TNB Tech Minute: Elon Musk’s xAI Launches Stand-Alone App
WSJ Tech News Briefing
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Here's your TMB Tech Minute for Thursday, January the 9th. I'm James Rundle for The Wall Street Journal. Elon Musk's generative artificial intelligence company, XAI, has launched a standalone app for its language model known as Grok. Previously, users could only access the chatbot through X, Musk's social media platform. Musk launched XAI in 2023 to compete with OpenAI, which he co-founded but later left.
Apple is seeking to ease privacy concerns about its Siri voice assistant technology, saying it has never sold data collected by the feature or used it for advertising purposes. The defense comes days after Apple agreed to pay $95 million to settle a class action lawsuit. The suit alleged that the tech giant obtained private conversations through accidental Siri activations and shared them to third parties without consent. Apple has denied wrongdoing in the case.
Apple said it uses on-device processing where possible and that it doesn't retain audio recordings of interactions with Siri unless users opt in to improve the feature. Even then, it said, the recordings are only used for that purpose. And cybersecurity company Wiz has named its new finance chief Fazal Merchant, a former senior executive at DreamWorks who has come out of retirement for the role.
Wiz, which develops products for cloud security, came close to a deal to sell itself to Alphabet in July for $23 billion. The deal fell apart, leading Wiz to plan for an initial public offering. Wiz said Merchant will be responsible for preparing the company for its listing. His most recent executive role was a short stint as the CEO of cybersecurity company Tanium, which he left in 2020.
Since then, he has been advising and serving on company boards. For a deeper dive into what's happening in tech, check out Friday's Tech News Briefing podcast.