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For many Americans, COVID-19 served as a wake-up call: The U.S. was nowhere nearly as prepared to overcome challenges as it should be, and it was overly dependent on China.

Whether the current geopolitical order calls for a new wave of isolationism will depend on your worldview, but the desire for the U.S. to be more self-reliant, solve its most glaring issues and stay ahead of its rivals can be found across the political spectrum.

Will the answer come from the government? Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz doesn’t think so. Its co-founder, Marc Andreessen, already said as much in his “Time to Build” call to action, but general partner Katherine Boyle doubled down in January with an essay on American dynamism.

American dynamism, Boyle wrote, is “the recognition that seemingly insurmountable problems in our society — from national security and public safety to housing and education — demand solutions that aren’t simply incremental changes that perpetuate the status quo. These problems demand solutions from builders — and it’s never been more vital that startups tackle these serious American problems.”

As a thesis, American dynamism found resonance in the U.S. tech community. But voices also emerged to question how well this goal was represented in a16z’s portfolio, which is heavier in crypto and SaaS than in govtech, for instance.

Boyle already anticipated some of that criticism, attributing it in part to a false belief “that software only touches the digital world and that we’re wasting valuable talent ignoring the physical.”

But, she retorted, “these critics are missing this current movement to the physical sector and the interplay between hardware and software.” In terms of sectors, Boyle added, “dynamism is neither govtech nor ESG.”

This is where things become interesting: a16z came up with a concept that clearly resonates with other investors, but that they may also define differently. For instance, solo GP Nichole Wischoff recently told TechCrunch that she is hoping to fund “American dynamism … the real one.”

This VC is bullish about American dynamism – ‘the real one’ by Anna Heim originally published on TechCrunch

The next breakthrough to take the AI world by storm might be 3D model generators. This week, OpenAI open-sourced Point-E, a machine learning system that creates a 3D object given a text prompt. According to a paper published alongside the code base, Point-E can produce 3D models in 1 to 2 minutes on a single Nvidia V100 GPU.

Point-E doesn’t create 3D objects in the traditional sense. Rather, it generates point clouds, or discrete sets of data points in space that represent a 3D shape — hency the cheeky abbreviation. (The “E” in Point-E is short for “efficiency,” because it’s ostensibly faster than previous 3D object generation approaches.) Point clouds are easier to synthesize from a computational standpoint, but they don’t capture an object’s fine-grained shape or texture — a key limitation of Point-E currently.

To get around this limitation, the Point-E team trained an additional AI system to convert Point-E’s point clouds to meshes. (Meshes — the collections of vertices, edges and faces that define an object — are commonly used in 3D modeling and design.) But they note in the paper that the model can sometimes miss certain parts of objects, resulting in blocky or distorted shapes.

Outside of the mesh-generating model, which stands alone, Point-E consists of two models: a text-to-image model and an image-to-3D model. The text-to-image model, similar to generative art systems like DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion, was trained on labeled images to understand the associations between words and visual concepts. The image-to-3D model, on the other hand, was fed a set of images paired with 3D objects so that it learned to effectively translate between the two.

When given a text prompt — for example, “a 3D printable gear, a single gear 3 inches in diameter and half inch thick” — Point-E’s text-to-image model generates an synthetic rendered object that’s fed to the image-to-3D model, which then generates a point cloud.

After training the models on a data set of “several million” 3D objects and associated metadata, Point-E could produce colored point clouds that frequently matched text prompts, the OpenAI researchers say. It’s not perfect — Point-E’s image-to-3D model sometimes fails to understand the image from the text-to-image model, resulting in a shape that doesn’t match the text prompt. Still, it’s orders of magnitude faster than the previous state-of-the-art — at least according to the OpenAI team.

“While our method performs worse on this evaluation than state-of-the-art techniques, it produces samples in a small fraction of the time,” they wrote in the paper. “This could make it more practical for certain applications, or could allow for the discovery of higher-quality 3D object.”

What are the applications, exactly? Well, the OpenAI researchers point out that Point-E’s point clouds could be used to fabricate real-world objects, for example through 3D printing. With the additional mesh-converting model, the system could — once it’s a little more polished — also find its way into game and animation development workflows.

OpenAI might be the latest company to jump into the 3D object generator fray, but — as alluded to earlier — it certainly isn’t the first. Earlier this year, Google released DreamFusion, an expanded version of Dream Fields, a generative 3D system that the company unveiled back in 2021. Unlike Dream Fields, DreamFusion requires no prior training, meaning that it can generate 3D representations of objects without 3D data.

While all eyes are on 2D art generators at the present, model-synthesizing AI could be the next big industry disruptor. 3D models are widely used in film and TV, interior design, architecture and various science fields. Architectural firms use them to demo proposed buildings and landscapes, for example, while engineers leverage models as designs of new devices, vehicles and structures.

3D models usually take a while to craft, though — anywhere between several hours to several days. AI like Point-E could change that if the kinks are someday worked out, and make OpenAI a respectable profit doing so.

The question is what sort of intellectual property disputes might arise in time. There’s a large market for 3D models, with several online marketplaces including CGStudio and CreativeMarket allowing artists to sell content they’ve created. If Point-E catches on and its models make their way onto the marketplaces, model artists might protest, pointing to evidence that modern generative AI borrow heavily from its training data — existing 3D models, in Point-E’s case. Like DALL-E 2, Point-E doesn’t credit or cite any of the artists that might’ve influenced its generations.

But OpenAI’s leaving that issue for another day. Neither the Point-E paper nor GitHub page make any mention of copyright.

OpenAI releases Point-E, an AI that generates 3D models by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

Microsoft says a vulnerability it discovered in a core macOS security feature, Gatekeeper, could have allowed attackers to compromise vulnerable Macs with malware.

The flaw, tracked as CVE-2022-42821, was first uncovered by Microsoft principal security researcher Jonathan Bar Or, and dubbed the “Achilles” vulnerability. Bar Or said the bug could allow malware to skirt Gatekeeper’s protections on macOS.

First introduced in 2012, Gatekeeper is a security feature designed to allow only trusted software to run on macOS. The feature automatically verifies that all apps downloaded from the internet are from identified developers who have been “notarized” by Apple, and whose apps are known to be free of malicious content.

Microsoft’s Bar Or explained in a blog post that macOS adds a “quarantine” attribute to apps and files that have been downloaded from a web browser and instructs Gatekeeper to check the file before it can be opened. But the Achilles vulnerability exploits a file permissions model called Access Control Lists (ACLs) to add extremely restrictive permissions to a downloaded file, which prevents web browsers from properly setting the quarantine attribute.

In exploiting the bug, a user could be tricked into downloading and opening a malicious file on macOS without triggering Gatekeeper’s security protections.

Microsoft reported the Achilles flaw in July, but Apple didn’t acknowledge the vulnerability was fixed until last week.

Bar Or said that Lockdown Mode, an opt-in Apple feature introduced earlier this year to help high-risk users block some of the more sophisticated cyberattacks, would not defend against the Achilles vulnerability, since Lockdown Mode is aimed at stopping silent and remotely triggered “zero-click” attacks that require no user interaction. “End-users should apply the fix regardless of their Lockdown Mode status,” said Bar Or.

Achilles is just one of many Gatekeeper bypasses that have been uncovered in recent years. In April 2021, Apple fixed a zero-day vulnerability in macOS that enabled the threat actors behind the notorious Shlayer malware to bypass Apple’s Gatekeeper and notarization security checks.

Apple fixes bug that let malicious apps skirt macOS’ security protections by Carly Page originally published on TechCrunch

The European Commission (EC) has announced that it has reached an agreement with Amazon over a duo of antitrust probes, one that will enshrine commitments made by Amazon in European Union (EU) antitrust legislation.

The initial probe kicked off back in 2018, when regulators launched enquiries into how Amazon was leveraging non-public data from third-party marketplace sellers on its platform to benefit its own competing business as a retailer. The crux of the concerns centered on how Amazon was able to gain an unfair advantage through big data insights as the marketplace owner, such as optimizing its own pricing or deciding what new products to launch and when.

The probe escalated into a formal investigation the following year, before the EC issued Amazon with a direct Statement of Objections in 2020. Europe’s competition chief Margrethe Vestager said at the time that Amazon was likely abusing its market position in its biggest European markets in France and Germany, and was “illegally distorting” competition through its use of merchant data.

At the same time, the EC announced a second tangential investigation into how Amazon favored its own business in terms of rules it set merchants for being featured in its much-coveted “buy box” and Prime loyalty program. The Commission added that Amazon seemingly favored its own products, as well as sellers that use Amazon’s logistics and delivery services.

Commitments

In the intervening months, Amazon submitted proposals to appease regulators in an attempt to end the probe early, including commitments to: stop using non-public data from its marketplace sellers; treat all sellers equally, regardless of whether they pay for Amazon’s logistics services; allow Prime sellers to choose any carrier for their deliveries. However, the bloc was urged by NGOs, trade unions, and digital rights groups to reject what they deemed to be a “weak” offer by the ecommerce giant, arguing that the Commission should pursue the probe through to its natural conclusion, which may eventually have involved a huge fine.

Fast-forward to today, and the Commission has said that Amazon has made some amendments to its initial offer, which includes improving the layout of a second competing “buy box” that Amazon had earlier proposed, and several other changes that it says will increase transparency and data protection for third-party merchants on the platform.

“Today’s decision sets new rules for how Amazon operates its business in Europe,” noted Margrethe Vestager, the European Commission’s executive vice-president for competition policy, in a statement. “Amazon can no longer abuse its dual role and will have to change several business practices. Competing independent retailers and carriers as well as consumers will benefit from these changes opening up new opportunities and choice.”

These commitments, according to the EC, will be legally binding and cover Amazon’s activities across the whole European Economic Area (EEA), though Italy is excluded from the “buy box” and Prime commitments due to a separate case brought by Italy against Amazon back in 2021.

The Prime and “buy box” commitments will remain enforceable for seven years, while all the remaining commitments will apparently lapse after five years. If Amazon is found to have breached any part of these commitments in that period, it could face a fine of 10% of its global revenue.

Today’s announcement comes just a day after the EC issued a preliminary finding that Facebook’s parent company Meta abused its dominant market position in the classifieds ads space, in contravention ofArticle 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), the same treaty that Amazon allegedly contravened.

However, while Amazon will have to change the way it operates in Europe, the company said that it doesn’t agree with a number of the EC’s assertions.

“We are pleased that we have addressed the European Commission’s concerns and resolved these matters,” an Amazon spokesperson told TechCrunch in a statement. “While we continue to disagree with several of the preliminary conclusions the European Commission made, we have engaged constructively to ensure that we can continue to serve customers across Europe and support the 225,000 European small and medium sized businesses selling through our stores.”

Amazon and EU settle two antitrust cases, including one focused on merchant data abuse by Paul Sawers originally published on TechCrunch

Oh man, you got 300 email sign-ups, awesome! Goodness, your web traffic spiked by 200%! Yesssss! Holy god, you got a feature article on TechCrunch — well done! You won an award from the regional chamber of commerce! Break open the champagne, right?

Not so fast. These moments of excitement are, in fact, your body lying to you. The little hits of dopamine feel so good. You want more.

You know who doesn’t care? Your would-be investors.

At the earliest stages of raising money, before you have any real traction, it can be tempting to take anything that looks like traction and shout it from the rooftops. The truth is that investors know what real traction looks like, and none of the above qualify. And yet, I’ve seen all of them in pitch decks. Trust me: At best, your investor doesn’t care. At worst, it shows that you are a founder who doesn’t know what’s important when you’re building your business, which is a huge red flag for investors.

The goal of a startup is to stop being a startup

I subscribe to Steve Blank’s definition of a startup: A “temporary organization in search of a repeatable, sustainable business model.”

Banish vanity metrics from your startup’s pitch deck by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

In 2022, uncertainty continued: Major acquisitions took place, layoffs swept the tech industry and Elon Musk bought Twitter.

While that last one may not have been on your 2022 bingo card, it certainly caused quite a bit of commotion here at TechCrunch — and got us talking. This year, a big trend for us was doing “three views” and other collaboration pieces. It’s a fun way for us to work with our colleagues while offering differing opinions about trending topics in the tech space. Here are some of our favorites:

3 views on Amazon’s $3.9B acquisition of One Medical

Earlier this year, Amazon acquired One Medical for $3.9 billion, yes that’s billion with a B. We gathered some TechCrunch+ staff to get their thoughts on the purchase. Alex Wilhelm was skeptical because, frankly, he doesn’t want Amazon as his health provider. Miranda Halpern (me, hello, hi) felt that this acquisition followed a logical progression for Amazon since it entered the healthcare space in 2018. Walter Thompson saw this as a chance for Amazon to accrete additional mass.

Should Oracle or Alphabet buy VMWare instead of Broadcom?

VMWare was freed from Dell in April 2022, and Alex and Ron Miller wrote about who they think may buy it. In May, the Broadcom-VMware deal was a go, but Alex and Ron found themselves on opposite sides of a hypothetical — would a higher price or another bidder make sense? Alex didn’t feel that VMWare deserved a higher price and Ron thought that the company’s value was higher than its financial results at the time.

3 views: Thoughts on Flow

We’ve all heard by now that the reason millennials won’t be able to purchase a home is that they keep buying avocado toast. As a zillenial, I disagree with the avocado toast sentiment, partially because I’m allergic to avocados but mainly because homes are no longer affordable. Adam Neumann’s latest startup, Flow, backed by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), aims to revolutionize the rental industry. Tim De Chant, Dominic-Madori Davis and Amanda Silberling shared their thoughts on whether Flow will make a difference —and whether Neumann even deserved the VC funding at all.

3 views: Pay attention to these startup theses in 2022

In 2022, Alex predicted that open source would become the de facto startup model. Natasha Mascarenhas posited everything would be hybridized. Anna Heim, meantime, suggested a majority of SaaS companies would adopt usage-based pricing. While some of their predictions for 2022 came true, some fell short. In true TechCrunch fashion, they followed up this article by predicting 2023’s key startup themes. We’ll check back in a year to see how well they stood the test of time.

TechCrunch staff on what we lose if we lose Twitter

Where would you scream into the void if Twitter were to disappear (read: die)? While that may be the question for some people, others would miss it for more important reasons. Dominic would miss the community aspect of Twitter, specifically Black Twitter. “The memes are endless, as is the support — and the heat — we give and place onto people and topics. It was a place to find community in a world so unkind to us. It really does feel like its own universe sometimes,” she wrote. Check out the full article to see what Ron, Amanda, Christine Hall, Paul Sawers, Natasha, Ivan Mehta and Alex worry about losing if Twitter goes belly up.

We had thoughts in 2022. Here are the top takes from the TechCrunch+ team by Miranda Halpern originally published on TechCrunch

Most companies agree that user experience is important. In a 2019 report from UserZoom, 70% of enterprise CEOs said that they see user and customer experience as a competitive differentiator. But figuring out what exactly users want — and what frustrates them — can prove to be a challenge. Customer satisfaction and market research surveys have response rates ranging around 10% on the low end, and many user experience researchers say that they don’t have enough time for analysis of the results.

The demand for a solution has led to a wellspring of software-based user research tools, like UserLeap, Airkit and UserZoom. Platforms such as Great Question and Ribbon seek to simplify the process of interviewing customers about product ideas and strategy, while services like Sprig and Maze let product teams observe how users interact with a product and generate reports.

Another player in the highly competitive market is User Interviews, which focuses on the problem of user research recruiting. Co-founded by Dennis Meng, Bob Saris and Basel Fakhoury, the idea for User Interviews arose from a mobile travel app that wasn’t getting a lot of traction.

“As we tried to pivot and find a new idea, we began to do a lot of user research to validate our hypotheses,” Fakhoury, who serves as User Interviews’ CEO, told TechCrunch in an email interview. “The more research we did, the more passionate we were about how valuable research could be and realized there was a huge pain point around finding participants for studies. We then did more research to validate this opportunity and were blown away by how strong the signal was: participant recruiting is the most painful part of user experience research by a mile.”

And the stakes of letting customer research efforts fall through, whether because of recruitment-related reasons or otherwise, can be high. According to an Adobe study, 38% of people will stop engaging with a website if images won’t load or take too long. Clicktale reports that 73% of brands can’t provide a consistent experience across their different digital channels, hurting customers’ impressions of the brands.

User Interviews — which today closed a $27.5 million Series B round that brings the company’s total raised to around $45 million — offers two products aimed at addressing this pain point. One, called Recruit, is designed to help user experience researchers source study participants across different demographics and behavioral criteria. The other, Research Hub, serves as a customer relationship management tool for research teams, allowing them to build user panels for research while streamlining the logistics of getting customers into studies.

Anyone can sign up to participate in a User Interviews-facilitated survey; more than 2.4 million have signed up to date. Once a user creates a profile, they can apply to a study, after which a researcher will approve or deny their admission. Surveyors can choose to “double screen” participants, which might involve contacting users to have them sign an NDA or consent form, and they can opt to reward participants with gift cards and other forms of monetary compensation (usually amounting to between $50 and $200).

That pay range is on the higher end for customer survey portals, but some recent participant reviews of the User Interviews experience on TrustPilot aren’t especially positive. We’ve reached out to the company for more information about why that might be.

According to Fakhoury, User Interviews uses machine learning models to prevent and identify survey fraud. In a support page on its website, the company says that of the roughly 50,000 participants active on its platform each month, around 0.3% — ~150 — are flagged as suspicious.

“With Recruit, Research Hub and a growing suite of integrations, User Interviews is differentiated as a complete solution for participant recruitment and management that plays nicely with any tools researchers like to use for their testing and insights management needs,” Fakhoury said. “We are faster, cheaper and more flexible than established recruiting agencies and our speed, cost and intuitive user experience have opened quality research recruiting to new audiences, like product managers and user experience designers, who previously would try to ‘DIY’ their research recruiting with poor results.”

Fakhoury didn’t reveal revenue figures when asked. But he said that User Interviews currently counts “thousands” of brands in its customer base, including Adobe, CNN, Amazon, Intuit, the Mayo Clinic, Spotify, Pinterest and Citibank.

Sageview Capital led User Interviews’ Series B with participation from Teamworthy, Accomplice, Las Olas VC, Trestle Ventures, ValueStream, ERA’s Remarkable Ventures and FJ Labs. Fakhoury says that the investment will “fuel growth” and help to “further build” the company’s core products.

User Interviews, which helps companies recruit survey participants, raises $27.5M by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

After years of promises and millions in investments, Porsche today pumped the first gallons of its fully synthetic fuel into a car. That car? A 911, of course.

Porsche has been talking about eFuels since 2020, when it made a 20 million euro investment into a project with Siemens Energy to create a pilot plant in Punta Arenas, Chile. The house that Ferdinand built then backed that up with a further $75m investment earlier this year, taking a 12.5% stake in HIF Global, the holding company for these eFuel production efforts.

eFuels are meant to be carbon-neutral alternates, allowing legacy vehicles to continue operating in the face of growing restrictions on carbon output from passenger vehicles. However, it’s all theory at this point. While bans for the sale of internal combustion vehicles are already on the books in many places, starting in 2035 in California and the EU, globally, no exemptions have yet been granted for eFuels. The EU plans to draft a proposal for “CO2 neutral fuels” and whether they may prove exempt, but that may apply only to commercial vehicles.

Michael Steiner, Member of the Executive Board at Porsche, hopes such an exemption would cover eFuels use in his company’s cars: “This is still in progress, but at least our expectation is that we could use such eFuel also in passenger cars, especially Porsche cars. This is expectation, but this is not finalized today.”

For now, Porsche’s eFuels will exclusively be used off-road, powering the company’s global Porsche SuperCup series. With Porsche strongly rumored to be entering into Formula One soon, and with that series set to switch to carbon-neutral fuels by 2026, it’s not hard to see potential there, too.

Why Chile? eFuels are heavily dependent on the splitting water into its component elements: hydrogen and oxygen. To be done effectively, this electrolysis requires a lot of cheap electricity, provided in Chile by the constant, high winds. Punta Arenas is said to be the windiest area in South America, a force converted into electricity by Siemens Gamesa wind turbines.

The hydrogen from that process is then mixed with CO2 extracted from the air to create a form of methanol. This raw material can then be further refined for a variety of products, including the eFuels that Porsche will use to power its race cars today and hopes will keep its historic vehicles on the road well into the future.

Porsche’s initial plans were for 130,000 liters of the stuff by the end of 2022. Given the date, and the size of that 911’s tank (67 liters at the most), it seems clear that goal will come later. Porsche’s next target is 55 million liters per year within the next three years. At that volume, Porsche’s Michael Steiner says the production cost will drop to roughly $2 per liter.

Right now, average fuel prices in Germany are approximately $1.75 per liter, but that’s at the pump. Transportation, taxes, and other fees will mean eFuels will continue to be significantly more expensive than traditional fuels for some time to come, but their carbon-neutral nature may still make them appealing options for commercial applications in particular.

“There are several initiatives all around the world,” Steiner told me. “Some regions look for tax benefits, some look for blending quotas for different sectors. So this is still open which markets might be most favorable for eFuels.”

One thing is for clear: regardless of the success of eFuels, and indeed exemptions for carbon-neutral internal-combustion, Porsche is sticking to its goal of 80% EV sales by 2030.

“We have a clear strategy,” Steiner said. “The main focus is e-mobility, but in addition we take care of our ICE cars.” Porsche is of course a brand with a strong history. That 911 fueled up today was just one of over a million of the things Porsche has produced since 1963. Keeping them running is clearly a strong incentive.

Porsche pumps first synthetic fuel as Chilean plant finally starts producing by Tim Stevens originally published on TechCrunch

TikTok is launching a new feature that allows users to see why a particular video was recommended to them in their For You feed, the company announced on Tuesday. The new feature is designed to bring more context to content recommended in For You feeds, TikTok says.

To understand why a particular video has been recommended to you in your For You feed, you can now tap on the share panel and select the question mark icon called “Why this video.” From there, you can see reasons why a particular video was recommended to you.

You may be informed that you saw a particular video because of your interactions, such as content you watch, like or share, comments you post, or searches. Or, you may be told that you have been shown the video because of accounts you follow. TikTok says you may also be informed that you were shown a particular video because it was posted recently in your region or that the content is popular in your region.

“This feature is one of many ways we’re working to bring meaningful transparency to the people who use our platform, and builds on a number of steps we’ve taken towards that goal,” the company said in a blog post. “Looking ahead, we’ll continue to expand this feature to bring more granularity and transparency to content recommendations.”

TikTok’s personalized For You page algorithm is largely behind the app’s success due to its ability to show users content they will likely find interesting. But, the algorithm system isn’t perfect, as you may sometimes come across a video that doesn’t cater to you. In cases like these, you can now learn more about why the video appeared on your For You page. Although TikTok has already explained how its recommendations work, the new feature launching today offers users additional and specific context about why a specific video was shown to them.

TikTok’s new feature will tell you why a particular video appeared in your For You feed by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch

The complexity associated with the development of embedded systems is increasing rapidly. For instance, it is estimated that the average complexity of software projects in the automotive industry has increased by 300% over the past decade.

Today, every piece of hardware is driven by software and most hardware is composed of multiple electronic boards running synchronized applications. Devices have more and more features, but adding features means increasing development and debugging complexity. A University of Cambridge report found that developers spend up to 50% of their programming time debugging.

Thankfully, there are practical ways to reduce the complexity of debugging embedded systems. Let’s take a look.

Earlier is better

Bugs will pop up during the entirety of a product’s lifetime: in development, testing and in the field. Resolving a bug later down the road can increase costs by as much as 15 times and lead to user frustration, in addition to creating challenges associated with updating embedded devices that are in production.

However, identifying bugs at the early stages of your product’s development will allow you to track them while prioritizing them by severity. This will allow you to debug before other dependencies and variables are introduced later in the lifecyle, which makes bugs easier and cheaper to resolve.

Manage versioning

To properly replicate a bug, you must be able to have a device in the exact same state it was when the bug first appeared. With embedded devices, there are three distinct variables to look at when issues crop up:

The software version. This is the version of each feature. This applies to the code you build as well as to potential dependencies, such as imported libraries.
The board version. Specifically, the design of the board. Board design changes constantly as components are added/removed or moved around.

Simplify debugging to reduce the complexity of embedded system development by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch