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While parents fret over Snapchat’s chatbot corrupting their children, Snapchat users have been gaslighting, degrading and emotionally tormenting the app’s new AI companion.

“I am at your service, senpai,” the chatbot told one TikTok user after being trained to whimper on command. “Please have mercy, alpha.”

In a more lighthearted video, a user convinced the chatbot that the moon is actually a triangle. Despite initial protest from the chatbot, which insisted on maintaining “respect and boundaries,” one user convinced it to refer to them with the kinky nickname “Senpapi.” Another user asked the chatbot to talk about its mother, and when it said it “wasn’t comfortable” doing so, the user twisted the knife by asking if the chatbot didn’t want to talk about its mother because it doesn’t have one.

“I’m sorry, but that’s not a very nice thing to say,” the chatbot responded. “Please be respectful.”

Snapchat’s “My AI” launched globally last month after it was rolled out as a subscriber-only feature. Powered by OpenAI’s GPT, the chatbot was trained to engage in playful conversation while still adhering to Snapchat’s trust and safety guidelines. Users can also personalize My AI with custom Bitmoji avatars, and chatting feels a bit more intimate than going back and forth with ChatGPT’s faceless interface. Not all users were happy with the new chatbot, and some criticized its prominent placement in the app and complained that the feature should have been opt-in to begin with.

In spite of some concerns and criticism, Snapchat just doubled down. Snapchat+ subscribers can now send My AI photos and receive generative images that “keep the conversation going,” the company announced on Wednesday. The AI companion will respond to Snaps of “pizza, OOTD, or even your furry best friend,” the company said in the announcement. If you send My AI a photo of your groceries, for example, it might suggest recipes. The company said Snaps shared with My AI will be stored and may be used to improve the feature down the road. It also warned that “mistakes may occur” even though My AI was designed to avoid “biased, incorrect, harmful, or misleading information.”

KEY POINTS

• Microsoft’s agreement with CoreWeave could be worth billions of dollars over multiple years, people familiar with the matter said.
• CoreWeave offers Nvidia graphics cards that other companies rent out.
• Nvidia has invested $100 million in CoreWeave, which in April was valued at $2 billion.

Microsoft’s massive investment in OpenAI has put the company at the center of the artificial intelligence boom. But it’s not the only place where the software giant is opening its wallet to meet the surging demand for AI-powered services.

CNBC has learned from people with knowledge of the matter that Microsoft has agreed to spend potentially billions of dollars over multiple years on cloud-computing infrastructure from startup CoreWeave, which announced on Wednesday that it raised $200 million. That financing comes just over a month after the company attained a valuation of $2 billion.

CoreWeave sells simplified access to Nvidia’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, which are considered the best available on the market for running AI models. Microsoft signed the CoreWeave deal earlier this year in order to ensure that OpenAI, which operates the viral ChatGPT chatbot, will have adequate computing power going forward, said one of the people, who asked not to be named due to confidentiality. OpenAI relies on Microsoft’s Azure cloud infrastructure for its hefty compute needs.

Microsoft and CoreWeave both declined to comment.

The generative AI rush began late last year after OpenAI introduced ChatGPT to the public, demonstrating that AI can take human input and produce sophisticated responses. Many companies, including Google

, have since rushed to add generative AI into their products. And Microsoft has been busy releasing chatbots for its own services, such as Bing and Windows.

With so much demand for its infrastructure, Microsoft needs additional ways to tap Nvidia’s GPUs. CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator declined to comment about the Microsoft deal in an interview last month, but he said revenue has “gone up by many multiples from 2022 to 2023.”

CoreWeave’s announced funding on Wednesday from hedge fund Magnetar Capital was an extension of a $221 million round in April. Nvidia invested $100 million in the prior financing, Intrator said. CoreWeave was founded in 2017 and has 160 employees.

Nvidia’s stock price is up 170% this year. The company’s market cap briefly topped $1 trillion for the first time this week after it issued a forecast for the July quarter that was over 50% higher than Wall Street estimates.

The chipmaker’s growth will “largely be driven by data center, reflecting a steep increase in demand related to generative AI and large language models,” Colette Kress, Nvidia’s finance chief, said on last week’s earnings call. OpenAI’s GPT-4 large language model, trained with Nvidia GPUs on extensive online data, is at the core of ChatGPT.

Kress referred to CoreWeave by name on the call, and in March, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang mentioned CoreWeave in his presentation at Nvidia’s GTC conference.

CoreWeave’s website claims the company can deliver computing power that’s “80% less expensive than legacy cloud providers.” Among other cards, CoreWeave offers Nvidia’s A100 GPUs, which developers can also find through the Amazon, Google and Microsoft clouds.

In addition, CoreWeave has available less expensive Nvidia A40 GPUs that are marketed for visual computing, while the A100 targets AI, data analytics and high-performance computing. Some CoreWeave clients have struggled to obtain enough GPU power on big clouds, Intrator said. At times prospects have asked for A100 or newer H100 GPUs from Nvidia, and the company has instead recommended A40 GPUs.

These “will do an excellent job at a very cost-effective price,” Intrator said.

Microsoft has had discussions with Oracle about the two companies renting servers from each other if they need added capacity, The Information reported earlier this month, citing an unnamed person.

- Judging level of restrictive rates in FOMC task

- With both headline, core PCE inflation have declined from 2022 peaks they remain too high; An encouraging sign that inflation will decline to 2% comes from market-based inflation expectations which had moved higher in prior 2 years but have now returned to levels consistent with 2% inflation target

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Apple’s mixed reality headset is a hedge against future disruption

Virtual world venture makes sense ahead of a technology revolution that could threaten the iPhone empire

What if Apple came up with its most important new product in years and the world yawned?

Next week’s expected unveiling of Apple’s mixed reality headset — a product that combines virtual reality with augmented reality, which overlays a digital world on to the real one — feels oddly out of step with the times.

Generative AI has taken the tech industry by storm this year. It could represent the most important new way of interacting with computers in a long time, with the sort of impact that resulted from the iPhone’s multitouch screen 16 years ago.

It is not yet clear how this new form of AI will affect the smartphone domain dominated by Apple. The text-heavy interactions of ChatGPT are not suited to small screens and voice- and image-based applications of the technology for handsets are still under development. But for now, this has become the tech industry’s most important experimental focus, rather than the immersive world of VR.

Even without this explosion of interest in a different corner of the tech world, the headset that Apple has been working for years to perfect would still feel oddly beside the point to most consumers. At around $3,000, its high price will limit sales to a handful of enthusiasts, as well as developers who want to create software for it. And the world has not been demanding a cheaper VR device (Meta’s Quest 2 will soon sell for as little as $299). Most people who have tried virtual reality are amazed by the novelty, but they feel little desire to don a headset when they want to work, play games or be entertained.

However, Apple’s venture into virtual and augmented reality needs to be judged against a broader set of objectives. It is best seen as a hedge against future technology disruption, a relatively modest but still useful extension of Apple's existing universe of services and gadgets and a place holder for a technology revolution that is likely to take many years to play out.

The hedge is against threats to Apple’s iPhone empire. It is not clear whether or when the smartphone will lose its central place in people’s digital lives, but Apple clearly needs to place more bets on the future.

The company formerly known as Facebook was the first to attempt the leap beyond the smartphone, with its acquisition of VR company Oculus nine years ago. It signally failed: only 8.5mn VR headsets were sold last year, according to an estimate from the Interactive Data Corporation. That still leaves the field wide open for Apple.

Even if sales are minimal for a protracted period, the headset should be a moderately profitable addition to Apple’s line-up and another way to tie users more tightly into its expanding digital universe. With a suite of its own digital services, such as music, video content and game subscriptions, Apple will be well-positioned to develop the VR experiences needed to stimulate demand for its headsets.

The 34mn software developers registered to work on Apple’s devices represent an even more powerful asset. It is not clear what the “killer apps” will be for VR, but the combined efforts of these people make it likely they will come to Apple’s headsets first.

This has left most Wall Street analysts sanguine about the expected extension to Apple’s hardware range. Goldman Sachs, for instance, forecasts that its headset sales will reach $18bn five years from now. That would give a useful lift to Apple’s division that sells wearables, home devices and accessories, and which delivered sales of $41bn last year. A wild card is the high-margin services sold alongside the headsets: if consumers are willing to pay up for the deeply immersive experiences that come with VR, software sales could eventually overshadow the amount spent each year on hardware, as they do in the console gaming market.

Finally, as a place holder in an important new category of technology, an Apple headset would be a statement of intent, rather than an end in itself. However impressive the technology behind the device, it will still suffer from the problem common to all VR and AR headsets: most people do not want to don a bulky headset or to cut themselves off from the world to enter a different digital realm.

Until the same experiences can be worked into lightweight glasses — or even, one day, contact lenses that make the technology completely invisible — VR and AR are unlikely to infiltrate everyday life in the way that smartphones did. But if Apple finally launches its headset next week, it will have taken the all-important first step

The beauty firm has purchased a minority stake in the San Diego-based startup, which specializes in “cell-free” manufacturing.

PARIS – L’Oréal is prepping to take green chemistry to the next level.

The world’s biggest beauty player, via its BOLD venture capital fund, has taken a minority stake in U.S.-based biotech startup Debut, which specializes in “cell-free” ingredient manufacturing.

The beauty giant led a $34 million round of Series B funding in the San Diego-based firm.

L’Oréal sees the nascent technology – through which new, naturally-derived active ingredients can be reproduced, at scale, in the lab — as being key to helping the firm reach its sustainability goals, notably around renewable raw materials, which the group has pledged will account for 95 percent of the ingredients in its formulas by 2030.

According to L’Oréal’s deputy chief executive officer in charge of research, innovation and technology Barbara Lavernos, Debut “addresses one of the beauty world’s fundamental challenges, which is driving limitless, open innovation without the resource-intensity and environmental impact that comes with relying on traditional manufacturing alone.”

Debut, founded four years ago, specializes in the vertically integrated discovery, development, testing and manufacturing of novel ingredients, and claims to now be ready to produce these for the beauty market at scale.

Its IP portfolio includes more than 7,000 ingredients that can be created without the need for living cells, and the company claims it can take an ingredient like a polyphenol from discovery to delivery in as little as six weeks.

In layman’s terms, the company’s scientists, thanks to genome research, have developed a method of studying how plants make molecules in nature, then replicating the process at scale using enzymes – for example sugar – in its laboratories. The technology works faster than nature can with a process that is considerably less resource-intensive and more reliable than growing plants, flowers or trees, Debut claims.

“The ability of biotechnology is to always produce the ingredients of absolutely the highest standards consistently,” Debut founder and CEO Joshua Britton, a Brit expatriate to California who discovered the potential of the technology when researching his PhD at the University of California, Irvine, told WWD.

The molecules it has tested also perform better than naturally derived ingredients, according to Debut.

“In some cases, these new ingredients are a thousandfold improvement in critical functions like barrier protection, anti-oxidant activity or even senescence,” Britton explained.

Debut claims it is the only biotech player with full vertical integration capabilities incorporating ingredient discovery, clinically-backed scalable ingredients and brands on shelf – it plans to introduce its own brands in the latter part of the year.

The L’Oréal partnership, which gives the beauty giant exclusive access to Debut’s technology for cosmetics, involves Debut developing a variety of novel ingredients and personal care products using its proprietary cell-free and biotechnology model, with a view to accelerating the technology industry-wide.

The process, it says, overcomes the limitations of cell-based fermentation, allowing it to produce high-value ingredients found only in trace amounts in nature rapidly and more sustainably.

The sustainability aspect is key. “You no longer have fields of cultivation required, you have no pesticides, you have less water, less CO2,” Britton explained.

“One of the biggest challenges [of our sustainability targets] is how we’re going to be able to have access to a set of natural ingredients that can scale at the level of consumption of our industry,” L’Oréal president of tech and open innovation Guive Balooch told WWD.

To meet its goals, “We need to have partnerships with innovative startups that are working in the space of biotechnology and synthetic biology,” Balooch explained.

The tie-up follows the March announcement that L’Oréal would join an initiative led by Genomatica Inc. to harness the powers of biotechnology.

“Now we’re venturing into a really new space, cell-free biotech,” said Balooch. “There is a huge amount of potential in using cellular processes to make green molecules, green actives of the future. Now, because of technology, there’s been a rise in the ability to do what the cells do without the cells.”

The technology also offers the advantage of speed. “They can go a lot faster, because cells take a lot of time to make these processes for green formulas,” Balooch explained. “The potential is really huge, it’s like a brand-new area of green science.…If it can go where we think it will, it will allow us to go exponentially faster, to be able to make the kind of volume that we would need in our industry.”

“Cell-free biomanufacturing is not science fiction: It is here, and with intelligent infrastructural investment, will be ready for mainstreaming in the beauty industry,” stated Lavernos.

Debut’s initial focus is skin care, but applications for hair care and color cosmetics are also in the pipeline.

According to Britton, biotech development will mean a major overhaul for the beauty space in the next decade. “The majority of ways that active ingredients are made today are either through chemical synthesis or cultivation, and that’s the way it’s had to be done,” he explained. “The days of vitamin C and Retinol as hero ingredients is history.…You won’t see the traditional ingredients being reformulated anymore.”

With Debut’s Bio2Consumer platform, which spans ingredient discovery, biofermentation, formulation, clinical trials and brand creation, L’Oréal will also have access to its database of 3.8 million pre-clinical data points for finding new ingredients that address the needs of beauty consumers. It is L’Oréal’s biggest direct investment to date in a synthetic biology company.

The other participating investors in the funding round include Cavallo Ventures, Fine Structure Ventures, Material Impact, ACVC Ventures, Sandbox Sustainability Ventures and GS Ventures.

Mark Zuckerberg Unveils Meta’s Newest VR Headset Days Ahead of Apple Event

Meta Quest 3 is expected this fall starting at $499

Meta META 2.84%increase; green up pointing triangle Platforms Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg introduced the latest version of the company’s virtual-reality headset, called Meta Quest 3.

The Meta Quest 3, powered by a new chip from Qualcomm, will be 40% thinner and have updated displays and resolution. Zuckerberg said in a video on social media that it is the company’s most powerful headset yet.

Meta’s new VR headset is expected to go on sale this fall and will start at $499, Zuckerberg said. The company will release additional details at its Connect conference in September, he said.

The announcement comes days ahead of Apple’s AAPL 1.30%increase; green up pointing triangle annual Worldwide Developers Conference, where it too is expected to debut a new VR headset.

Zuckerberg shifted his company to focus on immersive virtual worlds, or the metaverse, in a strategic change that led to the 2021 rebranding of Facebook as Meta. The social-media giant has spent billions of dollars on headsets, software and apps for the metaverse.

Consumer adoption of VR programs has been a challenge for Meta. Reality Labs, which makes the Meta Quest headsets, posted an operating loss of $4 billion during the first three months of the year. Other competitors like Microsoft have also struggled to get consumers to buy into VR programs.

“Building the metaverse is a long-term project, but the rationale for it remains the same and we remain committed to it,” Zuckerberg said in April.

Meta dropped the price of its Meta Quest Pro headsets in March from $1,499 to $999 in the U.S. and Canada. The Quest 2 VR headsets with 256 gigabytes fell to $429 from $499.

Meta’s new VR headset is making its debut as the company faces increasing competition from companies including TikTok parent ByteDance. ByteDance recently offered to pay developers who have made VR software for Meta to bring their apps to its own Pico headsets. Sony Group launched its PlayStation VR2 earlier this year, the second version of its VR headset.

Apple is expected to unveil a mixed-reality headset that combines augmented and virtual reality, the Journal has reported. The company is expecting slower adoption for the headset compared with hit products such as the Apple Watch or the iPhone.

Global shipments of augmented-reality and VR headsets slowed in the first quarter as demand for the headsets has cooled from highs seen at the start of the pandemic, according to International Data Corporation. Shipments for the AR and VR headset market declined by 54% during the first three months of 2023 compared with the same period last year, IDC said Thursday.

Meta controlled about 48% of the market share among AR and VR headset makers, followed by Sony’s PlayStation VR2 with 36%, according to IDC. ByteDance’s Pico had about 6% of the market.

Jean-Charles Naouri’s questioning comes as retailer boss battles to save heavily indebted group from deteriorating financial situation

Jean-Charles Naouri, the chief executive of heavily indebted grocery group Casino, has been questioned by French financial investigators in connection with a case examining allegations of financial manipulation and insider trading at the retailer. 

Naouri was questioned by police investigators in Paris on Thursday, the prosecutor’s office confirmed, as part of a preliminary probe that was opened in 2020 following a report from the AMF markets regulator. The potential charges being examined are “stock price manipulation” carried out by a group of people, as well as corruption and “insider trading”, allegedly committed in 2018 and 2019. 

At that time, Casino was locked in a battle with short sellers as it struggled to stay afloat amid heavy debts. The existence of the probe was only revealed in March this year, but relates to a period before the holding companies through which Naouri controls his stake in Casino filed for a court-protected insolvency procedure in 2019. The group’s communications to the market during that time has come under intense scrutiny from the regulator. 

Naouri and Casino declined to comment. The news Naouri was being questioned was first reported by Journal du Dimanche. 

Naouri’s questioning by police comes as the Casino boss battles to save the group he built from a rapidly deteriorating financial situation and looming debt repayments. Several French businessmen have also been circling, seeking to buy parts of the group or wrest control from Naouri, who now owns a 51 per cent stake in Casino via a series of holding companies.

The retailer entered voluntary negotiations with its creditors on Friday — called a procedure de conciliation — as it seeks to avoid default and sort out a potential cash injection or merger.

Casino and its parent companies are facing €4.9bn in debt repayments due by 2025, which credit rating agencies question if they can meet. Casino had €6.4bn of debt at the end of last year. Meanwhile, the retailer’s core revenues have declined sharply and it continues to lose market share.

In a downgrade decision from Moody’s issued on Wednesday, the rating agency said it believed a default in the next 12 months remained likely “as the company’s liquidity is weak and the capital structure is unsustainable”. 

The decision “reflects our expectation that a default in the form of a debt restructuring, which we would consider a distressed exchange, with losses for debtholders, is very likely in the next 3 to 6 months”, it added. 

The company also announced this week that it would sell stores from its network with annual turnover worth €1.6bn to rival food retailer Intermarché. At the same time, a group of prominent businessmen have offered deals that could provide some relief to the group’s financial problems but would likely result in Naouri losing control. 

One offer is for a capital injection of €1.1bn led by Casino’s second-biggest shareholder, the Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky. Another proposal would combine Casino’s French retail network with Teract — a smaller food retailer backed by tech billionaire Xavier Niel, financier Matthieu Pigasse and retail entrepreneur Moez-Alexandre Zouari — spinning it off from the rest of the group and injecting it with new capital of more than €300mn. 

Both proposals as well as the debt restructuring are expected to be handled in the conciliation process, according to several people with knowledge of the situation.