Google fakes an AI demo, Grand Theft Auto VI goes viral and Spotify cuts jobs

Hey, folks, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter that recaps the past few days in tech. AI stole the headlines once again, with tech giants from Google to X (formerly Twitter) heading off against OpenAI for chatbot supremacy. But plenty happened besides.

In this edition of WiR, we cover Google faking a demo of its new AI model (and giving out offensive notebooks to Black summit attendees), defense startup Anduril unveiling a fighter jet weapon, the continued fallout from the 23andMe hack, and the release of the Grand Theft Auto VI trailer. Also on the roster are stories about patient scans and health records spilling online, Meta’s new AI-powered image generator, Spotify cutting jobs and an autonomous truck startup leaving the U.S.

It’s a lot to get to, so we won’t delay. But first, a reminder to sign up here to receive WiR in your inbox every Saturday if you haven’t already done so.

Most read
AI, faked: Google unveiled a new flagship AI model this week called Gemini. But it didn’t release the full model, Gemini Ultra — only a “lite” version called Gemini Pro. In a press briefing and blog posts, Google touted Gemini’s coding capabilities and multimodal prowess, claiming that the model can understand images, audio and videos just as well as text. But Gemini Pro — which is strictly text-in, text-out — has proven to be mistake-prone. And in a worse look for Google, the company was caught faking a Gemini demo by tuning text prompts with still