Tech
BuzzFeed debuts AI slop apps in bid for new revenue
BuzzFeed, the U.S.-based media company known best for its quizzes, listicles, and, for a time, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism division, is reinventing itself for the AI era. At least, that’s the pitch.
At the SXSW conference in Austin, BuzzFeed co-founder and CEO Jonah Peretti introduced the company’s next media foray: a spin-off called Branch Office, which will explore artificial intelligence in consumer-facing apps designed for creativity and connection.
The new company is an extension of the experiments BuzzFeed has run for years using AI technology, Peretti explained, in a halting presentation that began with slideshow glitches, before moving on to app demos met with silence or a polite tittering.
“We’ve been working on this secretly for over a year, and we’ve learned a lot from the BuzzFeed platform about what is coming with new kinds of AI formats,” Peretti said. “Using AI is the way of connecting people, building community around these pillars of culture, and taste, and community.”
Bill Shouldis, a director of product at BuzzFeed and the founder of Branch Office, presented two of the company’s new apps: BF Island and Conjure.
The first product, BF Island, is a group chat platform offering features for changing and editing photos using AI. This is not exactly groundbreaking tech in and of itself, but that’s not the point.
The key feature here is not the AI toolset but the in-app library of online trends and memes, created by an editorial team, which could inspire users to create AI photos referencing blink-and-you-miss-it trends like the McDonald’s CEO taste-testing a burger or the “frame-mogging” drama. (If you don’t know what these are, you’re probably not the “very online” audience that’s being targeted.)
The other app, Conjure, is similar to BeReal — the once-a-day temporary photo app — except that it instead appears to guide users to take daily photos of things besides themselves. (As a reminder, BeReal didn’t stick, ultimately exiting to Voodoo after losing traction.) In the demo, for instance, the photo prompt was “What lies between the trees and the moon?,” leading the users to snap a photo of the night sky. A series of spooky images flashed on the screen, followed by a whispered, “What will you conjure?”
We don’t get it, and clearly the audience didn’t either. After the demo, a lone cough could be heard among the silence, followed by uncomfortable laughter.
Shouldis then noted that AI is involved in Conjure, too, as the app has an “AI spirit for a CEO.” (Again, what?)
Peretti also introduced Quiz Party, a social app that lets you take BuzzFeed quizzes with friends and share your results.
BuzzFeed’s underwhelming presentation comes only days after the media company shared that it has “substantial doubt” about its ability to continue as a business and was engaging in strategic conversations focused on fixing its liquidity challenges. The company, which had a net loss of $57.3 million last year, said it would focus this year on its Studio IP and new AI apps, like these.
But even the tech-forward audience at SXSW was not convinced.
As one person pointed out during the Q&A session after the presentation, BeReal had struggled to get people to come back after the novelty wore off. What would an app like Conjure do to combat the same sort of retention problem?
Shouldis said that the app would evolve “and have different types of things happening and not just be exactly what it is today.” He referenced the potential to integrate things like video, audio, and prototyping with Claude Code to build community.
The premise behind the new apps is not unreasonable: AI can lead to faster software development, which makes it possible for companies to more quickly iterate and keep people engaged.
“In a way, software is the new content,” Peretti noted.
Of course, before you can iterate, you have to attract users. With its new apps, BuzzFeed seems to have thought more about what AI can do than what people want to do with AI, which is not a recipe for success.
Tech
Amazon working on new smartphone with Alexa at its core, report says
Looks like Amazon’s getting back into the smartphone game. More than 11 years after the e-commerce giant pulled the plug on its failed first effort, the Fire Phone, the company is now developing a new smartphone codenamed “Transformer,” Reuters reported, citing anonymous sources.
The device is being developed by the company’s Devices and Services division, and it would feature personalized features that would make it easier to use Amazon’s suite of apps, including Amazon Shopping, Prime Video, and Prime Music, the report said.
The smartphone would also support Alexa, the smart home assistant that Amazon has been investing heavily in, adding AI chops and expanding support to work with most of the company’s devices. AI features are said to be a big focus for the smartphone, which is being seen internally as a way to encourage Amazon customers to use its AI products, Reuters reported.
The smartphone is said to be developed by a relatively new unit within the Devices division called ZeroOne, which is led by J Allard, a former Microsoft executive who helped create the Xbox.
The news comes as Amazon has been going all-in on AI, investing $50 billion into OpenAI recently, and projecting $200 billion in capital expenditures toward its AI, chips, and robotics efforts in 2026.
The company spent more than a year revamping its Alexa assistant with generative AI features, finally launching it this February as Alexa+. The assistant keeps its smart home chops, and can now do most things that other AI chatbots can — like planning an itinerary for a trip, updating a shared calendar, finding and saving recipes to a library, making movie recommendations, helping with homework, exploring a topic, and more.
Amazon declined to comment.
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Tech
Cyberattack on vehicle breathalyzer company leaves drivers stranded across the US
A cyberattack on a U.S. vehicle breathalyzer company has left drivers across the United States stranded and unable to start their vehicles.
The company, Intoxalock, says on its website that it is “currently experiencing downtime” after a cyberattack on March 14. Intoxalock sells breathalyzer devices that fit into vehicle ignition switches, and is used by people who are required to provide a negative alcohol breath sample to start their car.
Intoxalock spokesperson Rachael Larson confirmed to TechCrunch that the company had been hit by a cyberattack. Larson said the company took steps to “temporarily pause some of our systems as a precautionary measure.”
These breathalyzer devices need to be calibrated every few months or so, but the cyberattack has left Intoxalock unable to perform these calibrations. The company said customers whose devices require calibration may experience delays starting their vehicles.
Drivers posting on Reddit say that cars are unable to start if they miss a calibration, effectively locking drivers out of their vehicles.
According to local news reports across Maine, drivers are experiencing lockouts and some have been unable to start their vehicles. One auto shop in Middleboro told WCVB 5 in Boston that it has had cars parked in its lot all week due to the cyberattack.
News reports from across the United States show drivers are affected from New York to Minnesota, and drivers have been unable to drive because their vehicle-based breathalyzers cannot be immediately calibrated.
Intoxalock would not say what kind of cyberattack it was experiencing, such as ransomware or if there was a data breach, or whether it had received any communications from the hackers, including any ransom demands. The company’s technology is used in 46 states, its website says, and it claims to provide services to 150,000 drivers every year.
Intoxalock did not provide an estimated timeline for its recovery.
Tech
AI startups are eating the venture industry and the returns, so far, are good
Well, the data is out. AI startups accounted for 41% of the $128 billion in venture dollars raised by companies on Carta last year — a record-high annual share. In a sense, though, we knew that. Investors last year were voracious in deploying capital to AI startups, to the point that 10% of startups accounted for half of the funding.
Those startups included Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI, which raised double-digit billions last year at sky-high valuations. Actually, they are still raising at an even more astounding velocity. In January, xAI raised a $20 billion Series E. In February, OpenAI snagged a $110 billon round, one of the largest private rounds ever raised, bringing the company closer than ever to a $1 trillion valuation.
Size-wise, in between OpenAI and xAI was Anthropic, which raised a $30 billion Series G last month at a $380 billion valuation. OpenAI and Anthropic accounted for a heavy chunk of the $189 billion in global venture capital raised last month and, alongside xAI, have teased IPOs for later this year that have left investors foaming at the mouth.
The state of the venture market is now K-shaped — or bifurcated — in which capital remains concentrated in a select few firms that then back a handful of companies, while everyone else is, well, kinda just there.
“While funding rounds have gotten slightly harder to raise, the capital for each round has increased,” Peter Walker, head of insights at Carta, told TechCrunch. “So fewer bets, but more capital. AI startups are raising bigger rounds not because they have lots of employees — they don’t — but because the cost of running AI models is high.”
The latest Carta data also shows that funds raised in 2023 and 2024 (after the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022) have posted the highest internal rate of return (IRR), compared with the declining IRR of funds raised between 2017 and 2020. The report views the increased IRR over the past few years as a positive indicator for the funds backing some of the leading startups emerging from this AI moment.
“It’s promising that the younger funds have seen IRR start strong,” Walker said, adding, however, that there were a few factors to consider. For one, he said, newer funds might look like they are doing well on paper because if they invested in a seed round, for example, and that company went on to raise a Series A at a higher valuation, then on paper it looks like the investor made high returns in a short time period.
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“This pushes IRR up,” Walker said. “It is also likely that the portfolios of the more recent vintage funds are full of AI-native startups in a way that the portfolios of 2021/2020 funds are not.”
Time will tell if this early enthusiasm will translate into real returns for investors via exits like blockbuster IPOs or big-dollar acquisitions, or if we are merely in the hype phase of a bubble that will eventually pop.
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