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| Here's a glance at today's Tech briefing: - Slack CEO Lidiane Jones will replace Bumble boss Whitney Wolfe Herd.
- Elon Musk is integrating his AI startup with X.
- Apple has pledged to fix a battery drain issue affecting Apple Watches.
- Mobility startup Revel is shutting down its shared electric-moped business.
- Attendees at Yuga Labs' NFT event have complained of eye injuries.
Beth
p/beth-duckett | |
| 1 | Bumble co-founder Whitney Wolfe Herd is stepping down as CEO early next year, passing on the role to Slack CEO Lidiane Jones. Jones, Slack's CEO since December, will take over from Wolfe Herd on Jan. 2, while Wolfe Herd will stay on as Bumble's executive chair. More: - Wolfe Herd founded dating app Bumble in 2014 following a contentious exit from rival service Tinder, which she also co-founded.
- Bumble's app, known for letting women make the first move, now helps users also find friends and professional connections.
- With a portfolio that includes Friends, Badoo, Fruitz, and Official, the company went on to raise $2.2B in its 2021 IPO, making Wolfe Herd, then 31, the youngest self-made female billionaire.
Zoom out: - The company now claims more than 3.6 million paying users across its apps.
- Bumble is set to report its latest figures in its Q3 earnings on Tuesday.
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| 2 | | Elon Musk announced plans to merge his AI startup, xAI, with his social media platform X. The news comes after xAI unveiled its first AI model, a bot called Grok, on Friday to select X users, tapping into the booming market for AI-powered chatbots. 
Details: xAI — which is working on AI tools to "assist humanity in its quest for understanding and knowledge" — will now be integrated directly into the X app, Musk said in a post on Sunday. xAI will also launch as a standalone app, he added, though he did not specify a release date, features, or pricing. Zoom out: xAI's first product, Grok, competes with market leaders such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google Bard, and Microsoft Bing AI. The bot, inspired by "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," was introduced as a "very early beta product" on Friday to select X users for testing and will eventually become part of X Premium+, its subscription service that costs $16 per month. According to xAI, Grok is designed to provide witty and occasionally rebellious answers to questions, and it can respond to "spicy questions" that other chatbots might avoid. Musk said Grok bot has a "massive advantage" over other AI models as it has "real-time access" to information on X. | | | |
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| 3 | | Apple has promised to fix a battery drain issue affecting multiple Apple Watch models. Users who updated to watchOS 10.1 are seeing their batteries drain much faster, according to posts on social media and Apple's Support Community. More: - The problem is affecting a range of Apple Watches, from older models like the Watch SE to the latest Apple Watch Ultra 2.
- One user, Martin Cooper, reported a rapid battery drop from 100% to 50% within an hour after updating to WatchOS 10.1.
- Apple has since acknowledged the issue in an internal memo and promised a fix through an upcoming WatchOS update.
- The company partially fixed it with its iOS 17.1 update, which addressed increased power consumption when an Apple Watch with WatchOS 10.1 is connected to an iPhone running iOS 17.
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| 4 | | Mobility startup Revel is ending its shared electric-moped business in New York City and San Francisco. CEO and co-founder Frank Reig told employees in an email that the service "has been strained and ridership isn't what it used to be." More: - Revel, which got its start with electric mopeds, withdrew the service from all other markets last year, leaving only about 3,000 mopeds in operation in NYC and San Francisco.
- Ridership in both cities fell by about 30% year-over-year from peak summer levels, making the service unsustainable, a spokesperson said.
- Revel is now shifting its focus exclusively to its electric ride-hail and EV fast-charging ventures:
- The company is now developing large public fast-charging networks in New York and the Bay Area.
- Its ride-hail service features 500 EVs, including Tesla Model Ys and 3s, and operates in NYC and parts of northern New Jersey.
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| 5 | | More than a dozen attendees of Yuga Labs' NFT event in Hong Kong have come forward with complaints of eye injuries. Bored Ape creator Yuga Labs is now investigating to determine the potential causes of the injuries, with some attendees attributing them to UV exposure from the event's stage lights. More: - Yoga Labs held the Apefest, a celebration of its Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs, on Nov. 3-5.
- Following the event, some attendees complained of vision problems and sunburnt skin. At least one was diagnosed with photokeratitis (also known as "welder's eye") due to UV light exposure.
- Yuga Labs said it's now actively reaching out to individuals to identify the root causes.
- The 15 people it has directly communicated with so far represent less than 1% of the total attendees, the company noted.
Zoom out: - Yuga, which launched its flagship Bored Ape Yacht Club collection in April 2021, also acquired the rights to the popular CryptoPunks NFT project from Larva Labs last year.
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| 6 | | During Apple's Q4 earnings call, CEO Tim Cook said the company is "investing quite a bit" in AI technology but declined to go into detail about its latest generative AI efforts. Customers can expect to see ongoing product advancements driven by AI, Cook said. More: - Apple is going to develop generative AI "responsibly," the CEO added.
- During the call, Cook mentioned the company's existing AI technologies, saying they are "integral to every product we ship."
- These include Personal Voice and Live Voicemail in iOS 17, as well as Crash Detection on the iPhone/Apple Watch and Fall Detection and ECG on the Apple Watch, he said.
- Apple doesn't explicitly label the features as AI. Instead, it's focused on the consumer benefits, even though the underlying technology is still AI and machine learning, Cook said.
- Apple has ramped up its spending on AI technologies to millions of dollars per day, according to The Information.
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 | AI and technology writer | | Beth is an editor and writer of Inside's AI and Tech newsletters, with a career spanning journalism since 2007. She has written for publications including The Arizona Republic and USA Today and authored a book on the solar industry in 2016. Reach her at Beth.Duckett@yahoo.com. | | This newsletter was edited by Eduardo Garcia | |
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