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LinkedIn is the Twitter/X rival no one is talking about | TechCrunch

May 1, 2024 8:37 PM0


Since Elon Musk acquired Twitter in the fall of 2022, the market for Twitter alternatives has been saturated with would-be competitors ranging from smaller startups to open source apps to well-funded efforts like Threads from Instagram. But there’s one overlooked Twitter/X alternative that’s been growing right under our collective noses: LinkedIn. As of March, LinkedIn’s web traffic was up 10.6% year-over-year compared with a decline of 15.2% for X, according to traffic analytics data from digital intelligence platform SimilarWeb.

Compared with November 2022 — or right after Musk took over Twitter — X’s web traffic has declined by 10%, while LinkedIn’s has grown 18%.

In March, Twitter/X saw 727.6 million (deduplicated) unique visitors worldwide, a decline of 7.5% year-over-year. LinkedIn had a much smaller total — 269.2 million — but that figure was up 11.1% year-over-year, Similarweb said.

In addition, the firm found that worldwide Android app usage of LinkedIn was up 14% since November 2022 as of March, while X had dropped by 20%.

Another source for app data, Appfigures, doesn’t see the same trend playing out across mobile, however. Its data indicates that LinkedIn’s monthly downloads were up 10% year-over-year, while X’s were down by 24% — but Appfigures attributes this decline to the rebranding of Twitter to X, not other consumer behavior. LinkedIn’s average downloads have stayed consistent before and after the Musk Twitter takeover, the firm said.

Still, given that people work at their desktops and laptops during the day, it makes sense that some business professionals could have shifted a portion of their web usage of X over to LinkedIn as a result of Twitter’s transition.

Now, with features like games (launched today) and short-form videos coming to LinkedIn, it’s clear that the social network’s owner, Microsoft, is hoping to capture the attention and interest of those users who used to network via Twitter — and particularly the younger Gen Z crowd.

The strategy appears to be working. As Appfigures also points out, LinkedIn’s mobile app is earning more than X and Snapchat combined across both iOS and Android.

That’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, given that LinkedIn’s subscriptions are higher priced, starting at $29.99/month and going up to as much as $69.99/month on the app stores. X’s monthly subscriptions instead range from $4 to $22, though users can opt to pay for higher-priced annual subscriptions, as well. Snapchat Plus, meanwhile, is only $3.99 per month or $29.99 per year.

Image Credits: Appfigures

In other words, LinkedIn doesn’t have to sell as many subscriptions to boost its revenue — and it hasn’t had trouble outcompeting X or Snapchat on mobile before.

However, Appfigures notes that LinkedIn’s mobile app revenue has been rapidly growing from $20 million in Q1 2021 to $91 million in Q1 2023. It has now hit its biggest quarter ever, at $119 million in app revenue as of Q1 2024.

By comparison, X and Snapchat saw $23 million and $67 million, respectively, in the first quarter, totaling $90 million combined — or lower than LinkedIn.

LinkedIn launches gaming: 3 logic puzzles aimed at extending time spent on its networking platform


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xAI, Elon Musk’s OpenAI rival, is closing on $6B in funding and X, his social network, is already one of its shareholders | TechCrunch

April 26, 2024 10:29 AM0


xAI, Elon Musk’s 10-month-old competitor to the AI phenom OpenAI, is raising $6 billion on a pre-money valuation of $18 billion, according to one trusted source close to the deal. The deal – which would give investors one quarter of the company –  is expected to close in the next few weeks unless the terms of the deal change.

The deal terms have changed once already. As of last weekend, Jared Birchall, who heads Musk’s family office, was telling prospective investors that xAI was raising $3 billion at a $15 billion pre-money valuation. Given the number of investors clamoring to get into the deal, those numbers were quickly adjusted. 

Says our source, “We all received an email that basically said, ‘It’s now $6B on $18B, and don’t complain because a lot of other people want in.”

Investors who’ve been lobbying to get into the deal for months hardly minded. Sequoia Capital and Future Ventures, the venture fund co-founded by Musk’s longtime friend Steve Jurvetson, are participating in the round.

Other participants are likely to include Valor Equity Partners and Gigafund, whose founders are also part of the inner circle of Musk, who famously blends the personal and the private. (Outreach to these investors went unreturned; xAI does not have a press function.)

Jurvetson sits on the board of SpaceX and was a director at Tesla until 2020. Gigafund co-founder Luke Nosek, who previously co-founded Founders Fund with investor Peter Thiel, was the first venture investor to write a check to SpaceX and has sat on its board since. Valor founder Antonio Gracias was among the earliest investors in Tesla; like Jurveston, he’s a former Tesla director and is also on the board of SpaceX.

Our source said it’s not entirely clear to every other investor who is in the deal because of the way the commitments were garnered. “It’s a Zoom call and it’s just you and Elon and Jared [on the other side] at a table with some engineers.”

The pitch, says this individual, is captivating.

xAI’s marketing literature already makes clear that the outfit’s ambition is to connect the digital and physical worlds, but it may not be widely understood that Musk plans to do this by pulling in data from each of his companies, which include Tesla, SpaceX, his tunneling outfit Boring Company, and Neuralink, which develops computer interfaces that can be implanted in human brains.

Of course, another of Musk’s companies is X. The social media platform has already incorporated xAI’s months-old chatbot, Grok, into the platform as a paid add-on.

It’s just one piece of what Musk tells investors will become a sprawling virtual cycle. With Grok, for example, X is both a customer and provides Grok with massive distribution. Eventually (goes the pitch), Grok will be fed data from Musk’s other companies, helping it to master the physical world in potentially endless ways, starting with truly self-driving cars.

Another likely beneficiary would be Tesla’s humanoid robot, Optimus. Today the Tesla robot is still in the lab, but Musk told analysts on a call earlier this week that Optimus will be able to perform tasks in Tesla’s factories by the end of this year. Even if that timeline proves ambitious, these slick assistants may be able to do more — and faster than previously imagined — if Musk’s overarching vision plays out.

In the meantime, the most immediate beneficiary of xAI’s burgeoning momentum may be X itself. Though the platform has become something of a toxic cesspool in the 1.5 years since Musk bought it and subsequently lost much of its value, Musk had already seen to it that X owns a stake in xAI, so it will benefit from whatever upside the AI outfit sees.

What it all means for OpenAI — which became the fastest growing startup in history last year —  is an open question. Musk has had OpenAI in his crosshairs since the outfit’s surge began, following the release of its ChatGPT chatbot.

Musk cofounded OpenAI in 2015 and left its board in 2018 over disagreements about the direction of the outfit, which began life as a nonprofit and later evolved into a for-profit entity. Musk has since publicly harangued OpenAI cofounder Sam Altman and poked fun at the brand, proposing that it instead call itself ClosedAI.

Last month, when Musk open sourced the architecture of xAI’s earliest chatbot “Grok-1,” meaning that anyone can now download and alter it, the move was another part of his ongoing campaign to distinguish his efforts from OpenAI, which has not shared its secret sauce with the world, and which Musk is now suing.




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Exclusive: Eric Schmidt-backed Augment, a GitHub Copilot rival, launches out of stealth with $252M

April 25, 2024 2:16 AM0


AI is supercharging coding — and developers are embracing it.

In a recent StackOverflow poll, 44% of software engineers said that they use AI tools as part of their development processes now and 26% plan to soon. Gartner estimates that over half of organizations are currently piloting or have already deployed AI-driven coding assistants, and that 75% of developers will use coding assistants in some form by 2028.

Ex-Microsoft software developer Igor Ostrovsky believes that soon, there won’t be a developer who doesn’t use AI in their workflows. “Software engineering remains a difficult and all-too-often tedious and frustrating job, particularly at scale,” he told TechCrunch. “AI can improve software quality, team productivity and help restore the joy of programming.”

So Ostrovsky decided to build the AI-powered coding platform that he himself would want to use.

That platform is Augment, and on Wednesday it emerged from stealth with $252 million in funding at a near-unicorn ($977 million) post-money valuation. With investments from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and VCs including Index Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Innovation Endeavors and Meritech Capital, Augment aims to shake up the still-nascent market for generative AI coding technologies.

“Most companies are dissatisfied with the programs they produce and consume; software is too often fragile, complex and expensive to maintain with development teams bogged down with long backlogs for feature requests, bug fixes, security patches, integration requests, migrations and upgrades,” Ostrovsky said. “Augment has both the best team and recipe for empowering programmers and their organizations to deliver high-quality software quicker.”

Ostrovsky spent nearly seven years at Microsoft before joining Pure Storage, a startup developing flash data storage hardware and software products, as a founding engineer. While at Microsoft, Ostrovsky worked on components of Midori, a next-generation operating system the company never released but whose concepts have made their way into other Microsoft projects over the last decade.

In 2022, Ostrovsky and Guy Gur-Ari, previously an AI research scientist at Google, teamed up to create Augment’s MVP. To fill out the startup’s executive ranks, Ostrovsky and Gur-Ari brought on Scott Dietzen, ex-CEO of Pure Storage, and Dion Almaer, formerly a Google engineering director and a VP of engineering at Shopify.

Augment remains a strangely hush-hush operation.

In our conversation, Ostrovsky wasn’t willing to say much about the user experience or even the generative AI models driving Augment’s features (whatever they may be) — save that Augment is using fine-tuned “industry-leading” open models of some sort.

He did say how Augment plans to make money: standard software-as-a-service subscriptions. Pricing and other details will be revealed later this year, Ostrovsky added, closer to Augment’s planned GA release.

“Our funding provides many years of runway to continue to build what we believe to be the best team in enterprise AI,” he said. “We’re accelerating product development and building out Augment’s product, engineering and go-to-market functions as the company gears up for rapid growth.”

Rapid growth is perhaps the best shot Augment has at making waves in an increasingly cutthroat industry.

Practically every tech giant offers its own version of an AI coding assistant. Microsoft has GitHub Copilot, which is by far the firmest entrenched with over 1.3 million paying individual and 50,000 enterprise customers as of February. Amazon has AWS’ CodeWhisperer. And Google has Gemini Code Assist, recently rebranded from Duet AI for Developers.

Elsewhere, there’s a torrent of coding assistant startups: Magic, Tabnine, Codegen, Refact, TabbyML, Sweep, Laredo and Cognition (which reportedly just raised $175 million), to name a few. Harness and JetBrains, which developed the Kotlin programming language, recently released their own. So did Sentry (albeit with more of a cybersecurity bent). 

Can they all — plus Augment now — do business harmoniously together? It seems unlikely. Eye-watering compute costs alone make the AI coding assistant business a challenging one to maintain. Overruns related to training and serving models forced generative AI coding startup Kite to shut down in December 2022. Even Copilot loses money, to the tune of around $20 to $80 a month per user, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Ostrovsky implies that there’s momentum behind Augment already; he claims that “hundreds” of software developers across “dozens” of companies including payment startup Keeta (which is also Eric Schmidt-backed) are using Augment in early access. But will the uptake sustain? That’s the million-dollar question, indeed.

I also wonder if Augment has made any steps toward solving the technical setbacks plaguing code-generating AI, particularly around vulnerabilities.

An analysis by GitClear, the developer of the code analytics tool of the same name, found that coding assistants are resulting in more mistaken code being pushed to codebases, creating headaches for software maintainers. Security researchers have warned that generative coding tools tools can amplify existing bugs and exploits in projects. And Stanford researchers have found that developers who accept code recommendations from AI assistants tend to produce less secure code.

Then there’s copyright to worry about.

Augment’s models were undoubtedly trained on publicly available data, like all generative AI models — some of which may’ve been copyrighted or under a restrictive license. Some vendors have argued that fair use doctrine shields them from copyright claims while at the same time rolling out tools to mitigate potential infringement. But that hasn’t stopped coders from filing class action lawsuits over what they allege are open licensing and IP violations.

To all this, Ostrovsky says: “Current AI coding assistants don’t adequately understand the programmer’s intent, improve software quality nor facilitate team productivity, and they don’t properly protect intellectual property. Augment’s engineering team boasts deep AI and systems expertise. We’re poised to bring AI coding assistance innovations to developers and software teams.”

Augment, which is based in Palo Alto, has around 50 employees; Ostrovsky expects that number to double by the end of the year.


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Substack rival Ghost confirms it will join the fediverse in 2024 | TechCrunch

April 23, 2024 12:22 AM0


Ghost, an open-source rival to Substack’s newsletter platform, has confirmed it will this year officially join the fediverse — or the open social network of interconnected servers that includes apps like Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Flipboard and, more recently, Instagram Threads, among others. Last week, the company teased its plans by surveying its users about how they may want federation to work.

Founder John O’Nolan had explained in a post on Threads that there are many potential ways that Ghost could leverage federation in its software, but wanted to know how users would expect things to work.

According to some replies, the hope was that Ghost’s blog and newsletter authors would become fediverse accounts, while each of their posts would be federated to the fediverse. This would allow users to follow Ghost’s authors from their preferred app, as well as like and reply to their posts from the fediverse. These replies could then be posted back on the author’s site as a blog comment. Ghost said it expects to add tens of millions of users to the fediverse when integration is completed. In total, the fediverse is expected to reach 170 to 200 million users by this summer, when including Instagram Threads in the total.

This setup is similar to how WordPress federated with ActivityPub, the protocol powering the fediverse, after acquiring an ActivityPub blog plug-in. When enabled, WordPress blogs can be followed by people on apps like Mastodon and others in the fediverse and then receive replies as comments on their own sites.

Ghost’s announcement last week set off a flurry of activity, including outreach from Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput who offered to help out with the ActivityPub integration.

On Monday, Ghost officially confirmed its plans to federate its service in 2024 and detailed how it would work.

The company explained that Ghost publishers would “soon” be able to follow, like, and interact with one another in the same way as they normally would on a social network, but from their own website. Plus, they’ll be able to follow, like, and interact with users on other federated services like Mastodon, Threads, Flipboard, Buttondown, WriteFreely, WordPress, PeerTube, Pixelfed, and others.

Meanwhile, an ActivityPub-powered feed will be built into Ghost so users can follow the people, publications, and topics of interest to them from around the web. They’ll also be able to subscribe to these sites via ActivityPub, in addition to RSS. And when Ghosts’ authors publish, their posts will appear on networks like Mastodon and others.

Ghost’s announcement detailed the benefits of an ActivityPub integration, noting that each platform could design how it wants to present its content while still being compatible with other services. Readers will also have more choices in how they want to subscribe to an author’s content — via email subscriptions, RSS, or ActivityPub. Gated access for sites with paid subscriptions can also be managed through ActivityPub, but Ghost hasn’t yet shared exactly how this aspect would work, only that it will do its best to “create a seamless experience.”

“And, because this technology is all open, you remain in full control of your subscribers,” the blog post states. “When you publish a new piece online, your distribution comes from your own website rather than needing to depend on third parties.”

Ghost has generated increased interest in recent months as more high-profile authors have made the switch.

Notably, Casey Newton, formerly of The Verge, left Substack and migrated to Ghost instead over concerns about how Substack moderated — or rather didn’t moderate — some of the content on its platform. Garbage Day left as well. Other popular publishers include 404 Media, Buffer, Kickstarter, David Sirota’s The Lever, and Tangle, to name a few.


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Open source Substack rival Ghost may join the fediverse | TechCrunch

April 16, 2024 3:17 AM0


Ghost, the open source alternative to Substack’s newsletter platform, is considering joining the fediverse, the social network of interconnected servers that includes apps like Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Flipboard and, more recently, Instagram Threads, among others. According to a post from Ghost founder John O’Nolan, the company — which is structured as a nonprofit — is considering federating Ghost over ActivityPub, the social networking protocol that powers the fediverse.

O’Nolan said that the most requested feature over the past few years has been to federate his software. “It seems like there are many potential ways to do it. Curious to hear how you would want it to work?” he asked in a post on Threads, which was syndicated to Mastodon via Threads’ own integration with ActivityPub.

The survey asks users if they use any ActivityPub platforms like Mastodon or Threads, and how they would expect ActivityPub functionality to work in Ghost, if it were to be added. It also asks how federation would personally benefit Ghost users. It invites survey respondents to optionally provide an email address if they want to be contacted for more input in the future, as well.

Image Credits: Ghost

While the launch of a survey isn’t necessarily a commitment to federating Ghost, it is another signal pointing to the broader reshaping of the web that’s now underway.

Following Twitter’s acquisition by billionaire Elon Musk, online users have experienced the downsides of putting their trust in centralized platforms: With a shift in ownership, Twitter was overhauled to be a different type of platform called X, with revised ethics and long-term ambitions. (Musk wants X to be an “everything” app for transactions, creator content, video, shopping and more and takes a more hands-off role in terms of content moderation.)

For those unhappy with Musk’s changes, having a portable social networking identity suddenly seemed like an idea that had more value. That is, if you don’t like the way your Mastodon server (or other federated service) is run, you can pick up your profile and move it elsewhere, followers in tow.

With Ghost, however, the idea could be to federate the accounts of the writers who use Ghost to publish their content. Their posts, which would also be published on the web and to their newsletter subscribers, could also exist in the fediverse, where others could read, like and reply to the post from their preferred app. These replies could also potentially syndicate back to Ghost, where they could exist as comments.

Assuming Ghost went this route, it would be similar to how WordPress federated with ActivityPub after the acquisition of an ActivityPub blog plug-in. When enabled, WordPress blogs can be followed by people on apps like Mastodon and others in the fediverse and then receive replies as comments on their own sites.

After seeing O’Nolan’s post, Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput reached out to help with the ActivityPub integration, which O’Nolan accepted.

Ghost has gained attention as a Substack rival in recent months for the same reason that some have fled X: People disagree about how platforms should be moderated. Substack has taken to promoting free speech, as Musk does on X, but that’s also led to the platform being used by pro-Nazi publications, as detailed by The Atlantic late last year.

As a result, one of Substack’s more high-profile writers, Casey Newton, formerly of The Verge, left Substack and migrated to Ghost instead.

“I’m not aware of any major U.S. consumer internet platform that does not explicitly ban praise for Nazi hate speech, much less one that welcomes them to set up shop and start selling subscriptions,” Newton wrote at the time.

In addition to Newton, other notable Ghost users include 404 Media, Buffer, Kickstarter, David Sirota’s The Lever and Tangle, to name a few.

Today, Ghost has been installed over 3 million times, which would make for a healthy addition to the wider fediverse and its roughly 13+ million total users, around 1.5 million of which are active monthly. (This figure doesn’t include Threads’ 130+ million monthly active users as it’s not fully integrated with ActivityPub as of yet.)

How Twitter’s descent into chaos is paving the way for a new web


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Databricks' GPT rival and who's investing in 'underdog' founders | TechCrunch

April 13, 2024 6:55 AM0


Hello, and welcome to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Friday episode, in which we dig through the most critical stories and themes from the week.

As the week comes to a close, we’re also shutting the book on the trial of former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, the erstwhile crypto baron who is heading to prison for 25 years. But while the SBF news was a big deal, there was so very much more to cover on today’s news roundup episode of Equity.

With Kirsten Korosec, Mary Ann Azevedo and Alex Wilhelm aboard this week, the crew dug into Robinhood’s new credit card and what it can tell us about the strategy of major tech companies, Fisker’s latest woes and even Databricks’ new AI model that it spent $10 million to spin up.

But that wasn’t enough. We also dug into two companies building startups focused around kids. One wants to help tots learn how to produce music, while the other is working to reduce waste and help parents care for their kids on a budget. Then, to wrap up, a look at just who unicorn founders really are, and a new $100 million fund to back climate tech.

Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast and posts every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and you can subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.

For the full interview transcript, for those who prefer reading over listening, read on, or check out our full archive of episodes over at Simplecast.




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