Canva is dramatically increasing prices for some customers. Canva Teams subscribers on older pricing plans will see a 300% increase for a five-person plan, jumping from $119.99 per year to $500 per year. Users will get a 40% discount for the first 12 months before the switch takes effect. The company is pointing to its suite of AI-powered design features, including Magic Studio, to justify the price increase.
Google Photos’ AI-powered search feature is rolling out. Powered by Google’s Gemini AI model, Ask Photos lets you search your photos using natural language queries that leverage the AI’s understanding of your photos’ content and other metadata. Hypothetically, the feature could tell you what you ate the last time you were at a certain restaurant or what your child’s last birthday party theme was based on your photo library.
Ilya Sutskever’s AI startup Safe Superintelligence (SSI) has raised over $1 billion in capital. Prior to SSI, Sutskever headed the now-dismantled Superalignment team at OpenAI, which focused on general AI safety research. Sutskever quietly departed OpenAI months after a highly publicized fallout due to a “breakdown in communications.”
This is Read’s Week in Review, where we recap the week’s biggest news. Want this delivered as a newsletter to your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.
A big bump for Bluesky: Bluesky continues to benefit from X’s shutdown in Brazil, having now added more than 2 million new users in a matter of days. Bluesky jumped to becoming the No. 1 app in Brazil after the ban, ahead of Meta’s X competitor, Instagram Threads. Read more
A pretty cool robotic wheelchair: Korea’s Institute of Machinery and Materials has developed an early version of a wheelchair that can climb stairs and traverse rocky terrain by creating a compliant wheel with a “smart chain” structure that conforms to the ground around it. Read more
Anthropic plays catch-up with OpenAI: Anthropic is launching Claude Enterprise, a new subscription plan for its AI chatbot that will compete directly with OpenAI’s business-specific solution, ChatGPT Enterprise. Read more
A tablet combining PC with paper: The new Paper Pro tablet from reMarkable adds color and capability while keeping the philosophy of focus intact. The tablet can also function as a typedeck for a truly focused writing experience. Read more
Spotify’s daylist goes global: Spotify is globally launching daylist, its personalized playlist that evolves throughout the day. Now you can have a “bedroom pop banger early morning” or a “’90s rave rainforest late night” wherever you are. Read more
A new way to terrorize the family group chat: Karo is a task management app that lets you assign tasks to your friends and family. The company says the app’s biggest draw is the ability to send your contacts a reminder without them being on the app. Read more
Salesforce’s big buy: Salesforce has acquired Own Company, a New Jersey-based provider of data management and protection solutions, for $1.9 billion in cash. It’s the company’s biggest deal since buying Slack for $27.7 billion in 2021. Read more
YouTube stops recommending weight-loss videos to teens: YouTube is going to limit teens’ exposure to videos that promote and idealize a certain fitness level or physical appearance. The company has previously faced criticism for exposing teens to content that could encourage eating disorders. Read more
A cyberattack hits Halliburton: Energy giant Halliburton said intruders “accessed and exfiltrated information” following a cyberattack last week. The company says it is “working to identify effects of the incident” on its ongoing oil and fracking operations. Read more
Instagram gives your DMs a face-lift: Instagram is jazzing up the inbox by adding new features for photo editing, sticker creation and themes in an effort to make itself more appealing as a messaging app. Read more
“Emotion AI” is on the rise. Is that a good thing? A new unexpected trend is “emotion AI,” in which companies turn to AI to help bots better understand human emotion. It’s a very Silicon Valley approach: Use technology to solve a problem caused by using technology. But as Julie Bort writes, even if most AI bots will eventually gain some form of automated empathy, that doesn’t mean this solution will really work. Read more
Before Midjourney, there was NightCafe: NightCafe doesn’t get the same publicity as some of its rivals, like Midjourney, but it has an enormous reach of over 25 million users — and it’s still kicking. To pull back the curtain on one of the web’s oldest generative art marketplaces, Kyle Wiggers spoke with co-founder Elle Russell about NightCafe’s origins and where it could evolve from here. Read more
