TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: AltStore

1. An app store to rival Apple's: The EU's Digital Markets Act has forced Apple to introduce APIs that allow developers to distribute iOS apps outside of the App Store, creating a new app store ecosystem. AltStore is the latest rival, and it has launched its first batch of third-party iOS apps. Read More

2. Another spyware company gets hacked: Spytech, a company that makes spyware that has compromised more than 10,000 devices including Android devices, Chromebooks, Macs and Windows PCs, has been hacked itself. You might be thinking, good! Serves you right. But the problem there is that now other hackers also have access to all the stolen data that Spytech has hoarded. Read More

3. Mistral comes out to play: The AI company says its new flagship model, Large 2, is on par with the latest models from OpenAI and Meta in terms of code generation, mathematics and reasoning. Large 2 dropped a day after Meta's latest open-source model, Llama 3.1 405b, but Mistral's tech already promises to outpace Meta's in a handful of key benchmarks. Read More

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Morning must-reads

Image Credits: Screenshot / YouTube

🤖 One small step for robotics: Researchers at MIT have found a way to use an iPhone to scan part of a home, upload a digital twin of that scan, and use it to train home robots. This is a big deal for robotics, where simulations allow robots to train themselves by performing tasks thousands of times quickly and with no real-world consequences. Making simulations accessible will no doubt enhance such robots' adaptability in different situations and environments. Read More

🚛 Taking self-driving trucks off-road: Automating long-haul trucking – the holy grail for many AV startups – is still many years away, but Kodiak Robotics thinks it's found a faster path to revenue-generation and profitability: Going off-road. The startup completed its first fully driver-less delivery out in the desert recently, and it aims to go commercial by early 2025. Read More

🌞 Harvesting energy from space: This stuff is straight out of some sci-fi books. Star Catcher Industries has emerged from stealth to develop a space-based energy grid. The startup's founders envision a future where spacecraft can use power generated from the sun, similar to a house that's run on solar panels. Read More

🇨🇳 Censorship automated: A new video-generating AI model is now widely available, but it appears to censor topics deemed politically sensitive by the Chinese government. Kling, developed by Beijing-based company Kuaishou, lets users enter prompts to generate 5-second videos — just don't ask it to come up with videos about stuff Beijing doesn't like. Read More

👋Making EV batteries cheaper: If battery costs don't drop soon, automakers are going to struggle to lower EV prices, which means adoption will stagnate. Thankfully, Addionics thinks there's a solution in one part of batteries that's often ignored: The foil current collector. The startup has raised a $39 million Series B to further build out its tech. Read More

Around the web

🇺🇲 Altman says AI's future must be democratic: In an op-ed for The Washington Post, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman argued that the U.S. and allied nations should be controlling the advance of global AI instead of countries like Russia or China. It's a classic argument from big business, and increasingly, big tech: American innovation shouldn't be stifled, because if we don't build it first, they will. Read More

❓ Google gets exclusive Reddit access: Google has signed a deal with Reddit to become the only search engine that can surface results from the social platform. Bing, DuckDuckGo, Mokeek, Qwant and other alternative search engines are being blocked off, reports 404 Media. I smell an antitrust complaint cooking. Read More

🪙 Coinbase gets a slap on the wrist: The crypto exchange has been fined £3.5 million by the U.K.'s financial watchdog for providing payment services to more than 13,000 "high risk" customers, such as those on sanctions lists, politically exposed people and unemployed people, the FT reports. The fine isn't a big one for Coinbase, which has a market cap of $58 billion and recorded profit of $1.2 billion in the first quarter. Read More

Before you go

Image Credits: Intron Health

🌍 Customizing AI for different cultures: AI has a reputation for failing to recognize women and minorities, and that goes for people with different accents and speech disorders, too. Intron Health, a clinical speech recognition startup, wants to solve this problem by training its algorithm on millions of audio clips from people in Africa so it can recognize different African accents. Read More