Wednesday, December 18, 2024 | | | Welcome to TC PM! We've got lots for you today: You can now call OpenAI's ChatGPT to ask it questions; SpaceX gets the green light to hold its seventh Starship launch; and we look at a new app for surfing the open web. Hang loose! | | | Image Credits: Clemson /Flickr under aCC BY 2.0 license | ☎️ Call me, maybe? OpenAI is coming to your landline. The company announced today that if you call 1-800-242-8478, you will be connected with OpenAI's AI assistant, which can answer questions. Everyone gets only 15 free minutes a month, which is good because I'm not sure callers' intentions will always be pure. Read more 🎁 GitHub gives a gift: Microsoft-owned GitHub is releasing a free version of its popular Copilot code completion/AI pair programming tool. The tool typically costs $10 a month and was only free for folks like teachers, students, and open source maintainers. Read more 🏄 Surf the open web: Social magazine app maker Flipboard has a new app that will allow people to surf sites like Mastodon and Bluesky and build themselves custom feeds. The app took two years to develop and is currently in invite-only beta. Read more | | | Image Credits: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto / Getty Images | | | 😳 That's a lot: Microsoft is currently designing its own AI chip, Maia, but the tech giant is getting its chips elsewhere in the meantime. Microsoft bought nearly half a million Nvidia Hopper chips in 2024, more than double any of its rivals. Read more 🚀 Another day, another launch: SpaceX has been given the regulatory green light to hold its seventh Starship launch. The launch date is still TBD. Read more 🚮 Let's talk trash: Waste management is an oft-ignored industry when it comes to technology. Hauler Hero wants to change that with its software that helps waste-management companies with everything from billing to route management. Read more 🧐 A perplexing acquisition: AI search engine company Perplexity acquired Carbon, a small Seattle-based startup that specializes in connecting AI systems to external data sources. Does this mean Perplexity is building an AI enterprise search product? Maybe! Read more ⚡️ Data center deals: Sam Altman-backed nuclear startup Oklo has inked a deal with Switch to build enough small modular reactors to generate 12 gigawatts of energy for Switch's data centers. This deal comes with a catch, though. Read more | | | 🐦 A use for AI we can all get behind: A group of scientists has developed BirdVoxDetect, which uses AI to identify bird species by their call. The tech is meant to help people study the migration patterns of birds. Not sure how this works, though, considering birds aren't real. Read more 📌 Well, well, well: Amazon made headlines a few months ago for declaring that all of its staff needed to come back into the office five days a week. Employees weren't happy. Turns out, Amazon doesn't have enough office space in some cities to actually mandate that. Read more | | | Image Credits: Alexander Spatari / Getty Images | 🍽️ I'll wait, thanks: Access is a startup that wants to help its users get coveted restaurant reservations. The service starts at $1,788 a year, which is confusing. People who can pay that are probably not the ones scrambling for a reservation. Read more | | | Featured jobs from CrunchBoard | | | Has this been forwarded to you? Click here to subscribe to this newsletter. | | | Update your preferences here at any time | | Copyright © 2024 TechCrunch, All rights reserved.Yahoo Inc. 110 5th St,San Francisco,CA | | | | |
