Proton Mail, the end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) email service from Swiss company Proton, is now officially available via a dedicated desktop app some three months after debuting in beta.
However, despite previous claims that the client would be available to all Proton Mail users in early 2024, the company has decided to restrict it to paying users.
“After a highly positive response during the beta phase, we’ve decided to keep the desktop app exclusive to premium subscribers to ensure the best service quality, given the significant infrastructure and maintenance demands,” a spokesperson explained to TechCrunch.
Proton Mail desktop app. Image Credits: Proton
In related news, Proton is also making its email service available via a standalone Linux desktop app, launching today in beta.
It’s worth noting that while Proton Mail has been available to desktop users from the company’s inception, initially through the browser and more recently a “bridge” which opened up access to Proton Mail through third-party desktop clients such as Apple Mail and Outlook, today’s news brings a dedicated Windows and MacOS app to the fray. This means that emails can be cached and accessed when offline, while users can funnel into Proton Mail directly from the MacOS dock or Windows Start menu.
Moreover, the new app also bundles access to Proton’s encrypted Calendar service.
Proton Mail for Desktop with Calendar. Image Credits: Proton
Show me the money
From Proton’s perspective, keeping the Proton Mail desktop app back behind a paywall could be a good way to incentivize premium signups, as it is the kind of product that many people value in their day-to-day lives and would be willing to pay for.
However, the company previously said that the client would “gradually be made available to all users, including free,” and it’s this backtrack that may cause a little consternation in its community.
Instead, everyone will be able to try the app out as part of a 14-day free trial, after which they will have to sign up to one of the company’s premium plans that costs between €8 and €13 per month, depending on how long they’re willing to commit to. These plans also unlock all the restrictions on Proton’s other products, which include cloud storage, a VPN and password management.
However, there is also a separate “Mail Plus” plan that starts at €3.49 per month designed for email and VPN users only, and this will also give access to the desktop app.
That’s not to say that Proton isn’t open to changing its mind, depending on the “feedback” it receives in the wake of today’s announcement.
“We remain open to broadening access in the future, though we do not have any specific plans to do so in the short term,” the Proton spokesperson said. “We’re committed to continuously evaluating our offerings based on our users’ feedback and needs.”
Social network X (formerly Twitter) launched new top-up packs for its developer API program on Tuesday. These paid upgrades will allow developers to fetch roughly 10,000 posts for $100 if they hit their existing tier’s limit midway through the month.
Last year, Elon Musk curtailed free API access and released new paid tiers with the basic level starting at $100 per month. The company released a $5,000 per month Pro tier with higher limits later in the year.
Different developer API access tiers with their limits. Image Credits: X/Twitter
However, there was no way for developers to fetch more tweets if they hit the limit for the month. They either had to wait it out or upgrade to a costlier tier.
With the new top-up launch, the social network said that there are also limits to the number of upgrades developers can purchase. Developers with the basic tier are capped at 10 top-ups and developers with the pro tier are capped at five top-ups per month.
X’s API changes impacted the third-party developer ecosystem massively and many tools such as Tracy Chou’s Block Party have pivoted to concentrate on other social platforms.
The company’s alterations to its API rules also impacted researchers and their ability to study the platform’s data. However, the company had to open up access to researchers in the EU because of the bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA) rules.
Social networks are getting stingy with their data, leaving third-party developers in the lurch
OpenAI captivated the tech world a few months back with a generative AI model, Sora, that turns scene descriptions into original videos — no cameras or film crews required. But Sora has so far been tightly gated, and the firm seems to be aiming it toward well-funded creatives like Hollywood directors — not hobbyists or small-time marketers, necessarily.
Alex Mashrabov, the former head of generative AI at Snap, sensed an opportunity. So he launched Higgsfield AI, an AI-powered video creation and editing platform designed for more tailored, personalized applications.
Powered by a custom text-to-video model, Higgsfield’s first app, Diffuse, can generate videos from scratch or take a selfie and generate a clip starring that person.
“Our target audience is creators of all types,” Mashrabov told TechCrunch in an interview, “from regular users who want to create fun content with their friends to social content creators looking to try a new content format to social media marketers who want their brand to stand out.”
Mashrabov came to Snap by way of AI Factory, his previous startup, which Snap acquired in 2020 for $166 million. While at Snap, Mashrabov helped build products like AR effects and filters for Snapchat, including Cameos, as well as Snapchat’s controversial MyAI chabot.
Higgsfield — which Mashrabov co-launched several months ago with Yerzat Dulat, an AI researcher specializing in generative video — offers a curated set of pre-generated clips, a tool to upload reference media (i.e. images and videos) and a prompt editor that lets users describe the characters, actions and scenes they wish to depict. Using Diffuse, users can insert themselves directly into an AI-generated scene, or have their digital likeness mimic things — like dance moves — captured in other videos.
Image Credits: Higgsfield
“Our model supports highly realistic movements and expressions,” Mashrabov said. “We’re pioneering ‘world models’ for consumers, which will allow us to build best-in-class video generation and editing with a great level of control.”
Higgsfield isn’t the only generative video startup going head to head with OpenAI. Runway was one of the first on the scene, and its tools continue to improve. There’s also Haiper, which has the backing of two DeepMind alums and over $13 million in venture cash.
Mashrabov argues that Diffuse will stand out thanks to its mobile-first, social-forward go-to-market strategy.
“By prioritizing iOS and Android apps instead of desktop workflows, we enable creators to create compelling social media content anytime and anywhere,” Mashrabov said. “Indeed, by building on mobile, we’re able to prioritize ease of use and consumer-friendly features from day one.”
Higgsfield is also running lean. Mashrabov says that the generative models underpinning the platform were developed by a 16-person team in less than nine months and trained on a cluster of 32 GPUs (32 GPUs might sound like a lot, but considering OpenAI uses tens of thousands, it’s not really). And Higgsfield has only raised $8 million to date, the bulk of which came from a recent seed funding tranche led by Menlo Ventures.
Image Credits: Higgsfield
To stay one step ahead of rivals, Higgsfield plans to put the seed cash toward building an improved video editor that’ll let users modify characters and objects in videos, and toward training more powerful video generation models specifically for social media use cases. In fact, Mashrabov sees social media — and social media marketing — as Higgsfield’s principle money-making niche.
While Diffuse is currently free to use, Mashrabov envisions a future where marketers pay some sort of fee or subscription for premium features, or for volume or large-scale campaigns.
“We believe Higgsfield unlocks an incredible level of realism and content production use cases for social media marketers,” he said. “We constantly hear from CMOs and creative directors that they need to optimize content production budgets and shorten timelines while still delivering impactful content. So we believe video generative AI solutions will be a core solution in helping them to achieve it.”
Of course, Higgsfield isn’t immune from the broader challenges facing generative AI startups.
It’s well-established that generative AI models like the kind powering Diffuse can “regurgitate” training data. Why’s that problematic? Well, if the models were trained on copyrighted content without permission or some sort of licensing agreement in place, those models’ users could unwittingly generate a copyright-infringing work — exposing them to lawsuits.
Image Credits: Higgsfield
Mashrabov wouldn’t reveal the source of Higgsfield’s training data (other than to say it comes from “multiple publicly available” places), and also wouldn’t say whether Higgsfield would retain user data to train future models, which might not sit right with some business customers. He did note that Diffuse users can request that their data be deleted at any time through the app.
Digital “cloning” platforms like Higgsfield are also ripe for abuse, as the wildfire spread of deepfakes on social media in recent months has shown.
In a similar vein, Higgsfield could make it easier to steal creators’ content. For instance, one need only upload a video of someone’s choreography to generate a video of themselves performing that same choreography.
I asked Mashrabov about what safeguards or protections Higgsfield might be using to attempt to prevent abuse, and — while he wouldn’t go into specifics — he claimed that the platform employs a mix of automated and manual moderation.
“We’ve decided to gradually roll out the product and test in select markets first, so that we can monitor where there’s the potential for abuse and evolve the product as necessary,” Mashrabov added.
We’ll have to wait and see how well that works in practice.
Uber Eats is launching a TikTok-like short-form video feed to boost discovery and help restaurants showcase their dishes. Uber Eats’ senior director of Product, Awaneesh Verma, told TechCrunch exclusively in an interview that the new feed is being tested in New York, San Francisco and Toronto. The company plans to launch the feed worldwide in the future.
With this launch, Uber Eats now joins numerous other popular apps that have launched their own short-form video feeds following TikTok’s rise in popularity, including Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat and Netflix to name a few. TechCrunch also recently learned that LinkedIn has started experimenting with its own TikTok-like feed.
The new Uber Eats short-form videos are visible in carousels placed across the app, including the homescreen. Once you click on a video preview, you will enter into a vertical feed of short-form content that you can swipe through. You will only see content from restaurants that are close enough to deliver to you.
Verma says the feed is designed to replicate the experience of being in a restaurant in person and seeing people preparing food and being inspired to try something new. As you swipe through the feed, you may come across a video of an ice cream shop preparing a Nutella milkshake, or a video of an Indian restaurant packing rice separately from curry so it doesn’t get soggy by the time it gets delivered to your house.
“The early data shows people are much more confident trying new dishes and trying things that they otherwise wouldn’t have,” Verma said. “Even little things like being able to see texture, and the details of what a portion size looks like, or what’s in a dish, has been really inspiring for our users.”
Image Credits: Uber Eats
Uber Eats notes that the videos aren’t ads, as the company isn’t charging merchants for the content placements.
Many restaurants run social media accounts on apps like Instagram and TikTok to reach new customers and showcase their food using short-form videos. By allowing merchants to share short-form videos directly in the Uber Eats app, the company is helping restaurants reach customers directly as they decide what to order. As for consumers, many people already use social media to discover new places and dishes to try, so Uber Eats likely hopes that its new feed will encourage users to try to find inspiration directly within its own app.
Some users might not see the launch as a welcome addition to the app, as they may feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of different short-form video feeds in popular apps. While it may make sense to have short-form video feeds in entertainment and social media apps, the introduction of one in a food-delivery app may not be a favorable choice for some.
Verma also shared that in order to further support merchants, the company has revamped its Uber Eats Manager software and added personalized growth recommendations. The software is now capable of encouraging restaurants to grow their business by doing things like running a promotion on a certain dish or adding photos to menu listings.
In addition, the company is going to launch an entirely new app for restaurant managers this summer that is designed to make it easier for restaurants to be more proactive on the go. For instance, the app could alert a restaurant manager that their store is having issues or that they may want to boost sales with new ads.
Uber Eats announced on Monday that it now has more than 1 million merchants around the world on its platform, across 11,000 cities in six continents.
Family location services company Life360 has launched a new notification for its apps to automatically alert friends and family when you reach a destination after taking a flight.
Life360 said that the feature uses phone sensors to measure location, altitude and speed to determine if you are taking a flight. Plus, its algorithms can detect takeoff and landing times, and alert family members when you connect to the network post-landing.
The company said the landing notification feature is a useful alternative to online flight trackers or waiting for the traveler to send updates to their circle. The feature is enabled for all users with the latest app update and can be turned off through the Flight Detection toggle in the settings.
Life360, which has more than 66 million active users on its platform, said that the people in a flight-taking user’s circle can see a plane icon as a movement indicator — adding to the current set of activities such as walking, running, biking and driving.
The company’s CEO Chris Hulls told TechCrunch that the company wants to focus on safety and protection updates for users’ inner circle. He said that comparatively, Apple’s solution is very generic. Additionally, he noted that Life360 has the advantage of being on both iOS and Android.
Hulls said that the company is looking to launch a new Tile lineup, which it acquired in 2021 for $205 million, this year without providing more detail.
“We are going to make a unified hardware lineup that is far more robust than Apple, which is one size fits all. We will have Bluetooth tags and GPS devices with LTE connections, and it will be a more holistic service,” he said.
Life360 launched its premium membership in Canada in 2022 and in the U.K. in 2023. This year, the company aims to expand the paid tier to Australia.
The right to repair has been a hot topic for several years now, hitting a kind of critical mass with domestic and international legislation. Advocates note that these proposals give users more control over their own property, while expanding products’ shelf life and reducing e-waste.
Fairphone is, perhaps, the most prominent hardware company to make repairability the foundation of its consumer electronic design ethos, rather than a simple afterthought. To date, the European startup has released several handsets and a pair of over-ear headphones. This week, it’s adding earbuds to that list.
While Bluetooth buds have rapidly become a commodity, user repairability has been something of a non-starter, owing to their compact size. They’re also relatively cheap to produce, making it easy to toss a pair when it stops working for some reason. If you’re going to make a product like this repairable, you have to make it a foundational feature — which, thankfully, is kind of Fairphone’s whole deal.
Image Credits: Fairphone (screenshot)
In this case, the company centered on battery life. Users can easily open the buds and case to remove the batteries once they’ve worn down. The company calls Fairbuds, “the world’s most repairable premium earbuds.” They’re certainly easier to crack open and swap out parts than competitive products from the likes of Apple and Samsung.
The €149 ($162) price puts them somewhere in the mid-tier of the earbud world. You can, of course, get buds for significantly less these days. And while the company is promoting features like active noise canceling and 11mm titanium drivers, the truth is that repairability and battery longevity need to be high up on your list of requirements to pick these out of an extremely crowded field.
In the consumer electronics world, right to repair has largely focused on handsets and PCs. Given the lower price point and smaller footprint, it seems unlikely that they’ll find their way into many laws in the near future. But anything that can help reduce e-waste and give users more control over these products is probably a net positive.
You might know Bay Area artist Danielle Baskin for her viral, immersive art installations and jokes. Her newest project, Moonlight, is certainly not a joke, but she still finds her characteristic whimsy when describing her new venture: “It’s SaaS for witches.”
She’s not kidding. Moonlight is a free online tarot platform, where you can draw tarot cards on your own, do a reading in a multiplayer room or even book a session with a vetted tarot professional (that’s where the SaaS part comes in).
Some founders would kill to have just one good idea. Baskin has so many good ideas that some of her performance art projects have inadvertently spun into legitimate companies. What if instead of getting more corporate swag, you could go to a conference and get a Salesforce-branded avocado? (“That was actually a solid business,” she told TechCrunch, but it was quashed by the pandemic.)
She’s also spent four years running Dialup, an app that pairs strangers in one-on-one phone calls. Then, there are less time-consuming joke products like OneHoodie, a hoodie with swappable Velcro logos, in case your company gets acquired and you don’t want a whole new hoodie; Drone Sweaters, to keep your drone warm; or Warby Parkour, photos of glasses doing parkour. Some of the funding for Moonlight came from selling her business Maskalike, where she made photorealistic face masks with people’s actual faces on them.
“After I sold my mask company, I felt like for the first time in my life, I wasn’t hustling anything, and I could just think about what I wanted to do next,” she said. Then came Moonlight.
Image Credits: Moonlight
Moonlight has an appropriately mystical connection to one of Baskin’s first companies. About 15 years ago, Baskin ran a business painting custom bike helmets, but around the same time, she had just begun learning about tarot.
For many modern practitioners, Tarot isn’t fortune-telling or psychic reading. Dating back to the 1400s, each of the 78 cards in the tarot deck tells a story. Tarot readers help people interpret the cards they pull, and draw from the stories of the cards to help clients think through life events from a different angle.
“I had this idea to paint each tarot card on 78 unique helmets, and sell them all in New York, so that they’d all be shuffling around, and when you pass a cyclist, you could get a reading on your bike,” she said. “You’d be biking and pass the three of swords and you’re like, ‘Oh, I’m going to think about heartbreak right now,’ or you pass the magician, and you’re like, ‘Oh, I should be doing more spectacles today.’”
Sometimes, she’d trade a helmet for a few tarot lessons with a witch (which is how some tarot practitioners describe themselves). It was at one of these lessons that Baskin first imagined what an online tarot platform could look like.
Image Credits: Danielle Baskin/Inkwell Helmets
“One of my teachers, I went to her place and she had this desktop computer in the corner, and there were these beach sounds coming from it,” she said. “I asked her what was on her computer, and she explained that she was a tarot reader in Second Life [at a beachside tarot shop]. She would meet clients there, and people all over the world would voice chat with her… That’s always been in the back of my mind. Even when building this, I’m like, ‘Whoa, should I get in touch with her again?’”
Baskin has spent 15 years studying tarot, giving readings (sometimes at corporate parties) and getting to know other witches. Now, the path to Moonlight has come full circle.
Moonlight’s interface is beautiful and intuitive. When you enter a room, you start by shuffling your tarot deck — the default is the iconic Rider-Waite-Smith deck, but decks from other artists are for sale. You can pull cards in four different preset spreads, but you also can just pull cards onto a blank canvas, which can be helpful for people learning to read the cards. If you’re not a tarot expert, there’s a built-in handbook inside the app, but the descriptions are pretty open-ended — “I just put in the most minimalist keywords, so you could project your own meanings onto it,” Baskin said.
As she was building out the idea for Moonlight, Baskin teamed up with Caroline Hermans, a game designer and former UX engineer at Google.
“It took a whole two years before I actually made it, because I was also like, who can I collaborate with? Are there tarot engineers?” Baskin said. Hermans fit the bill.
Image Credits: Moonlight
Moonlight was first bootstrapped with the money Baskin made selling Maskalike, but she managed to find some investors to jump in as well (she declined to say how much she’s raised). Given her history of poking fun at Silicon Valley — she sold blonde wigs and “blood energy drinks” outside the courtroom at Elizabeth Holmes’ trial, and she was behind the TouchBase trading cards, which treated venture capitalists like baseball players — she wasn’t sure if investors would take her seriously.
“I was worried that investors might think I’m a prankster — will that hurt me in actually making a business? But I think if people actually know me, they know I’m multi-faceted,” she said. “A lot of investors I met with were familiar with my artwork. They’re like ‘Oh, you did BART Basel,’ the art show in BART.”
It’s important to Baskin that Moonlight has an actual business plan from the get-go — she learned that lesson while running Dialup, which has since been sunsetted.
“I was in this sort of mindset, maybe similar to Clubhouse, where I was like, ‘Well, we can keep growing our app, and keep it free, and then as it’s more popular, we’ll figure out a plan to monetize it,’” she said. Neither Clubhouse nor Dialup thrived under that model — most companies don’t. But Moonlight already is generating some income by taking a 15% platform fee from bookings with tarot readers and sales of digital decks. The platform launched without fanfare about a year ago, but now that its booking flow is in place, Moonlight is looking to make a splash.
“I was worried that witches would hate technology. You know, they’re like, ‘My physical deck is charged with a crystal in the windowsill and that’s the only one I’ll use,’ but no, everyone’s on the internet,” Baskin said. “Witches have Instagram. We’re all using technology, and I think they’re excited that someone’s making a platform who’s a tarot person, too.”
Once a Kickstarter campaign is complete, you need to turn to a creator’s own page to buy the products after the campaign clock has ticked down — that is, until now. Today, Kickstarter announced that it is (finally!) including preorder functionality as part of its core platform once the campaign is over. It calls the feature “late pledges,” and the platform says it’s planning to make it available to all creators “soon.” Those following the industry will probably meet the announcement with an eyeroll and a “welcome to the club,” as Indiegogo launched its equivalent — InDemand — almost a decade ago.
Indiegogo Launches InDemand, A Way To Sell On The Site After Crowdfunding Stops
Late to the party-ness aside, since its inception in 2009, Kickstarter has been a trailblazer in the crowdfunding space. The introduction of late pledges is a welcome addition to its support of creative individuals. The feature opens up new avenues for backers who missed the initial campaign but also simplifies the process of post-campaign contributions, making it a win-win for all parties involved — not least Kickstarter, which until this point has seen post-campaign presales go off-site, which means the platform wasn’t able to skim its usual 5% platform fee off the top. Which, of course, it will do for late pledges as well.
Bit of a no-brainer, really.
How it works
When creating their campaign, creators can activate late pledges from their dashboard, so the party can continue once a project is successfully funded. This adds a dedicated “Late Pledges” section to their project page, where new backers can choose rewards and pledge their support at their convenience, just like in the initial campaign phase. A spokesperson for Kickstarter assures us that Late Pledges is seamlessly integrated within the Kickstarter platform, ensuring a smooth and efficient experience for all users.
For founders, the late pledges feature makes a lot of sense. A product’s Kickstarter page often has an enormous amount of Google clout, and will frequently show up in the top search results. Driving people toward spending money is an obvious next step. That makes late pledges an excellent way to leverage the momentum from successful campaigns. Potential backers discovering the project later can still participate and secure their desired rewards without waiting for a separate preorder campaign. Creators can also offer exclusive rewards or limited-time incentives to attract additional support, maintaining excitement and visibility of their projects.
It’s not all rainbows and unicorns, however: Crowdfunding campaigns can be excruciatingly hard to deliver in some cases, and there’s often a post-campaign period where the real gets really real, and manufacturing and design challenges start showing up. Continuing to take preorders at that stage could represent a risk: managing an increased volume of backers, fulfilling rewards and potentially affecting the initial urgency that drives many crowdfunding campaigns. Additionally, creators may need to carefully consider the timing and duration of the late pledges period to avoid diluting the impact of their initial campaign.
Despite potential challenges, the late pledges feature offers substantial benefits to Kickstarter creators. Backers gain more flexibility and the opportunity to support projects they might have missed initially. It’s also easy to imagine a world where the feature could contribute to a more sustainable crowdfunding environment by allowing projects to generate ongoing support.
It’ll be interesting to see where Kickstarter takes the feature going forward — it’s easy to imagine the platform introducing enhancements like time-limited pledge windows or integration with other platform features to boost project visibility and success. The evolution of this feature could lead to broader changes in Kickstarter’s strategy, emphasizing long-term creator-backer relationships and expanding support tools for creators.
If you want to see what it looks like, Kickstarter has enabled the functionality on the recently completed Master of Realms campaign.
Advances in generative AI have taken the tech world by storm. Biotech investors are making a big bet that similar computational methods could revolutionize drug discovery.
On Tuesday, ARCH Venture Partners and Foresite Labs, an affiliate of Foresite Capital, announced that they incubated Xaira Therapeutics and funded the AI biotech with $1 billion. Other investors in the new company, which has been operating in stealth mode for about six months, include F-Prime, NEA, Sequoia Capital, Lux Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures, Two Sigma Ventures and SV Angel.
Xaira’s CEO Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a former Stanford president and chief scientific officer at Genentech, says the company is ready to start developing drugs that were impossible to make without recent breakthroughs in AI. “We’ve done such a large capital raise because we believe the technology is at an inflection point where it can have a transformative effect on the field,” he said.
The advances in foundational models come from the University of Washington’s Institute of Protein Design, run by David Baker, one of Xaira’s co-founders. These models are similar to diffusion models that power image generators like OpenAI’s DALL-E and Midjourney. But rather than creating art, Baker’s models aim to design molecular structures that can be made in a three-dimensional, physical world.
While Xaira’s investors are convinced that the company can revolutionize data design, they emphasized that generative AI applications in biology are still in the early innings.
Vik Bajaj, CEO of Foresite Labs and managing director of Foresite Capital, said that unlike in technology, where data that train AI models is created by consumers, biology and medicine are “data poor. You have to create the datasets that drive model development.”
Other biotech companies using generative AI to design drugs include Recursion, which went public in 2021, and Genesis Therapeutics, a startup that last year raised a $200 million Series B co-led by Andreessen Horowitz.
The company declined to say when it expects to have its first drug available for human trials. However, ARCH Venture Partners managing director Bob Nelsen underscored that Xaira and its investors are ready to play the long game.
“You need billions of dollars to be a real drug company and also think AI. Both of those are expensive disciplines,” he said.
Xaira wants to position itself as a powerhouse of AI drug discovery. However, some view bringing on Tessier-Lavigne as CEO as an unexpected move. Tessier-Lavigne resigned just seven months ago from his position as Stanford president following explosive reports — including in the Stanford Daily — that his laboratory at Genetech had manipulated research data.
Tessier-Lavigne was not himself accused of manipulating any data and denied knowing there was falsified research being published by his colleagues.
Indeed, after a special committee of Stanford’s Board of Trustees initiated a review related to Tessier-Lavigne’s scientific research, he let it be known that the panel concluded he “did not engage in any fraud or falsification of scientific data.” Still, as he wrote in his last public communication from Stanford last summer, “[a]lthough the report clearly refutes the allegations of fraud and misconduct that were made against me,” the investigation itself had become so big a distraction that he decided to step down “for the good of the University.”
Investors don’t seem bothered by the events. They say they’re confident that Tessier-Lavigne — who left Genentech in 2011 to lead Rockefeller University, then joined Stanford in 2016 — is the right person for the job.
“I have known Marc for many years and know him to be a person of integrity and scientific vision who will be an exceptional CEO,” Nelsen said in an email. “Stanford exonerated him of any wrongdoing or scientific misconduct.”
X, formerly Twitter, is now using Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok to power a feature that summarizes the personalized trending stories in the app’s Explore section. According to an announcement and screenshots posted by the X Engineering team on Friday, X’s Premium subscribers will be able to read a summary of posts on X associated with each trending story featured on the For You tab in Explore.
👀 Now available: Stories on X, powered by Grok AI 👀
See what the world is talking about with Stories on X, curated by @grok. now available for Premium subscribers in the Explore tab!
web & iOS only for now– let us know your feedback pic.twitter.com/Iv6zk9WugU
— Engineering (@XEng) May 3, 2024
The For You page showcases the news and stories being shared across X’s platform that are popular within your network, along with other suggested items. It’s among the first stops for X users who want to catch up with what’s being said on the platform, without having to spend long amounts of time scrolling their timeline.
For instance, a TechCrunch reader’s For You page today may feature stories about Apple’s coming iPad event, Microsoft’s security overhaul, and burnout among AI engineers. As you tap into each story to view the associated X posts, a summary of the story will now appear at the top of the page, offering an overview of the subject matter.
In the case of the AI burnout story, for example, the Grok-powered summary begins: “AI engineers are facing burnout and rushed rollouts due to the competitive race in the tech industry, as companies prioritize investor satisfaction over solving actual problems.” After briefly touching on the problem of the AI “rat race,” the story concludes by saying that “critics argue that proper safeguards and thoughtful innovation should not be afterthoughts in the pursuit of AI investments …”
Humorously, a message appears below that summary, warning: “Grok can make mistakes, verify its outputs.”
The idea of summarizing trends is not a new one, but it is new in terms of how the summaries are being handled. Under its prior leadership, Twitter began adding headlines and descriptions to its trends in 2020, though not with the help of an AI bot. Instead, Twitter itself would annotate some of its daily trends with extra information and pin a representative tweet to provide further context. However, Twitter’s rollout was haphazard, with some trends getting written up and others not.
With Grok’s Stories, as the summaries are called, all the top news on the For You page is summarized.
Access to xAI’s chatbot Grok is meant to be a selling point to push users to buy premium subscriptions. With the Premium and top-tier Premium+ plans, users can access Grok by tapping on the bottom middle button of the app. A snarky and “rebellious” AI, Grok’s differentiator from other AI chatbots like ChatGPT is its exclusive and real-time access to X data.
A post published to X on Friday by tech journalist Alex Kantrowitz lays out Elon Musk’s further plan for AI-powered news on X, based on an email conversation with the X owner.
Kantrowitz says that conversations on X will make up the core of Grok’s summaries. Grok won’t look at the article text, in other words, even if that’s what people are discussing on the platform. That could be a problem in terms of painting a true picture of the news being shared, as what people are chattering about on X may be their reactions or opinions, not the news itself. Kantrowitz calls the move “controversial” but admits there’s opportunity there.
New: @elonmusk emailed me about his plan for AI news on X.
The idea is to use AI to blend breaking news and commentary, building real-time summaries of events. Then you can go deeper via chat on Grok.
Here's the full story! I'll be talking more about this on Big Technology…
— Alex Kantrowitz (@Kantrowitz) May 3, 2024
Journalists are already having to contend with AI news summaries in other areas as well, including from startups. For example, Arc’s new web browser includes an AI summary feature and former Twitter engineers are building an AI news summary service called Particle. How this will play out in terms of traffic to the news sites themselves remains to be seen. Kantrowitz believes that users may be interested in going “deeper into the source material once their curiosity is piqued,” he writes. But it’s also likely that at least some news sites will go out of business as page views drop due to AI summaries, leaving fewer sources for AI bots like Grok to summarize in the long run.
For that reason, some news publishers are doing deals with AI providers like OpenAI’s recently announced partnership with the FT. Others, such as Axel Springer, the AP, and Le Monde, have also announced similar moves. In X’s case, it’s able to get at the news by way of the conversation around it — and without having to partner to access the news content itself. That’s both clever and worrisome, the latter from a misinformation standpoint.
Grok’s Stories are rolling out to Premium X subscribers now. Access to Premium starts at $8 per month, if paying on the web and not through the app stores.
