Airbnb plans to use AI, including its GamePlanner acquisition, to create the ‘ultimate concierge’
In November, Airbnb acquired a stealth AI firm launched by Siri’s co-founder, called GamePlanner.AI. The deal valued the secretive startup at around $200 million, according to reports. Though the hosting company didn’t telegraph its plans for GamePlanner at the time, Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky today shared a high-level
Read moreWaymo recalls and updates robotaxi software after two cars crashed into the same towed truck
Waymo is voluntarily recalling the software that powers its robotaxi fleet after two vehicles crashed into the same towed pickup truck in Phoenix, Arizona, in December. It’s the company’s first recall. Waymo chief safety officer Mauricio Peña described the crashes as “minor” in a blog post, and said neither vehicle
Read moreAirbnb is making progress to get rid of those hated cleaning fees
Airbnb is slowly killing the cleaning fee as it aims for more transparent pricing. Since early last year, when the company started showing guests all-inclusive pricing when booking a property, almost 300,000 listings have removed or lowered cleaning fees, Airbnb said in its earnings report today. Now, nearly 40% of
Read moreInstacart lays off 250 employees, or 7% of its workforce, to ‘reshape’ company
Grocery-delivery giant Instacart announced today that it’s laying off around 250 employees, or roughly 7% of its global workforce, as part of a restructuring. Instacart CEO Fidji Simo said in a letter to investors that the layoffs will allow the company to streamline how it operates. The company announced the
Read moreAntithesis raises $47M to launch an automated testing platform for software
Software testing is hard. Even with the right talent in place, it doesn’t always go as planned — particularly when executed at scale. In a 2020 survey from Electric Cloud, 58% of developers blamed software bugs on test infrastructure and process issues — not design defects. The market for software
Read moreThe creator of PyTorch Lightning on the AI hype cycle
The home team chats with William Falcon, an AI researcher and creator of PyTorch Lightning, about developing tooling for the AI ecosystem, open-source contributions, what happens when widely hyped technology needs to scale, and why he’s bullish on experienced developers using AI but not so bullish on new devs doing
Read moreSolana-based DeFi, airdrops propel crypto wallet Phantom’s userbase to new heights
Phantom, a crypto wallet heavily used in the Solana ecosystem, has seen its user base more than triple over the past year. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Read moreChatGPT will now remember — and forget — things you tell it to
You’ll soon be able to tell ChatGPT to forget things — or remember specific things in future conversations. Today, as part of a test, OpenAI began rolling out new “memory” controls for a small portion of ChatGPT free and paid users, with a broader rollout to follow at some unspecified
Read moreFlipboard just brought over 1,000 of its social magazines to Mastodon and the fediverse
The fediverse just got a little bigger today as Flipboard has now launched over 1,000 of its social magazines across the decentralized social web, allowing its curators and publishers to reach new audiences. The news follows the magazine app’s December announcement that it would begin to integrate directly with the
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