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To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here . As January is coming to a close, the TechCrunch team is firing on all cylinders (do we still say that, in a time of electric cars? What is a better expression these days?), with a wall of amazing content for you to download straight into your brain. We’ve picked the cream of the crop, even as we are further confused as to why there was cream on the crops in the first place. In summary, idiomatic English continues to confound even the biggest language nerds among us. — Christine and Haje The TechCrunch Top 3 Who’s calling? : T-Mobile’s data breach last week seems to have spilled over into Google Fi, which now says hackers accessed customers’ information. Carly has more. Home sweet HomePod : Brian plugged in the 2023 Apple HomePod and shares what he likes and doesn’t like about it. More layoffs : Cloud data management giant NetApp will lay off 8...

After telegraphing the move in media appearances , OpenAI has launched a tool that attempts to distinguish between human-written and AI-generated text — like the text produced by the company’s own ChatGPT and GPT-3 models. The classifier isn’t particularly accurate — its success rate is around 26%, OpenAI notes — but OpenAI argues that it, when used in tandem with other methods, could be useful in helping prevent AI text generators from being abused. “The classifier aims to help mitigate false claims that AI-generated text was written by a human. However, it still has a number of limitations — so it should be used as a complement to other methods of determining the source of text instead of being the primary decision-making tool,” an OpenAI spokesperson told TechCrunch via email. “We’re making this initial classifier available to get feedback on whether tools like this are useful, and hope to share improved methods in the future.” As the fervor around generative AI — particularly ...

The U.S. Department of Justice has asked Tesla for documents related to its branded Full Self-Driving and Autopilot advanced driver assistance systems, the automaker disclosed in a securities filing. Tesla said  in the filing it “has received requests from the DOJ for documents related to Tesla’s Autopilot and FSD features.” “To our knowledge no government agency in any ongoing investigation has concluded that any wrongdoing occurred,” Tesla noted in the 10K filing that was posted Monday. Tesla has been under investigation by the DOJ for at least a year, Reuters reported last fall, citing three people  familiar with the matter.” It’s unclear if the DOJ’s request for documents is connected to that investigation, which was launched in late 2021 following more than a dozen accidents involving the active use of Tesla’s Autopilot system. Tesla vehicles come standard with a driver assistance system branded as Autopilot. For an additional $15,000 , owners can buy “full self-driv...

Peacock is no longer offering its free tier to new customers, a spokesperson for NBCUniversal confirmed to TechCrunch on Tuesday. The company says it’s shifting its focus to its Premium offering, and that doing so will allow the streaming service to remain competitive in the marketplace. The change was first reported by The Streamable . The free tier is still available to users who are already on the plan, the spokesperson said in an email. In addition, users who cancel their paid subscriptions will automatically be downgraded to the free tier. Peacock has offered the free tier since its launch in 2020, giving users restricted access to the streaming service’s content catalogue. The tier included a limited amount of content when compared to the paid tiers. New customers will now have to choose between Peacock’s Premium or Premium Plus tiers. The ad-supported Premium tier costs $4.99 per month and includes the full content library, live sports and NBC and Bravo shows after they air on...

Spotify’s success with its year-end review known as Wrapped , designed for social sharing, may be pushing the company toward building more social experiences directly into its mobile app. The company for many months has been testing different iterations of a “friends activity” tab on its mobile app, and investors have now taken notice. During the streamer’s Q4 earnings call earlier today, the company was asked to clarify some details about its social plans. Though Spotify CEO Daniel Ek declined to comment on the specific feature the investor asked about, he didn’t shoot down the idea of Spotify becoming a more social platform. Instead, he replied that social could become “a meaningful driver of creating an even stickier and more engaging experience” for the company. The exec was answering an investor question about Spotify’s recent tests of a “Friends tab” which appears in the app’s bottom navigation bar for some subset of Spotify’s users. Though only an experiment at present, the te...

Meta is starting to test closed spaces called “members-only worlds” in Horizon Worlds, its social VR experience. The company has begun a limited alpha test to give creators the ability to grow and moderate their own communities. Meta has selected a small group of creators to build and obtain feedback about members-only worlds. In a blog post , Meta explained that creators can hand-select members and offer them exclusive experiences. During the alpha test, each members-only world can have up to 150 world members and 25 concurrent visitors at any given time. With members-only worlds, creators can launch a dedicated space to do things like host a book club, gather a gaming group, organize a support group or just hang out with friends and family without having to worry about uninvited guests. Image Credits: Meta “Every community develops its own norms, etiquette, and social rules over time as it fosters a unique culture,” Meta explained in its blog post. “To enable that, we’ll provid...

Female-focused telehealth startup, Teal Health , is popping up today to announce an $8.8 million seed round with a roster of heavy hitting investors on board — including (Serena Williams’) Serena Ventures, ( Chelsea Clinton’s) Metrodora Ventures, and (Laurene Powell Jobs’) Emerson Collective. The February 2020-founded San Francisco-based startup’s first product will be a service that supports women to collect their own sample for cervical cancer screening in the comfort of their own home. It wants to tackle the problem of women not getting screened — either because the traditional route of going to a doctor’s surgery for a pap smear (using a speculum ) is uncomfortable or inconvenient or both. Teal has developed a novel device for women to self collect a sample to mail off for lab analysis. Its websites refers to this device as a “collection wand” — and we gather there’s a sponge involved — but details of what exactly it looks like and how it will function remain under wraps as...

Despite continuing talk about a possible recession , slumping tech stocks  and a slowdown in the world of startup investing, the business of funding was positively humming last week. After slowing way down last spring, venture outfits disclosed a stunning $8 billion in new capital commitments in the span of just five days. Consider the following: NEA revealed that it closed its two newest funds adding up to $6.2 billion ; Cowboy Ventures announced two funds totaling $260 million ; and FJ Labs also disclosed two funds totaling $260 million . Then there’s Sapphire Sport (it closed a second fund of $181 million ), Volition Capital (it announced $675 million for its fifth fund), Kearny Jackson ( $14 million ) and Dimension ( $350 million ). Even non-U.S. outfits got into the act, including Highland Europe, which announced a new €1 billion fund, and a Japanese chemical giant that revealed a $100 million fund. So what’s going on exactly? Are we already through this downturn? While i...

Sovereign Labs has raised $7.4 million in seed funding led by Haun Ventures, co-founders Preston Evans and Cem Özer told TechCrunch. The startup is building an “open, interconnected rollup ecosystem” with a software development kit (SDK) to provide a framework for secure and interoperable zero-knowledge rollups (ZK-rollups). “Sovereign’s goal has always been to make scaling [blockchains] simple,” Özer said. “For people who have been in this space for four-plus years, it’s pretty clear that rollups and ZK-rollups are the way to scale blockchains to the masses.” A rollup is a blockchain that gets security from another blockchain, so it’s a way to add functionality to an existing chain without sacrificing security, Evans said. Rollups can be used to support different use cases like tokens, NFTs, smart contracts and so on — but they’re cheaper to operate because they outsource transactions. The capital will be used to build its SDK and hire protocol engineers and researchers with exp...

With the economy teetering on recession , and sales of mobile phones and other consumer electronics slowing down globally, a U.K. startup called Raylo that’s leaning into both of those themes has picked up £110 million ($136 million) to grow its business, offering consumers access to new gadgets by way of short-term leases. The London-based company currently operates in the U.K. selling monthly subscriptions for phones, tablets and laptops, and it plans to use the funding both to expand that list to a wider range of gadgets like e-bikes, as well as to continue investing in its tech, which includes an AI-based platform to assess risk for each sale, recommendation tech and a platform called “Raylo Pay” that is embedded by third-party merchants for Raylo to power leasing services for them. The circular aspect of its sales model, the company said, is also the basis of another development at the business: Raylo said it now has “ B Corp ” status — which signifies that as a for-profit com...

It’s hard to develop a personal note taking habit. Many folks just resort to using a default app like Apple’s Notes app or sending something to themselves on Slack. It’s fine if you just need to jot down a note or two, but it becomes hard to organize and search for them later. Stashpad is working on a solution for that issue — especially for developers and product managers. Stashpad is an app that runs on all desktop platforms (Intel and M1 Mac, Windows and Linux). When you first launch the application, it has a minimal learning curve for getting started — you can just start typing in notes. You can put these notes under one Stack for a project  — think of this as creating a folder. There is also an option of creating a sub-stack (no, not that one) under a folder. All stacks open up as tabs on top of the app, and there is an option of pinning tabs for easy access. The app also has a “Sticky” mode, which makes it easier to take notes during a video call. Image Credits: Stashpa...

French startup Sorare has signed a four-year licensing partnership with the Premier League. This is an important move for the company as the English football league is one of the most-watched sports league in the world. Sorare is a fantasy sports gaming experience based on NFTs, or non-fungible tokens. In particular, Sorare has partnered with many football leagues so that it can create trading cards representing football players. Each card is registered as a unique token on the Ethereum blockchain. Sorare players can buy and sell cards from other players. They can then put together a lineup of five players and earn points based on real-life performances. Sorare frequently issues new cards on the platforms that users can buy to add to their personal collections — that’s how the company generates revenue. And the startup has been quite successful so far. It raised a gigantic $680 million Series B round and signed partnerships with many clubs and football organizations including Spai...

After a decade of frantic growth, China’s smartphone market is hitting a speed bump as COVID-19 roils the world’s second-largest economy. The country’s smartphone shipments dropped 14% year-over-year in 2022, reaching a ten-year low, according to research firm Counterpoint. It was also the first time that China’s handset sales had slid below 300 million units in ten years, according to Canalys. Even in December, which has historically seen seasonal jumps in sales, China recorded a 5% quarter-to-quarter decline in smartphone shipments. The three-year-long stringent “zero-COVID” policy that disrupted businesses and dampened consumer confidence, coupled with macroeconomic headwinds, spelled an end to China’s years of double-digit growth. Troubles mounted when the abrupt relaxation of COVID-19 restrictions in early December resulted in a surge in cases, further adding pressure to the waning economy. Last year, China’s GDP grew 3%, its lowest in decades other than 2020. Alibaba’s annua...

Founded by two insurance industry veterans, Eazy Digital wants to give small insurance companies in Southeast Asia the same advantage as their larger competitors. Its SaaS platform lets insurers digitize many parts of their operations, enabling them to scale up more efficiently. The Bangkok-based startup announced today it has raised $850,000 in an oversubscribed seed round led by Wavemaker Partners, with participation from Seedstars International Ventures, Wing Vasiksiri and Sasin Bangkok Venture Club. Eazy Digital was founded last year by Haprem Doowa and Maethavee Sukul. Doowa was previously co-founder and CEO of Frank Insurance, an online digital broker in Thailand that was acquired by Bolttech in 2021. Sukul was head of operations at Frank, Bolttech Insurance Broker and digital health insurance broker Benix. Eazy Digital co-founder Haprem Doowa Doowa told TechCrunch that while working together at Frank, he and Sukul “both realized that the insurance industry was plagued wi...

Welcome to  The Interchange ! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up  here  so you can receive it directly in the future. Every week, I’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. This will include everything from funding rounds to trends to an analysis of a particular space to hot takes on a particular company or phenomenon. There’s a lot of fintech news out there and it’s my job to stay on top of it — and make sense of it — so you can stay in the know. —  Mary Ann Stripe eyes exit, reportedly tried raising at a lower valuation The big news in fintech this week revolved around payments giant Stripe . On January 26, my Equity Podcast co-host and overall amazingly talented reporter Natasha Mascarenhas and I teamed up to write about how Stripe had set a 12-month deadline for itself to go public, either through a direct listing or by pursuin...