The move comes after Bengaluru-based quick home services startup Pronto confirmed it was testing opt-in recordings during household tasks, triggering concerns around surveillance, consent and the use of customer-home data for AI training.

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has taken cognisance of the controversy around Pronto's in-home recording pilot and is looking into the matter, government sources told Moneycontrol, bringing greater regulatory scrutiny to how startups use customer-home data for AI systems.

The development comes after Bengaluru-based home-services startup Pronto confirmed it was testing an opt-in feature involving recordings during cleaning and other household tasks, triggering debate around surveillance, consent and the use of customer-home data for AI training purposes.

The controversy also pushed rival home-services startups to publicly distance themselves from similar practices. Urban Company cofounder Abhiraj Singh Bhal and Snabbit founder Aayush Agarwal denied claims on social media that their companies were actively deploying recording systems inside customer homes.

The issue has drawn attention because of the rapid rise of India’s instant home-services segment, where startups such as Pronto, Snabbit and Urban Company are aggressively expanding rapid cleaning and household assistance offerings. Moneycontrol had earlier reported that combined monthly active users across the three platforms crossed 10 million earlier this year.

Privacy experts say the larger concern is not just the recordings themselves, but the absence of clear regulatory guardrails around how such data could eventually be reused for AI systems.

“Pronto’s collection of personal data has brought to the forefront several uncertainties within the DPDPA, 2023, particularly when it comes to the use of personal information for AI training purposes,” said Kamesh Shekar, Associate Director at The Dialogue, a technology policy think tank.

“Although Pronto may delete the underlying data after 48 hours, concerns remain around prompt-data reuse and the broader challenge that AI-generated inferences cannot simply be ‘unlearned’ like human memory,” he added.

Source: Money Control

The company seems to be positioning Forum as a platform that functions similarly to Reddit, describing the app as a “dedicated space built for deeper discussions, real answers and communities you care about.”

After you sign in with your Facebook account, Forum will load in your groups, profile, and activity, and let you make posts with a nickname, just like on the standard Facebook app. Meta noted that your groups still exist on Facebook, and anything you share on Forum will be visible in your groups on Facebook.

Meta says Forum’s feeds are centered on conversations within groups, allowing users to see “what real people are saying, not just what’s trending,” and making it easy to pick up where they left off.

The app includes an AI-powered “Ask” tab that lets users ask questions and receive answers compiled from discussions across different groups. There’s also an admin AI assistant to help administrators manage groups and moderate content.

Source: Tech Crunch

A new Worker Accounting and Retraining Notification (WARN) report reveals that 606 LinkedIn employees were notified of permanent layoffs last week, which will go into effect on July 13.

The bulk of the layoffs (352) come from their Mountain View, California office, with another 66 remote employees in the same city.

Another 108 employees were laid off at their San Francisco office, plus another 59 at their Sunnyvale office and 21 in Carpinteria.

The layoffs were foreshadowed by an internal memo from LinkedIn CEO Daniel Shapero

“We need to reinvent how we work, with agile teams focused on our highest priorities, and by shifting investments toward areas such as infrastructure to fulfill our mission and vision over the long term. This requires hard prioritization and tradeoffs,” the memo stated.

“Today I’m sharing the difficult decision that I, along with our leadership team, have made to reduce roles across GBO, Marketing, Engineering and Product,” the CEO added.

A 5% cut of the company’s 17,500 employees would result in a cut of 875 jobs, though there is no indication that more could be shown the door at LinkedIn quite yet. The cuts come just weeks after LinkedIn announced in a third-quarter earnings statement that they posted a 12% growth in revenue year-over-year.

Source: New York Post

Google is bringing AI by default into their search box.

Intelligent Search Bar

• Expands for longer queries
• AI-powered query suggestions
• Follow-up questions in AI mode

Search Agents

• Navigate web for users
• Run in the background 24/7
• Track changes across the internet
• Alert users to new information/updates

Agentic Coding

• 'Mini-apps' within Search
• Custom dashboards and trackers
• Turns search results into interactive page

GitHub has since detected and contained a compromise of an employee device involving a poisoned VS Code extension.

GitHub has removed the malicious extension version, isolated the endpoint, and began incident response immediately, according to their claims.

Their current assessment is that the activity involved exfiltration of GitHub-internal repositories only. The attacker’s current claims of ~3,800 repositories are directionally consistent with their investigation so far. They have moved quickly to reduce risk. Critical secrets were rotated yesterday and overnight with the highest-impact credentials prioritized first.

GitHub continues to analyze logs, validate secret rotation, and monitor for any follow-on activity. They have said that they will take additional action as the investigation warrants. They will publish a fuller report once the investigation is complete.

Source: GitHub

This is similar to when Yuri Milner offered to invest in every startup back when Sam was a YC partner.

The deal gives fledgling AI startups guaranteed compute resources and significantly extends their runway by covering heavy API costs.

Some in the community have warned that taking these tokens could be risky. Because OpenAI will get a clear look at how the startups use the tokens, some fear the platform could copy promising ideas and integrate them into its own free or native offerings.

Source: Sam Altman

Anthropic announced Monday it has acquired Stainless, a startup founded by former Stripe engineer Alex Rattray whose software is widely used by rival AI labs, including OpenAI and Google.

Anthropic is gradually winding down Stainless’s general-purpose, hosted services. The startup's engine that automatically creates and updates SDKs will no longer be available to the wider market.

Existing clients will retain full rights and access to the SDKs they have already generated, allowing them to modify and maintain them.

The New York-based startup, founded in 2022, rose to prominence in the emerging AI industry for automating the creation and maintenance of software development kits, or SDKs; the libraries developers use to interact with APIs.

Source: Stainless