Wednesday, October 16, 2024

Welcome to TechCrunch AM! This morning, we've got notes on Tesla's upcoming run in with red tape, more executives playing musical chairs in AI Land, and how one startup is helping assess AI regulatory compliance in Europe. We've also got the future of solar storage, the best startups out of Pear VC's accelerator, Character.AI's non-consensual avatars, and more. Let's dive in! — Rebecca

TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: Getty Images

1. Red tape will always get in the way: Elon Musk said Tesla would roll out "unsupervised FSD" in California and Texas next year, but that timeline seems ambitious given California's regulatory landscape around AVs. The feds also may not love Tesla's robotaxi, which is built without a steering wheel and pedals. Read More

2. An executive lost, an executive gained: Palantir's former chief information security officer Dane Stuckey has jumped over to OpenAI to help the AI giant "drive the development of safe AGI for the world." Read More

3. AI hyperscalers: Photonic computing startup Lightmatter's optical interconnect layer allows hundreds of GPUs to work at the same time, and VCs think that will shatter one of the biggest bottlenecks for AI data centers. The startup's just raised a whopping $400 million at a $4.4 billion valuation to build that out. Read More

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Morning Must-Reads

Image Credits: Storio

☀️ Solar power unlocked: The sun generates a lot of energy and Storio, a commercial and industrial smart energy storage startup wants to help make it easier to store it. The startup has raised a €5 million seed round and has signed its first client. Read More

🍐 Pearing up for success: Pear VC has grown the size of its bi-annual accelerator to 20 companies. We've highlighted five that stood out due to their fresh approaches to complex problems. Read More

👀 Stay alert: Engineers often need to be on-call in case a service goes down, but companies struggle with when to alert the right person and how. And how do you avoid alert fatigue? YC-backed Keep thinks AI can help solve this problem. Read More

🦷 SMB for life: On this week's episode of Found, we sat down with the co-founder and CEO of Gusto, a payroll and benefits startup that is committed to serving small businesses. As Josh Reeves said, "there's more dentist offices in the U.S. than tech startups." Read More

🤖 The business of compliance: The EU's risk-based framework to regulate AI has created an opportunity for startups to evaluate whether LLMs are meeting legal obligations. LatticeFlow AI is the first to throw its LLM framework into the ring. Read More

👗 Supply chain, but make it fashion: The founders of supply chain platform Autone came from a background in luxury fashion, where they realized retailers were leaving money on the table by not planning inventory properly. Now, they've raised $17 million in a General Catalyst-led round to aid sales while cutting waste. Read More

Around the Web

👏 Please scale responsibly: Anthropic has updated its Responsible Scaling Policy that's aimed at mitigating the risk of highly capable AI systems, VentureBeat reports. The policy sets out thresholds that indicate when an AI model's abilities require additional safeguards. Read More

👻 Non-consensual avatars: A man's daughter died in 2006 when she was just 18. Fast-forward to 2024, and he began seeing his daughter's likeness turned into an AI chatbot created with the Google-backed platform Character.AI. Wired has the story. Read More

📹 Unaltered video: AI-generated and altered videos have become so commonplace that it doesn't even make sense to label them as such. No, better to label when a video actually comes from a real camera with unaltered footage and sound, per YouTube's new labels. The Verge has all the details. Read More

Before You Go

Image Credits: Allen J. Schaben / Getty Images

🚘 I want to complain about Waymo, too! A San Francisco woman set up a livestream this summer showing Waymo cars in a parking lot honking at all hours of the night. As an apology, Waymo threw her an ice cream party and gave her codes for free rides. And boy did she use them. Read More