Meta is reducing its workforce by about 5% through performance-based terminations, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday. The company plans to hire new people to fill the roles, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an internal memo to staff. “I’ve decided to raise the bar on performance management and move out low-performers faster,” Zuckerberg said in the note. “We […]

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Apple has joined a consortium creating next-gen technology to link together chips in AI data centers. The consortium, the Ultra Accelerator Link Consortium, is developing a standard called UALink, which connects the AI accelerator chips found within a growing number of server farms. As of Tuesday, Apple is a member of the consortium’s board, along […]

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WhatsApp is adding new features including creating new stickers from selfies, sharing sticker packs, and adding new camera effects. Stickers and camera effects are good engagement ploys to keep users interacting with their contacts. The chat app added the ability to create custom stickers from photos last year. Now, the company is adding an option […]

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OpenAI has quietly removed language endorsing “politically unbiased” AI from one of its recently published policy documents. In the original draft of its “economic blueprint” for the AI industry in the U.S., OpenAI said that AI models “should aim to be politically unbiased by default.” A new draft, made available Monday, deletes that phrasing. When […]

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang may have said that “very useful quantum computers” are probably still 20 years away, but his company is also hedging its bets beyond classical chips with investments and partnerships in that very space. Now one of the companies that Nvidia partners with in quantum development is announcing funding. SEEQC, a quantum […]

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Data centers are expected to continue growing at a breakneck pace, doubling their power demand by 2029, according to a new report from JLL. The industry’s expansion, fueled by the rapid growth of AI alongside the continued expansion of cloud-based services, is testing the limits of the energy sector. Some experts think that half of […]

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Aurora Innovation is taking federal safety regulators to court in a case that could have far-reaching implications for self-driving truck companies operating in a regulatory environment designed around humans. The fight centers around the rather commonplace practice of placing physical warning triangles around semi trucks stopped along highways. The court denied Aurora’s request to be […]

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The FBI says it was authorized to mass-remove “PlugX” malware from more than 4,000 compromised machines in the United States

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It’s not an easy time to raise money for an electric vehicle startup, especially given how many have failed or are close to failing. But Los Angeles-based Harbinger has pulled it off by taking a hyper-focused approach to electrifying commercial trucking.  The reward is a $100 million Series B, co-led by early Tesla investor Capricorn […]

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Pixelfed, a decentralized alternative to Instagram, has launched its official mobile apps. The service today runs on the same ActivityPub protocol that powers open source X alternative Mastodon, YouTube competitor PeerTube, and other decentralized social apps, now including Meta’s Threads and Flipboard (plus its newer app, Surf), that are part of a growing push toward […]

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Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) is planning to introduce legislation to extend the TikTok ban deadline by 270 days. TikTok has warned of a looming shutdown in just five days, but the new legislation, officially called the Extend the TikTok Deadline Act, would give TikTok more time to divest from its Chinese parent company ByteDance, if approved by Congress. TikTok […]

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Shortly after OpenAI released o1, its first “reasoning” AI model, people began noting a curious phenomenon. The model would sometimes begin “thinking” in Chinese, Persian, or some other language — even when asked a question in English. Given a problem to sort out — e.g. “How many R’s are in the word ‘strawberry?'” — o1 […]

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Months after announcing a $3 million pre-seed, the AI networking startup Boardy is back with an $8 million seed announcement led by Creandum.  The company connects users with other people when they call an AI agent who chats with them for a bit and then connects them with others it thinks they ought to know. […]

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App stores are filled with different services that are designed to help you cut down on your screen time and count your steps. A new iOS app called Steppin combines these two ideas to help users do both at the same time to bridge the gap between physical and mental health.  Steppin blocks your social […]

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For years, twin sisters Nilo Rahmani and Jen Rahmani swapped stories — and commiserated — over the pain points they were facing in their respective engineering jobs. Nilo told TechCrunch that a frequent topic of conversation was about frustrations over the reliability platforms they were using at work. When they noticed the reliability landscape starting […]

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In an announcement Tuesday, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing division, said it plans to invest $5 billion in Mexico over the next 15 years as a part of a “long-term commitment” in the region. A portion of that investment is a new server region launching today, AWS Mexico (Central) Region, that will allow […]

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Powerset, founded in late 2022, is an investment program with a simple hypothesis: what if the best investors aren’t venture capitalists but other founders, scribbling off checks in between late night coding sessions and board meetings? 

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A joint international statement provides the first official confirmation that North Korea was behind the $235M hack of WazirX, India's largest cryptocurrency exchange.

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The Home Office has proposed a 'targeted ban' on ransom payments following a wave a cyberattacks targeting the UK

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Alex Dewez, a partner at 20VC, just released its highly anticipated State of the French tech ecosystem report. This is a nice followup to Atomico’s State of European Tech report, with a more granular view on French startups in particular. As a reminder, the bottom line of Atomico’s report is that European startups raised $45 […]

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