Welcome back to Week in Review! Lots of news for you this week — Travis Kalanick is possibly returning to the world of self-driving vehicles, CoreWeave’s CEO is now worth $10 billion, Apple users aren’t happy with how the company is promoting its new “F1” movie, and much more.
Quick note that we will be off next week for the July 4 holiday. Have a great weekend!
And another one: Meta snagged a key OpenAI researcher, Trapit Bansal, to boost its new AI superintelligence team. He’s the same guy who helped kick off OpenAI’s reasoning model work alongside Ilya Sutskever. As Zuckerberg rolls out the red carpet (and likely a giant paycheck), Meta’s brainy new squad is shaping up to be a who’s who of AI talent poached from rival labs.
Revolving doors: Travis Kalanick might be plotting his return to the self-driving car game, this time by trying to buy the U.S. arm of Pony AI, with some help from Uber, according to The New York Times. The move would mark a full-circle moment for the Uber founder, who’s been cooking up ghost kitchens since getting ousted in 2017 and now seems ready to steer back into autonomous vehicles.
A federal judge just handed AI companies a major legal win: Training on copyrighted books without permission can count as fair use. Creatives are reeling from the blow, but the court will still go to trial over Anthropic’s alleged use of pirated books to build a “central library” of everything ever written.
This is TechCrunch’s Week in Review, where we recap the week’s biggest news. Want this delivered as a newsletter to your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.
Fashion forward: Google released a new experimental app called Doppl that lets you virtually try on outfits using an AI-generated version of yourself, all from one photo. You can mix and match looks from thrift finds, social media, or your camera roll, and even generate short videos to see how your new outfit would move in real life.
Out in the Nevada desert: JB Straubel’s Redwood Materials flipped the switch on the largest microgrid in North America, powered by 805 retired EV batteries and fueling an AI data center. With his new venture, Redwood Energy, Straubel is turning yesterday’s car batteries into tomorrow’s clean, profitable power source. And it may be outpacing the company’s core recycling business in the process.
To the moon: CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator is now worth a jaw-dropping $10 billion, just months after his AI cloud firm’s bumpy IPO. What began as a scrappy crypto mining hustle is now a GPU-fueled AI powerhouse serving OpenAI and Microsoft. But with $8.8 billion in debt and eye-watering interest rates, it’s still walking a tightrope.
Story Continues
