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Watch: Elon Musk’s big plans for xAI include raising $6 billion

April 29, 2024 10:32 PM0


TechCrunch recently broke the news that Elon Musk’s xAI is raising $6 billion at a pre-money valuation of $18 billion.

The deal hasn’t closed yet, so the numbers could change. But it sounds like Musk is making an ambitious pitch to investors about his 10-month-old startup — a rival to OpenAI, which he also co-founded and is currently suing for allegedly abandoning its initial commitment to focus on the good of humanity over profit.

You may be wondering: Doesn’t Musk have enough companies already? There’s Tesla, SpaceX, X (formerly Twitter), Neuralink, The Boring Company … maybe he should spend his time on the existing businesses that have struggles of their own.

But in the xAI pitch, Musk’s connection to these other companies is a feature, not a bug. xAI could get access to crucial training data from across his empire — and its technology could, in turn, help Tesla achieve its dream of true self-driving cars and bring its humanoid Optimus robot into factories.

Of course, Musk’s hype doesn’t always match up to reality. But with this impressive new funding, xAI could become an even more formidable competitor in the AI world. Hit play, then leave your thoughts below!


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Stripe's big changes, Brazil's newest fintech unicorn and the tale of a startup shutdown | TechCrunch

April 28, 2024 8:07 PM0


Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech! This week, we’re looking at Stripe’s big product announcements, a bump in valuation for a Brazilian fintech startup and much more!

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important fintech stories delivered to your inbox every Sunday at 7:00 a.m. PT, subscribe here. 

The big story

Stripe announced that it will be de-coupling payments from the rest of its financial services stack. This is a big change, considering that in the past, even as Stripe grew its list of services, it required businesses to be payments customers in order to use any of the rest. Alongside this, the company is adding in a number of new embedded finance features and a new wave of AI tools. The fintech giant also announced that after a six-year hiatus, it will let customers accept cryptocurrency payments, starting with just one currency in particular, USDC stablecoins, initially only on Solana, Ethereum and Polygon.

Analysis of the week

Brazil got a new fintech unicorn last week. Banking-as-a-service startup QI Tech achieved unicorn status after raising an undisclosed amount of capital in a General Atlantic-led investment that was an extension of its $200 million Series B raise, which TechCrunch covered last October. QI Tech said it is also preparing to close on the acquisition of Singulare, a Brazilian fund administration services provider, in the third quarter. Meanwhile, another Brazilian startup, Vixtra, secured $36 million in debt and equity funding — another example of companies in the region continuing to attract venture dollars.

Dollars and cents

Bump, a platform that helps creators manage and grow their businesses, announced a $3 million seed round, with investments from ImpactX, Capitalize and Serac Ventures. Bump allows creators to track income and market value, which can help them negotiate better deals and see how much money partners owe them.

Y Combinator alum and B2B fintech startup Fintoc raised a $7 million Series A round of funding to consolidate its presence in its home country, Chile, and in Mexico, where it expanded one year ago.

Pomelo, a startup that launched in the Philippines in 2022 — allowing people in the United States to send money to the country while at the same time building their credit — has raised $35 million in a Series A round led by Dubai venture firm Vy Capital with participation from Founders Fund.

You can hear the Equity crew talk about this deal and more here:

What else we’re writing

Bengaluru-headquartered CRED, valued at $6.4 billion, has received the in-principle approval for a payment aggregator license in a boost to the Indian fintech startup that could help it better serve its customers and launch new products and experiment with ideas faster.

Winding down a startup can be bittersweet for founders. In the case of Fundid, rising interest rates killed the business finance startup. But VCs and partners hurt it, too, founder Stefanie Sample says in this compelling read by Christine Hall.

After a tumultuous year, banking-as-a-service (BaaS) startup Synapse has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and its assets will be acquired by TabaPay.

High-interest headlines

401Go raises $12M Series A to fuel next phase of growth

Ramp vs. Brex risks becoming fintech’s Uber vs. Lyft, some VCs warn

Want to reach out with a tip? Email me at [email protected] or send me a message on Signal at 408.204.3036. You can also send a note to the whole TechCrunch crew at [email protected]. For more secure communications, click here to contact us, which includes SecureDrop (instructions here) and links to encrypted messaging apps.


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How Rubrik’s IPO paid off big for Greylock VC Asheem Chandna | TechCrunch

April 27, 2024 4:13 AM0


When Asheem Chandna drove up to Rubrik’s office in Palo Alto on a Friday night in early 2015, he was looking forward to learning what the young company that had yet to build its product would show him. The Greylock partner wasn’t disappointed.

The company’s CEO, Bipul Sinha, drew Rubrik’s plan to revamp the data management and recovery market on a whiteboard. “The old versus new architecture he presented was very compelling,” Chandna said. “Based on my knowledge of the sector, I knew it could be built into a large business.”

That was a prescient call. On Thursday, nine years after that meeting, Rubric began its life as a publicly traded company with a market cap of over $6 billion. Greylock holds a 13% stake, according to the latest SEC filings. By the close of market Friday, with shares priced at $38, those nearly 19.9 million shares were worth over $756 million. 

But Chandna says it was much more than Rubrik’s desire to take on the arcane data recovery market that motivated him to lead Rubrik’s $40 million Series B in May 2015. (The Series B round sold for $2.45/share, adjusting for splits, according to those SEC documents. While Greylock also participated in later rounds at higher prices, Chandra’s returns on this one are hefty.) 

“The longer I do what I do, the more I fundamentally believe that venture is a people business,” said Chandna, who has been an investor for over 20 years and has an enviable track record of successful exits. He has helped incubate Palo Alto Networks in Greylock’s offices and was on the nearly $100 billion-worth company’s board until last year. Chandna was also an early investor in AppDynamics, Sumo Logic and Arista Networks.

Chandna looks for people who are not only motivated and ambitious, but are also self-aware of their weaknesses, and can recruit people who can get things done in areas that are not the founder’s strong suits.  

Another essential ingredient for a founder is grit. “If you had technology that was adequate, but slightly inferior to my technology, but you were very self-aware and persistent, you will beat me,” he said.

That’s what he saw in Sinha. Rubrik’s founder had a lifelong dream of starting a company. When he founded the data management and recovery startup in 2013, he couldn’t find strong engineers who wanted to come work there, Chandra recalled. The business he was trying to build was inherently not sexy at the time. 

Despite having been an investor with Lightspeed for four years before launching Rubrik, recruiting talent turned out to be a big challenge for Sinha. But he didn’t give up. He pinged engineers on LinkedIn and then invited them for coffee blocks away from where they worked.

“Startup journeys are very hard, even for the most successful companies,” Chandna said. “I want people who won’t take ‘no’ for an answer.”

Perhaps it was Sinha’s grit and ambition that compelled him to take his company public despite the lukewarm IPO environment.

“Rubric has just under $800 million in annualized recurring revenue,” Chandna said, “That’s larger than most companies that went public in the last many years. I think they just wanted to get on with it.”

Chandna declined to say if he expects other Greylock portfolio companies to follow Rubrik’s lead but added emphatically that the firm’s best-performing late-stage businesses are Abnormal Security, Cato Networks, Discord, Figma and Lyra Health.

We will be following their fate closely.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Exclusive: Internal pre-Starlink SpaceX financials show big spending on moonshot bets

April 22, 2024 2:45 PM0


Confidential financial statements from SpaceX for 2018 and 2019 capture an early glimpse at the degree to which the company is likely dependent on its Starlink business unit, and bringing the Starship rocket online, to become cash flow positive. 

While the comprehensive balance sheets are five years old, they provide an intimate look inside the operations of arguably one of the most important, and secretive, private companies in the U.S. And they help shed light on what the company spent money on, and how much, as SpaceX grew itself from an unprofitable $2 billion in revenue to, reportedly, $9 billion for 2023 with a projected $15 billion in 2024 and $3 billion in earnings, sources familiar told Bloomberg in November.

2018 and 2019 were pivotal years for the company: In February 2018, SpaceX launched its Falcon Heavy rocket for the first time; the following March, the company nailed a pivotal flight test of its crew Dragon capsule, but exploded that same capsule a month later during ground testing. SpaceX was likely feeling pressure to deliver a safe, reliable spacecraft for NASA astronauts, so it could start realizing more dollars from the multibillion-dollar government contract it won for crew transportation services. 

That was also the year SpaceX launched its first 60 Starlink satellites. The service has become integral to the company’s overall plans — the core of which is to establish a human colony on Mars or, as CEO Elon Musk often puts it, “to expand the light of consciousness” throughout the universe. 

So, let’s take a look.

The company pulled in $1.98 billion in revenue in 2018 and $1.45 billion in 2019, but was operating at a net loss of -$308 million and -$501 million, respectively, according to comprehensive balance sheets from those years viewed by TechCrunch. The reason that revenue declined from 2018 to 2019 was because SpaceX changed the method it used to recognize revenue from, essentially, the percentage of a total contract that was completed to the percentage of discrete aspects of each contract completed due to a change in accounting regulations, the documents viewed by TechCrunch explained. SpaceX did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment on this story.

The majority of the losses came from “cost of revenue,” a broad category that can encompass all costs related to production and distribution of a product or service. It also includes the costs of its personnel and its contractors, utilities and rent in this item. SpaceX even includes the depreciation of reusable launch vehicle hardware costs in this equation. 

The company was spending plenty of cash on research and development, too — $559 million in 2018 and $661 million the following year. Often companies include personnel costs in this line item (aka, it is the “development” part of R&D). But in SpaceX’s case, the financial statement notes that these costs primarily involved the Starlink and Starship programs. The Starlink program completed a milestone in 2019, when SpaceX launched the first batch of operational Starlink satellites in May of that year. The company ended the year with cash and cash equivalents of $868 million for 2018 and $990 million for 2019. 

The balance sheets span the years after SpaceX netted the NASA contracts to deliver astronauts and cargo to and from the International Space Station. So it’s likely no surprise that money from the U.S. government, in the form of contracts with NASA, accounted for 37% of the revenue in 2018 and 83% in 2019. 

The company, whose valuation swelled to $180 billion late last year, has taken truly enormous strides since that May 2019 deployment of 60 Starlink satellites: There are now more than 5,500 active satellites deployed in orbit, with over 2.5 million customers. This is certainly reflected in its booming sales.

The arrival of Starship may change the equation again. The massive rocket, which the company is currently subjecting to an orbital flight test campaign from its Texas launch site, will be necessary to keep up launch cadence for the second-generation satellites. Those spacecraft will be nearly twice as heavy as the first-gen sats, and additional spacecraft in orbit will help boost capacity for end users.  

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk admitted during a May 2022 interview that Starship “is the only thing that can carry the Starlink 2 satellites.” 

“Falcon [9] has neither the volume nor the mass-to-orbit capability required for Starlink 2,” he said. 

There are myriad questions about SpaceX’s more recent financials. The company launches its Starlink satellites with its own rocket, its Falcon 9 workhorse, which means it can launch the space-based internet satellites at unprecedented rates. Because the rocket booster is reusable, the company can also amortize the cost of hardware over time. But the longer it takes to bring Starship online, the longer it will take to roll out Starlink to millions more users around the world.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

UK's antitrust enforcer sounds the alarm over Big Tech's grip on GenAI | TechCrunch

April 21, 2024 9:23 PM0


The U.K.’s competition watchdog, Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), has sounded a warning over Big Tech’s entrenching grip on the advanced AI market, with CEO Sarah Cardell expressing “real concerns” over how the sector is developing.

In an Update Paper on foundational AI models published Thursday, the CMA cautioned over increasing interconnection and concentration between developers in the cutting-edge tech sector responsible for the boom in generative AI tools.

The CMA’s paper points to the recurring presence of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and Apple (aka GAMMA) across the AI value chain: compute, data, model development, partnerships, release and distribution platforms. And while the regulator also emphasized that it recognizes that partnership arrangements “can play a pro-competitive role in the technology ecosystem,” it coupled that with a warning that “powerful partnerships and integrated firms” can pose risks to competition that run counter to open markets.

Image Credits: CMA’s Foundation Models. Update Paper

“We are concerned that the FM [foundational model] sector is developing in ways that risk negative market outcomes,” the CMA wrote, referencing a type of AI that’s developed with large amounts of data and compute power and may be used to underpin a variety of applications.

“In particular, the growing presence across the FM value chain of a small number of incumbent technology firms, which already hold positions of market power in many of today’s most important digital markets, could profoundly shape FM-related markets to the detriment of fair, open and effective competition, ultimately harming businesses and consumers, for example by reducing choice and quality, and by raising prices,” it warned.

The CMA undertook an initial review of the top end of the AI market last May and went on to publish a set of principles for “responsible” generative AI development that it said would guide its oversight of the fast-moving market. Although, Will Hayter, senior director of the CMA’s Digital Markets Unit, told TechCrunch last fall that it was not in a rush to regulate advanced AI because it wanted to give the market a chance to develop.

Since then, the watchdog has stepped in to scrutinize the cozy relationship between OpenAI, the developer behind the viral AI chatbot ChatGPT, and Microsoft, a major investor in OpenAI. Its update paper remarks on the giddy pace of change in the market. For example, it flagged research by the U.K.’s internet regulator, Ofcom, in a report last year that found 31% of adults and 79% of 13- to 17-year-olds in the U.K. have used a generative AI tool, such as ChatGPT, Snapchat My AI or Bing Chat (aka Copilot). So there are signs the CMA is revising its initial chillaxed position on the GenAI market amid the commercial “whirlwind” sucking up compute, data and talent.

UK’s antitrust watchdog announces initial review of generative AI

Its Update Paper identifies three “key interlinked risks to fair, effective, and open competition,” as it puts it, which the omnipresence of GAMMA speaks to: (1) Firms controlling “critical inputs” for developing foundational models (known as general-purpose AI models), which might allow them to restrict access and build a moat against competition; (2) tech giants’ ability to exploit dominant positions in consumer- or business-facing markets to distort choice for GenAI services and restrict competition in deployment of these tools; and (3) partnerships involving key players, which the CMA says “could exacerbate existing positions of market power through the value chain.”

Image Credits: CMA

In a speech delivered Thursday in Washington, D.C., at a legal event focused on generative AI, Cardell pointed to the “winner-take-all dynamics” seen in earlier web dev eras, when Big Tech built and entrenched their Web 2.0 empires while regulators sat on their heels. She said it’s important that competition enforcers don’t repeat the same mistakes with this next generation of digital development.

“The benefits we wish to see flowing from [advanced AI], for businesses and consumers, in terms of quality, choice and price, and the very best innovations, are much more likely in a world where those firms are themselves subject to fair, open and effective competition, rather than one where they are simply able to leverage foundation models to further entrench and extend their existing positions of power in digital markets,” she said, adding: “So we believe it is important to act now to ensure that a small number of firms with unprecedented market power don’t end up in a position to control not just how the most powerful models are designed and built, but also how they are embedded and used across all parts of our economy and our lives.”

How is the CMA going to intervene at the top end of the AI market? It does not have concrete measures to announce, as yet, but Cardell said it’s closely tracking GAMMA’s partnerships and stepping up its use of merger review to see whether any of these arrangements fall within existing merger rules.

That would unlock formal powers of investigation, and even the ability to block connections it deems anti-competitive. But for now the CMA has not gone that far, despite clear and growing concerns about cozy GAMMA GenAI ties. Its review of the links between OpenAI and Microsoft — for example, to determine whether the partnership constitutes a “relevant merger situation” — continues.

“Some of these arrangements are quite complex and opaque, meaning we may not have sufficient information to assess this risk without using our merger control powers to build that understanding,” Cardell also told the audience, explaining the challenges of trying to understand the power dynamics of the AI market without unlocking formal merger review powers. “It may be that some arrangements falling outside the merger rules are problematic, even if not ultimately remediable through merger control. They may even have been structured by the parties to seek to avoid the scope of merger rules.  Equally some arrangements may not give rise to competition concerns.”

“By stepping up our merger review, we hope to gain more clarity over which types of partnerships and arrangements may fall within the merger rules, and under what circumstances competition concerns may arise — and that clarity will also benefit the businesses themselves,” she added.

The CMA’s Update report sets out some “indicative factors,” which Cardell said may trigger greater concern about and attention to FM partnerships, such as the upstream power of the partners, over AI inputs; and the downstream power, over distribution channels. She also said the watchdog will be looking closely at the nature of the partnership and the level of “influence and alignment of incentives” between partners.

Meanwhile, the U.K. regulator is urging AI giants to follow the seven development principles it set out last fall to steer market developments onto responsible rails where competition and consumer protection are baked in. (The short version of what it wants to see is: accountability, access, diversity, choice, flexibility, fair dealing, and transparency.)

“We’re committed to applying the principles we have developed and to using all legal powers at our disposal — now and in the future — to ensure that this transformational and structurally critical technology delivers on its promise,” Cardell said in a statement.

Microsoft and OpenAI tie-up faces ‘relevant merger’ scrutiny by UK regulator CMA

UK’s competition watchdog drafts principles for ‘responsible’ generative AI


Software Development in Sri Lanka

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Vorlon is trying to stop the next big API breach | TechCrunch

April 17, 2024 3:43 PM0


Application programming interfaces, or APIs as they’re commonly known, are the bedrock of everything we do online. APIs allow two things on the internet to talk with each other, including connected devices or phone apps.

But the enormous growth of API usage — around half of all internet traffic — is putting businesses’ data at risk. A common security risk is granting third parties overly permissive API access. Malicious hackers can leverage APIs to gain access to a company’s sensitive information.

Cybersecurity startup Vorlon says it helps businesses protect their data from such incidents using its platform, and raised $15.7 million to improve its technology.

Founded in 2022 by former Palo Alto Networks executives Amir Khayat and Amichay Spivak, Vorlon analyzes network traffic to detect and remediate potential API abuse in real-time.

In an interview, Khayat said the company’s technology runs the analysis and lets the customer know “something that you need to be notified about and take an action on.”

Vorlon continuously observes a company’s APIs and notifies them when vendors make updates helps to better understand their exposure or potential exposure Khayat told TechCrunch. The founder also noted that alongside detecting vulnerabilities and exposures, Vorlon’s platform looks at the type of data third-party APIs have access to and where that can be connected to other applications.

Vorlon uses AI to analyze and map all the API communication it monitors and translate it into human-readable language. This helps users get a summary of their third-party apps. Vorlon also provides an AI chatbot to let businesses search for information in human natural language about any security threats or issues they have. Khayat said Vorlon doesn’t send chatbot data anywhere; instead, it sends user queries to its own databases, and the chatbot will return the information from the startup’s database.

“In many cases, organizations won’t find out about a vendor’s data breach until months after the fact,” said Steve Loughlin, Partner at Accel, in a statement. “Vorlon’s ability to reduce the timeline between threat detection and remediation to minutes is what makes this technology so powerful.”

Vorlon counts Hubspot, SafeBreach and presales engineering platform Vivun among early customers since the launch of its platform in February. The company says it sees significant demand from the healthcare and financial sectors and targets enterprises with at least 1,500 employees.

The Delaware-based startup, with an R&D subsidiary in Tel Aviv, currently has around 22 employees, and plans to increase that number by adding more people to its sales and product R&D teams using the money from its Series A round, which was led by Accel.

The all-equity round saw participation from Shield Capital and cybersecurity angel investors, including Demisto co-founders Slavik Markovich, Rishi Bhargava, Dan Sarel and Guy Rinat, who worked closely with Vorlon’s co-founders at Demisto before Palo Alto Networks acquired it in 2019. Former Exabeam CEO Nir Polak and Fox Corporation CTO Paul Cheesborough are also key Vorlon investors.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Watch: Why Tesla’s big layoffs happened, and what comes next

April 17, 2024 5:38 AM0


Tesla’s layoffs and executive departures took a bite out of its share price this week. The well-known electric vehicle company shed around 10% of its staff, impacting an estimated 14,000 people or more. Two well-known executives also decided it was time to move on.

In response to the news, shares of Tesla lost ground. The company’s value has eroded this year, falling 35% through the end of trading yesterday.

The year has not been kind to Tesla. It missed delivery estimates for the first quarter, has reportedly reduced hours for the production line of its Cybertruck and is seeing rivals in China stack market share with low-priced EVs. Tesla, in other words, helped foster the global electric vehicle market but is losing some of its primacy in that same market.

Which may be a bigger risk than it seems. The global auto market is large, complicated and replete with different manufacturers and badges competing for share. What’s the risk of being a bit smaller than expected? For Tesla, a lot. The company is currently valued at a price/sales multiple of 6.2x, per Yahoo Finance. GM? It’s worth 0.34x. Ford? An even more modest 0.29x.

In human terms, for every dollar of car that Tesla sells, it generates far more company worth than its rivals. Why? Because many investors are betting that Tesla is not only going to keep growing its EV business that became a profit center in recent years, but also that its work in energy, energy storage and related industries will generate a company that is far larger, and more valuable over time. If Tesla was to trade at a GM or Ford-style revenue multiple, it would erase most of its worth.

And with price cuts, falling deliveries, increasingly sophisticated competition and now mass layoffs, Tesla is starting to look more like a traditional company than a company that can avoid traditional business rules and trade like its peers. Hit play, let’s chat!


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Robotic Automations

Big Tech's ad transparency tools are still woeful, Mozilla research report finds | TechCrunch

April 16, 2024 9:54 AM0


Efforts by tech giants to be more transparent about the ads they run are — at very best — still a work in progress, according to a report looking at ads transparency tools. The report comes about a half year since the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) rules for larger platforms came into force, mandating companies offer a searchable public ads library. Companies include: Apple, Google, Meta, TikTok and X.

In some cases, notably (but not exclusively) X’s, the level of ad transparency provided by the platform scores close to zero on all fronts, with available tools lacking vital data and functionality per the external assessment, which was conducted by free software maker Mozilla working with CheckFirst, a Finland-based disinformation research company.

The report’s top-line conclusion is that platforms’ ad oversight tools are falling short of delivering the intended transparency and democratic accountability in a critical year for elections globally.

“We find a huge variation among the platforms, but one thing is true across all of them: none is a fully-functional ad repository and none will provide researchers and civil society groups with the tools and data they need to effectively monitor the impact of VLOs [very large online platforms and search engines] on Europe’s upcoming elections,” the report authors write, naming AliExpress and X as the worst examples of those tech giants that do provide an ads library (Amazon has avoided providing one so far), before adding in a line that damns with faint praise: “[W]e struggle to tell you which one is best.”

Europe’s Digital Services Act applies in full from tomorrow — here’s what you need to know

A lack of critical data and effective tools to study platforms means independent researchers still face huge barriers when it comes to producing data-driven insights on the impacts of Big Tech. Without robust public interest research, how can the world’s wealthiest companies be held to account for business models that frequently rely on amping up user engagement to juice more ad views?

Just think of the discussion around social media use and teens’ mental health, as one example. Ads transparency tools that enabled external researchers to study the types of paid messaging targeting young people across different platforms could help shine a light on any problematic dynamics and platform incentives. But adtech giants evidently aren’t making this kind of research easy.

Still, the bald fact of 11 of the world’s largest tech companies providing ad repositories — most doing so as a direct result of the EU regulation — is “in itself” a basic form of progress, as the research authors see it. Even as none of the tools they’re offering are properly enabling researchers yet in their view.  

The pan-EU DSA provides for penalties of up to 6% of global annual turnover for compliance failures. So enforcement on poor performance could lead to hefty fines down the line. But despite this dialed-up regulatory risk, the report suggests tech giants aren’t exactly falling over themselves to shine a clarifying spotlight on a targeted messaging that funnels direct revenue into their coffers.

Compliance theater

Indeed, no platform got a “ready for action” green light assessment from Mozilla and CheckFirst. Meta, which has been operating an ads library for longest, has among the most mature offering in their view, yet its ads library still has “big gaps in data and functionality,” per the report. Likewise, Apple, LinkedIn and TikTok all have similar failings. Alphabet (Google), Booking.com and Pinterest are assessed as offering an even worse “bare minimum” effort.

Alongside the aforementioned “utter disappointment” of AliExpress and X, the report gives the same overall red rating to Bing, SnapChat and Zalando, saying their transparency tools also lack vital data and functionality.

Compliance theater is a concept familiar to EU privacy watchers when it comes to the design of consent flows for collecting permission from web users to track and profile their online activity for mircotargeted advertising. Judging by the report findings, something similar may be playing out in platforms’ early responses to DSA demands for ads transparency. Many appear to be seeing how little they can get away with, perhaps with the aim of testing how the Commission, which oversees compliance, responds; or just because they prefer to direct more of their resources into generating revenue than addressing legal compliance.

Around a dozen tech giants that offer very large platforms and/or search engines, which the report refers to as VLOs, face the strictest level of DSA regulation — including the requirement to publish an ads library. Mozilla and CheckFirst stress-tested ad libraries associated with the following e-commerce, social networking and marketplace platforms between December 2023 and January 2024: AliExpress, Alphabet (Google Search and YouTube), Apple App Store, Bing, Booking.com, LinkedIn, Meta (Facebook and Instagram), Pinterest, SnapChat, TikTok, X and Zalando — conducting independent tests aimed at assessing key issues like the tools’ functionality and reliability.

“We examine factors such as the depth of information provided regarding the advertisement and its advertiser, the targeting criteria employed, and the ad’s reach. Additionally, we evaluate the completeness of the ad repository, the availability of historical data, and the accessibility, consistency, and documentation of the tools provided,” the authors wrote, noting also that most (but not all) platforms provide a separate web-based ad repository and an API — hence they assessed these discrete implementations individually.

“Major gaps”

They do note there has been some developments since they carried out their transparency tools tests. The study is therefore only a snapshot of where things stood about half a year after the late August compliance deadline for VLOs.

They also haven’t assessed some deeper elements, such as the accuracy of information platforms provide, i.e. about who is paying for ads. Influencer or branded content is also not assessed. But the tests allow analysis of the pace of progress since compliance day, as well as enabling basic comparisons between platform offerings and shortcomings.

TikTok expands research API to Europe and launches ads transparency library

Among several key findings in the report are concerns related to accuracy issues and missing data. “Our accuracy testing found many cases where ads in the user interface were not found in the ad repository,” they note, adding: “This can limit the usefulness and trustworthiness of the repositories as a transparency tool.”

“We feel there are major gaps between the spirit of the EU regulation and these repositories in practice, which are supposed to ‘facilitate supervision and research into emerging risks brought about by the distribution of advertising online’,” the report authors conclude, pointing out that in the case of X, for example, it only provides a CSV file for download, which they also found to be “curiously slow.” (They argue that this type of historical access is “only useful if you already know everything about the ad you’re searching for,” suggesting that X, under divisive billionaire owner Elon Musk, is essentially attempting to kneecap independent research, even as he claims to respect the law.)

The social network formerly known as Twitter was the first platform to be formally investigated by the EU for suspected breaches of the DSA, including in the area of data access for researchers. That probe, which was opened in December, remains ongoing. But if DSA breaches are confirmed, X is positioned first in line to receive a hefty fine.

Also highlighting how platforms are kicking against the EU’s transparency mandate, at the time the report was compiled, Amazon was not offering an ad library at all — after being granted a temporary exemption from the obligation by an EU court last fall.

A higher court subsequently reversed that decision, late last month, so the e-commerce giant will have to put its promotional laundry on the line for external perusal after all. But, as the report suggests, it’s all too easy for platforms to inject intentional friction into transparency tools, whether by restrictive design or sloppy implementation or both. This undermines researchers’ ability to interrogate technosocial impacts and ad-driven business models, by making finding, sorting and filtering data about ads they’ve monetized much harder than it should be.

The report contains a series of recommendations to drive transparency on platforms, including design changes tech giants could implement, such as making ad libraries public without requiring a login; allowing unrestricted browsing; and offering enhanced search functionalities such as supporting searches by keywords, advertiser, country and date range and allowing filtering and ordering of results, to name a few of the suggested changes.

They also suggests steps for enforcers, such as developing guidelines for ads transparency that set minimum standards for what platforms must deliver in web repositories and APIs; and requiring the use of standardized APIs for research access to boost usability and enable cross-platform research.

Amazon will have to publish an ads library in EU after all


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

TechCrunch Space: True Anomaly and Rocket Lab will make big moves on orbit (literally) | TechCrunch

April 16, 2024 3:49 AM0


Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch Space. I hope everyone had a great time at Space Symposium! Hopefully I’ll see you there next year.

Want to reach out with a tip? Email Aria at [email protected] or send me a message on Signal at 512-937-3988. You also can send a note to the whole TechCrunch crew at [email protected]. For more secure communications, click here to contact us, which includes SecureDrop instructions and links to encrypted messaging apps.

Story of the week

The Space Force has contracted out its next “responsive space” mission, and this one is a doozy. The two awardees, Rocket Lab and startup True Anomaly, will each build and launch spacecraft that will conduct rendezvous and proximity operations on orbit.

In the Space Force’s words: “The vendors will exercise a realistic threat response scenario in an on-orbit space domain awareness demonstration called Victus Haze.”

The two companies will have to operate under intentionally tight time frames, too — the first responsive space mission from Firefly Aerospace and Millennium Space set new records in terms of launch readiness — so we’ll definitely follow this mission closely when it launches next year.

Image Credits: Sam Toms and Simon Moffatt

Scoop of the week

Confidential financial statements from SpaceX for 2018 and 2019 capture an early glimpse at the degree to which the company is likely dependent on its Starlink business unit, and bringing the Starship rocket online, to become cash flow positive.

While the comprehensive balance sheets are five years old, they provide an intimate look inside the operations of arguably one of the most important, and secretive, private companies in the U.S.

Image Credits: Michael Gonzalez / Getty Images

What we’re reading

I was very interested to see this reporting from Bloomberg on Starlink’s profitability — or not. It’s a really nice complement to my scoop above: Taken together, the two stories tell a tale about the importance of Starlink as a revenue-driver for the company’s longer term, and considerably ambitious, plans to colonize Mars.

How many is too many? Starlink dishes in a line on a Celebrity Cruises ship. Image Credits: Celebrity Cruises

This week in space history

Houston, we have a problem…

This week’s space history segment is dedicated to the Apollo 13 mission, which launched on April 11 and returned to Earth on April 17. The three-person crew was destined for the moon, but those plans were swiftly put to an end when an oxygen tank in the service module ruptured two days after launch.

The prime recovery ship for the Apollo 13 mission hoists the Command Module aboard the ship. Image Credits: NASA / Getty Images


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Big Tech companies form new consortium to allay fears of AI job takeovers | TechCrunch

April 13, 2024 10:43 AM0


AI might not be coming for all jobs, but it might be coming for some. 

UPS’s largest layoff in its 116-year history was the result of, in part, new technologies, including AI, CEO Carol Tomé said during an earnings call in February. Meanwhile, IBM plans to pause hiring for roles it thinks could soon be automated by AI, CEO Arvind Krishna told Bloomberg last year.

Workers aren’t optimistic about the future. In a recent survey from McKinsey, 25% of business professionals said that they expect their employer to lay off staff as a result of AI adoption. And, well, their pessimism isn’t misplaced. According to one estimate, around 4,000 workers have lost their jobs to AI since May. And in a poll from Beautiful.ai, which makes AI-powered presentation software, nearly half of managers said that they’re hoping to replace workers with AI.

But a cohort of Big Tech vendors and consultancies — called the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium (ITC) — aims to push back against the notion that AI will lead to job losses, citing the need for re-skilling and upskilling within the information and communication technology (ICT) industry specifically.

The ITC is being led by Cisco with support from Google, Microsoft, IBM (conspicuously), Intel, SAP and Accenture. The ITC’s mandate is to explore AI’s impact on jobs while enabling people to find AI-related training programs and connecting businesses to “skilled and job-ready” workers, a spokesperson told TechCrunch in a briefing.

“The ITC’s unique approach will research and evaluate the impact of AI on specific job roles, including skills and tasks, and recommend training for an AI-enabled ICT workforce,” the spokesperson said. “Consortium members and advisers share a common perspective that a greater sense of urgency is required to understand the impact of AI on key job roles within the ICT Industry.”

In the first phase of its work, the ITC will evaluate the impact of AI on 56 ICT job roles and provide training recommendations for the roles affected. These 56 roles, which the ITC hasn’t disclosed yet, were selected for their “strategic significance” in the broader ICT ecosystem and AI’s impact on the tasks required to perform the roles, the spokesperson said, as well as roles that offer “promising entry points” for low-level workers.

“These job roles include 80% of the top 45 ICT job titles garnering the highest volume of job postings for the period February 2023–2024 in the U.S. and five of the largest European countries by ICT workforce numbers (France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands),” the spokesperson said. “Collectively, these countries account for a significant segment of the ICT sector, with a combined total of 10 million ICT workers.”

If the goal is to allay fears of a mass AI threatening of livelihoods, tech incumbents will need to deliver a lot more than vague promises and reports.

The ITC intends to publish its findings in a report this summer. And, beyond that, it hasn’t quite figured out a roadmap.

“The Consortium will determine its ‘phase 2’ scope in mid-2024,” the spokesperson said. “As we progress towards phase 2, the Consortium may consider extending invitations to other organizations and institutions to join our collaborative efforts in supporting the success of an AI-enabled ICT workforce.”

And therein lies the problem with industry consortiums like this.

If the goal is to allay fears of a mass AI threatening of livelihoods, tech incumbents will need to deliver a lot more than vague promises and reports. IBM has pledged to skill 2 million people in AI by 2030; Intel has said it’ll upskill over 30 million with AI in the same timeframe.

“Consortium members have established forward-thinking goals with skills development and training programs to positively impact over 95 million individuals around the world over the next 10 years,” the spokesperson said.

Yet it’s not clear how many AI roles will be available then.

According to a recent analysis by Lightcast, a labor market analytics firm, the demand for AI roles is decreasing, not increasing. In 2022, AI-related positions made up 2% of all job postings in the U.S. In 2023, that figure dipped to 1.6%. 

“Consortium members commit to developing worker pathways particularly in job sectors that will increasingly integrate artificial intelligence technology,” the spokesperson said. “It’s a voluntary and transparent effort across companies to assess the impact and identify paths for upskilling and reskilling of technology roles most likely to be impacted by AI … We intend for this work to produce real, tangible recommendations that will address business and worker needs.”

I’ll reserve some judgment until we see those “real, tangible” recommendations. But I’d hope that, whatever form they take, they’re accompanied by courses of action — or any action, really. Big Tech has big promises to keep, particularly where it concerns the future of work and the tech industry’s role in shaping it.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

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