# Tech Pivot: AI Compute Reallocation and Premium Market Expansion

**Podcast:** TechCrunch Daily Crunch
**Published:** 2026-03-31

## Transcript

This is TechCrunch.
Stimmt, krass.
Fühlt sich gar nicht wie Steuern an.
Steuern erledigt?
Safe.
Stop!
Raus aus der Recruiting Spirale.
In einem Paket to a fixed price.
So sparen sie bis to 75% kosten pro bewerbung and sind jederzeit flexible.de slash all jobs.
Stepstone.
Meta starts testing a premium subscription on Instagram.
I'm Imran Shake, and your daily crunch for Tuesdays, featuring three big tech headlines, starts right now.
It looks like Uber is buying up Berlin-based startup Black Lane, which, if you didn't know, provides on demand black car chauffeur services as the right hail giant Uber expands deeper into luxury and executive travel services.
Was founded in 2011 and has raised more than 100 million dollars to date from rental car company Sixth, Mercedes Benz, and Alpha Him, a conglomerate in the UAE.
Uber said the acquisition still needs regulatory approvals but expects to close by the end of this year.
The two companies didn't disclose financial terms of the deal.
Now the acquisition comes just a few weeks after Uber announced the launch of Uber Elite, which, as the name might imply, combines a chauffeur service with a number of luxury offerings like in-vehicle amenities, airport meet and greets, and 24-7 phone support.
Uber Elite is starting small in just Los Angeles and San Francisco, with NYC on the horizon.
Blacklane, meanwhile, operates in major cities across Europe, the Middle East Asia, South America, and North America.
OpeningEye's decision last week to shut down Sora, its AI video generation tool, just six months after releasing it to the public, raised, well, immediate suspicions.
I mean, the app had invited users to upload their own faces, so was this some kind of elaborate data grab?
Well, according to a new Wall Street Journal investigation, the real explanation is considerably more boring.
You see, Sora was a money pit that nobody was using, and keeping it alive was costing OpenAI the AI race.
So what happened?
Well, after a splashy launch, Sora's worldwide user count peaked at around a million and then collapsed to fewer than 500,000.
Meanwhile, the app was burning through roughly 1 million dollars every day, not because people loved it, but because video generation is so costly to run.
Every user who dropped themselves into a fantastical scene was drawing down a finite supply of AI chips.
While a whole team inside Opening Eye was focused on making Sora work, Anthropic was quietly winning over the software engineers and enterprises that drive revenue.
Cloud Code, in particular, was eating OpeningEye's lunch.
So CEO Sam Altman made the call.
Kill Sora, free up compute, and refocus.
Now, if you want to understand just how sudden this was, consider what happened to Disney per The Wall Street Journal.
The entertainment giant had committed $1 billion to their partnership, yet found out Sora was being shut down less than an hour before the public.
The deal died with it.
The subscription called Instagram Plus gives subscribers access to, well, exclusive features.
The move comes two months after Meta told TechCrunch that it was planning to test new subscriptions on Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp.
Now, among the premium features on Instagram is the ability to view a story, a photo or video post that disappears after 24 hours, without the poster knowing you viewed it.
Subscribers can also see how many people have rewatched their own stories, Meta told TechCrunch in an email.
Now, subscribers will also be able to create unlimited audience lists for stories beyond a close friends list.
This means users can customize who sees each story by grouping followers into different lists instead of only having the option to share with everyone or just one limited group.
Additionally, subscribers can extend their story for an extra 24 hours and choose to spotlight a story up to once per week, increasing its visibility by bringing it to the front of the stories tray for followers.com.
Hey, Berlin.
Berliner Stadtwerke.
Gut für Berlin.