Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks during the Microsoft Build conference at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, on May 21, 2024.
Jason Redmond | AFP | Getty Images
Microsoft will no longer ship Recall, an artificial intelligence tool that tracks user activity, when the company releases the Copilot+ PC next week, it announced in a blog post on Thursday following concerns about privacy and security.
The company wrote that Recall will shift from being a “broadly available” tool to a preview feature available only through the Windows Insiders Program, or WIP, when the new computer is released on June 18. Microsoft plans to make the AI feature available on all Copilot+ PCs soon after they receive feedback through WIP.
“This decision is rooted in our commitment to providing a trusted, secure and robust experience for all customers,” Windows Corporate Vice President Pavan Davuluri wrote in the blog post.
Microsoft first introduced the Copilot+ PC on May 20 as a computer designed to run advanced AI programs, including Recall. Recall is an AI tool that regularly takes screenshots to create a record of activity, allowing users to search for their previous actions.
Recall became a source of controversy soon after it was announced. Industry experts have expressed concern over the potential for hackers to develop tools that can retrieve user information, including usernames and passwords.
In response to the backlash, Microsoft initially announced that the Recall feature would be turned off by default, requiring users to opt in. The company also implemented additional security protections, including an encrypted search database and a requirement that Recall users enroll in Windows Hello, which has users prove their identity through a PIN, fingerprint or facial recognition.
Microsoft’s decision to delay Recall follows heightened concerns around security as the AI field evolves rapidly. Last month, a U.S. government review board criticized the company’s handling of China’s breach of U.S. government officials’ email accounts.
Amazon said Thursday it has removed 95% of the plastic air pillows from its packaging in North America and will replace them with paper fillers made from 100% recycled content.
It marks Amazon’s largest plastic-packaging reduction effort and will help it remove nearly 15 billion plastic pillows annually.
“We are working towards full removal in North America by end of year and will continue to innovate, test, and scale in order to prioritize curbside recyclable materials,” VP of Mechatronics and Sustainable Packaging Pat Lindner said in the announcement.
The e-commerce company began transitioning away from plastic filler in October 2023 when it announced its first U.S. automated fulfillment center to eliminate plastic-delivery packaging. Amazon collaborated with suppliers to instead source paper fillers that are also curbside recyclable.
This is not the first step that Amazon has taken to reduce its packaging waste. In 2015, the company launched the Ships in Product Packaging program, an initiative designed to reduce the use of Amazon’s signature brown box and instead ship products in their original packaging.
Kinetic cofounders: CEO Nikhil Naikal, CTO Sander Marques, COO Chris Weber
Courtesy: Kinetic Automation
While electric vehicle demand is still increasing in the U.S., the sales growth rate for cars that pollute less has cooled down in 2024 due partly to the high cost of insurance and repairs for tech-laden new models.
A 2024 study by J.D. Power found that, despite the climate benefits, only 26% of car buyers in the U.S. were “very likely to consider purchasing” an EV in the next year, and more than 20% were “very unlikely to consider an EV purchase” at all.
That’s where Santa Ana, California startup Kinetic Automation comes in. By providing diagnostics and recalibration of the high-tech systems in modern vehicles, the company hopes to decrease costs associated with EV ownership and repairs.
The startup, which employs about 40 people full-time, has developed a robotic system that uses computer vision and machine-learning software to quickly diagnose issues with a vehicle’s digital systems.
Kinetic CEO and co-founder Nikhil Naikal explained that a lot of new models, especially battery electrics, are loaded with bells and whistles such as touchscreens and robust infotainment software, along with a variety of cameras and sensors that enable everything from rapid charging to driver safety features including forward collision avoidance, lane-keeping and adaptive cruise control.
The existing collision repair industry is well-equipped to handle most physical fixes like replacing a bumper, a busted windshield, brakes and paint or adjusting alignment. But for many collision repair centers and auto dealerships, ensuring all sensors, software and computers are working properly can prove time-consuming and expensive.
Kinetic puts its robotic systems and technicians to work helping these shops and dealerships fix the finicky, “digital” aspects of customers’ cars.
Here’s how it works: A customer’s car rolls up to one of Kinetic’s service bays, where it is scanned from bumper to fender with machine vision sensors, some on a robotic arm that peers over the top of the vehicle.
The scan determines which systems need to be precisely programmed or need a recalibration. Then Kinetic’s software, which is connected to the vehicle’s systems, will initiate and track the completion of those fixes.
Kinetic uses robotics and AI to recalibrate the software and sensors in electric vehicles.
Courtesy: Kinetic Automation
The company built its first four service hubs in Las Vegas, and Orange County, San Bernardino and Riverside counties in California.
To fuel its growth, Kinetic has raised $21 million in a Series B round of venture funding led by Menlo Ventures, joined by Allstate Strategic Ventures, Liberty Mutual Strategic Ventures and the company’s earliest investors Lux Capital, Construct Capital and Haystack Ventures.
Menlo Ventures’ Partner Shawn Carolan, who invested in Uber and Jump Bikes, said collision companies and auto dealerships that had worked with Kinetic as pilot customers helped convince his firm to lead the deal.
“They were saying, ‘This reduced our cycle time by days.’ Or ‘We got cars back to customers faster and cheaper,’ and ‘This made my life way easier,'” he explained. “So we knew this was already solving a tremendous pain point.”
Before starting Kinetic with his co-founders, COO Chris Weber and CTO Sander Marques, Naikal worked as the vice president of software engineering at Velodyne, a company that made lidar sensors that enable robots, drones and autonomous vehicles to detect and avoid objects in their surrounding environment. Velodyne merged with Ouster in 2023.
Weber previously worked as an operations leader at Uber, while Marques is a repeat tech entrepreneur whose prior company developed engine control modules for high-performance vehicles.
Kinetic will one day provide its services to robotaxi fleets, Naikal said, and to the owners of other autonomous vehicles. But for now, the startup is focused on hiring, training technicians and building out its service hubs across the U.S. to handle a higher volume of auto repairs, especially the electric vehicles that are growing to comprise a larger portion of cars on U.S. roads each year.
So far, Kinetic has most commonly worked on Ford Mach-E, GM Chevy Bolt, Hyundai Ioniq EVs, and some Teslas at its existing service hubs, the CEO said.
Market research firm Canalys forecasts that sales of battery and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles combined will reach 2.2 million units in 2024 in North America, representing about 12.5% of all new vehicle sales in the region.
“Motor vehicle insurance for EVs, and across the board, has been a major contributor to inflation rising something like 20% when you look at the Consumer Price Index over the last 12 months,” Naikal said. “I’d like to hope we can shave a few points off of that while making people more comfortable switching to electrics.”
OpenAI competitor Anthropic on Thursday announced Claude 3.5 Sonnet, its most powerful artificial intelligence model yet.
Claude is one of the chatbots that, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google‘s Gemini, has exploded in popularity in the past year. Anthropic, which was founded by ex-OpenAI research executives, has backers including Google, Salesforce and Amazon. In the past year, it’s closed five different funding deals totaling about $7.3 billion.
The news follows Anthropic’s debut of its Claude 3 family of models in March and OpenAI’s GPT-4o in May. The company said Claude 3.5 Sonnet is faster than its previous leading model, Claude 3 Opus, and is the first model from Anthropic’s new Claude 3.5 family.
Claude 3.5 Sonnet
Claude 3.5 Sonnet is free from the company’s website, Claude.ai, and in the Claude iPhone app. Claude Pro and Team subscribers can access the latest model with higher rate limits.
“It shows marked improvement in grasping nuance, humor, and complex instructions, and is exceptional at writing high-quality content with a natural, relatable tone,” the company said in a blog post. It can also write, edit and execute code.
Anthropic also announced “Artifacts,” which it said allows a user to ask its Claude chatbot to, for example, generate a text document or code and then opens the result in a dedicated window. “This creates a dynamic workspace where they can see, edit, and build upon Claude’s creations in real-time,” the company said, adding that it expects Artifacts will be useful for code development, legal contract drafting and analysis, business report writing and more.
Claude Artifacts
As startups like Anthropic and OpenAI gain steam in the generative AI business, they — alongside tech giants like Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta — have been part of an AI arms race to integrate the technology to ensure they don’t fall behind in a market that’s predicted to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade.
The plan for businesses, dubbed Team, had been in development over the last few quarters and involved beta-testing with between 30 and 50 customers in industries such as technology, financial services, legal services and health care, Anthropic co-founder Daniela Amodei told CNBC in an interview last month. The idea for the service was partially borne out of many of those same customers asking for a dedicated enterprise product, Amodei added.
“So much of what we were hearing from enterprise businesses is people are kind of using Claude at the office already,” Amodei said at the time.
Last month, shortly after Anthropic’s new product debut, Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger joined the company as chief product officer. Krieger, the former chief technology officer of Meta-owned Instagram, grew the platform to 1 billion users and increased its engineering team to more than 450 people during his time there, per a release. OpenAI’s former safety leader Jan Leike also joined the company in May.
