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From TechCrunch
By Haje Jan Kamps
June 21, 2024
Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje‘s weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday.
Elon Musk just convinced Tesla shareholders to approve his $56 billion pay package, making him the highest-paid CEO in history — assuming he can dodge a Delaware judge’s disapproval. And where better to stage this circus than Texas, home of big everything, including egos? Shareholders erupted in applause at Tesla’s Texas gigafactory when the vote results were announced. Meanwhile, Musk juggles more companies than a clown with chainsaws and faces two new lawsuits (being sued just once per week is for wimps). Oh, and forget about any fancy ESG initiatives; those got shot down faster than you can say “corporate responsibility.” Who needs sustainability when you’ve got Elon dancing onstage with 0.7 Twitter’s worth of cash in a suitcase?
It seems Henrik Fisker’s knack for designing cars is only matched by his talent for driving companies into bankruptcy. Despite aiming to be the Apple of EVs (with Magna playing Foxconn), the much-touted Ocean SUV sank faster than the Titanic with software glitches, recalls, and lemon lawsuits galore. Now filing for Chapter 11 in Delaware, Fisker has gone from dreams of revolutionizing the auto industry to just trying not to get stuck with a $500 million bill. This marks Fisker’s second go of bankrupting an eponymous company. Can he make it to three? Stay tuned.
Apple has finally thrown its hat into the AI icon circus, joining the likes of Google and OpenAI in a desperate bid to depict AI with a logo that makes any sense at all. Spoiler alert: They’re as clueless as everyone else. Apple’s new visual for “Intelligence” is essentially a psychedelic circle — wait, no — a lopsided infinity symbol? Actually, it’s New Siri. Or maybe it’s when your phone edges glow like an alien spaceship landing. The real takeaway here? No one knows what AI should look like, but let’s slap on some friendly pastel colors and call it innovation.
Meanwhile, Ilya Sutskever, the AI brainiac who last month decided OpenAI wasn’t exciting enough anymore, has started his own shindig called Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI) with a couple of other ex-OpenAI pals. After a dramatic exit from OpenAI (presumably over how to avoid Skynet taking over), Sutskever is doubling down on making sure super-smart AI doesn’t become our overlord anytime soon. SSI’s mission? To balance mind-blowing AI advancements with safety measures so we don’t end up starring in our very own “Black Mirror” episode.
Meet the dynamic duo who seem to have skipped their quarter-life crisis and went straight to swimming in cash. Edward Tian and Alex Cui, founders of GPTZero, are living proof that high school friendships can lead to multimillion-dollar ventures. In just a year and a half, they’ve turned their AI detection startup into a moneymaking machine that’s outpacing your favorite viral app. With $10 million freshly bagged from eager VCs who couldn’t wait for an official raise, these guys are on track to create an internet where we can still tell if your essay was written by you or ChatGPT’s stoned-beyond-words cousin named Cheech.
Every week, there’s always a few stories I want to share with you that somehow don’t fit into the categories above. It’d be a shame if you missed ’em, so here’s a random grab bag of goodies for ya:
Share:
Sesame, the startup behind the viral virtual assistant Maya, releases its base AI model
AI company Sesame has released the base model that powers Maya, the impressively realistic voice assistant. The model, which is 1 billion parameters in size (“parameters” referring to individual components of the model), is under an Apache 2.0 license, meaning it can be used commercially with few restrictions. Called CSM-1B, the model generates “RVQ audio codes” from text and audio inputs, according to Sesame’s description on the AI dev platform Hugging Face. RVQ refers to “residual vector quan
Mar 13, 2025
Y Combinator’s police surveillance darling Flock Safety raises $275M at $7.5B valuation
Flock Safety and one of its long-time VCs, Bedrock Capital, announced Thursday that the startup raised a fresh $275 million at a $7.5 billion valuation. Flock makes computer vision-enabled video surveillance technology used by law enforcement as well as businesses, property management companies, and so on. It’s best known for its automatic license plate recognition tech, but Flock also makes gunshot detection tech marketed to schools, and recently acquired public safety drone company Aerodome.
Mar 13, 2025
Y Combinator urges the White House to support Europe’s Digital Markets Act
Y Combinator, one of the world’s most prolific startup accelerators, sent a letter on Wednesday urging the Trump administration to openly support Europe’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), a wide-ranging piece of legislation that aims to crack open Big Tech’s market power. The DMA designates six tech companies as “gatekeepers” to the internet — Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft — and limits these technology kingpins from engaging in anticompetitive tactics on their platforms, in
Mar 13, 2025
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