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By Christine Hall

Tuesday, April 2, 2024

Hello, and welcome back to TechCrunch PM, where we provide the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package. There’s a lot of news to digest today, including a large group of heavy-hitting musicians who are none too happy about the shortcomings of AI. We also look at Yahoo’s acquisition, why YC’s Garry Tan is angry, how the police are watching you and a lot of venture capital news. Let’s get started! — Christine

Will sing for responsible AI: Heavy hitters in the music industry, including Nicki Minaj, Billie Eilish and Katy Perry, join a group of 200 musicians who signed an open letter calling on tech companies and developers to not undermine human creativity with AI music generation tools. Read More

Yahoo finds an Artifact it wants to keep: That’s right, TechCrunch’s very own parent company decided to buy Artifact, the AI-powered news app from Instagram’s co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. The announcement comes a few months after Artifact said it would be winding down operations as the market opportunity wasn’t big enough to warrant continued investment. Read More

What’s your birthday?: Meta wants to know, and not because it plans on sending you a gift. Quest 2 and 3 users must now confirm their age so Meta can provide the “right experience, settings, and protections for teens and preteens,” the company explained. Read More

AWS in the clouds: Amazon targets the media and entertainment industries with its newest service called Deadline Cloud. It lets customers set up, deploy and scale up graphics and visual effects rendering pipelines on AWS cloud infrastructure. Read More

Garry Tan lets loose on X … again: Just in time for Y Combinator’s Demo Day this week, Tan took to his social platform of choice to critique a San Francisco lawmaker who is not new to Tan’s online rants. Read More

Police and their dragnets: Zack Whittaker has your look at the sneaky ways that police tap tech companies for your private data. Read More

Let’s get collaborative: Apple’s Personas is a work in progress, according to Brian Heater. But a new update makes it one step better. Read More

The EU’s Cyber Resilience Act is coming together: Seven open source organizations intend on pooling resources and connecting the dots between existing security best practices in open source software development over the next three years. Read More

Meta is not colluding with Netflix: At least that is what the social media company is saying … again. Read More

Meet OctoStack: OctoAI’s new end-to-end solution for deploying generative AI models in a company’s private cloud, be that on-premises or in a virtual private cloud of your choice. Read More

Rivian has a flat first quarter: Rivian signals that it plans to make roughly the same number of EVs as it did in 2023. If so, that should help it meet targets. We’ll see. Read More

Tesla sales drop: The electric automaker’s deliveries were down, but it is also pointing a finger at an arson attack at its factory in Germany and shipping disruptions caused by Houthi attacks in the Red Sea. Read More

Big Tech talking points in a new age of antitrust: Natasha Lomas is your translator for all the self-serving spin being put on entrenched, profit-extracting machinery. Read More

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It was a great day for companies getting funding. Check them out:

Hailo lands $120 million to keep battling Nvidia as most AI chip startups struggle.

Modal raises $25 million to train corporate workers on data and AI.

Quadratic, now with $5.6 million, is reimagining the spreadsheet with a focus on data.

Read AI raises $21 million to expand its AI-powered summaries from meetings to messages and emails.

A new games-focused VC raises $35 million in Turkey, which shows the industry there continues to gain steam.

Seso, building software to fix farm workforces and solve agriculture’s HR woes, grabs $26 million.

General Electric is now three companies. The Wall Street Journal reports on how this was 130 years in the making.

Meanwhile, Google found itself in the hot seat with incognito mode and now has to delete billions of browsing records. The Hacker News has more.

And Forbes has your look at Microsoft’s new chatbot, calling it “boring.”

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