals may have stolen a "significant volume of data" from hundreds of customers hosting their vast banks of data with cloud storage giant Snowflake. So far, only Ticketmaster and LendingTree have confirmed data thefts where their stolen data was hosted on Snowflake. Meanwhile, several other Snowflake customers say they are currently investigating possible data thefts from their Snowflake environments. Read more

Injecting AI into home energy audits: The founders of French startup Kelvin are using computer vision and machine learning to make it easier to audit homes for energy efficiency. They believe home renovations will have a massive impact on CO2 emission and energy consumption reduction, but just need a little tech TLC. Read more

U.K., Canada looking at 23andMe: Privacy watchdogs in each of the regions are probing into the genetic testing company's data breach from last year. That's when 23andMe disclosed a security incident that affected the genetic and ancestry data of 6.9 million users, or roughly half of its overall user base. The investigation will look into the scope of information exposed and the potential harm to the victims; whether 23andMe "had adequate safeguards" to protect users' sensitive data; and whether 23andMe "provided adequate notification." Read more

Stake raises $14M: Dubai-based Stake is bringing its fractional property investment platform to the UAE capital of Abu Dhabi next year with the new capital. The company makes it easier for people to participate in the real estate market by buying a share of a given property. Read more

Equity on Byju's valuation shakeup: On today's episode of Equity, we cover Byju's alarming valuation drop, as well as a new firm betting on Italian startups. Listen here!

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TechCrunch Minute

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A new study looks at AI's political leanings: Artificial intelligence is not a human, but much of the models are trained on human behavior. So researchers at Carnegie Mellon, the University of Amsterdam and the AI startup Hugging Face decided to see what would happen if they asked AI about politically sensitive topics. Having just noted what I said at the beginning, the results may not surprise you. Hit play and let's chat!

Around the web

We're going to make you an AI believer yet: If you can't tell yet, venture capital is gaga over artificial intelligence. Axios reports the newest numbers from Crunchbase that show AI companies raised $12.4 billion in May, which represents 40% of the global total of VC. However, there seems to be some battling back and forth. As Dan Primack puts it, "AI is a sure bet," but AI startups … well that's a different matter. Read more

Elon Musk is not happy: That's because one of Tesla's major institutional investors is not behind awarding him a $56 billion bonus at the June 13 annual meeting, MarketWatch reports. Read more

Southwest Airlines got a brand-new bag: Speaking of investors not going along, the Wall Street Journal reports that Elliott Investment Management secured a $2 billion stake in Southwest Airlines and is now calling for some changes. Read more