~techmeme | Bookmarks (1069)

Bloomberg: Former employees, analysts, VCs, and executives detail how DeepSeek works and how it fits into China's broader AI ambitions  —  The company's sudden emergence illustrates how China's industry is thriving despite Washington's efforts to slow it down.  —  With his wispy frame and reserved style …

The Information: Sources: TikTok has been working on a new feature that will allow US users to share photos over DMs inside the app and also plans to introduce voice messaging  —  TikTok has been working on a new feature that will allow users in the U.S. to share photos over direct messages inside the app …

Samantha Subin / CNBC: eToro prices its shares at $52 for its IPO, above its expected range of $46 to $50, raising nearly $310M and valuing the company at about $4.2B  —  EToro, a stock brokerage platform that's been ramping up in crypto, has priced its IPO at $52 a share, as the company prepares to test the market's appetite for new offerings.

Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat: Glass Imaging, which develops AI-powered software to improve digital image quality, raised a $20M Series A led by Insight Partners  —  Glass Imaging, a company harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to revolutionize digital image quality, raised $20 million in funding.

Tina Nguyen / The Verge: Trump's acting replacements for the Copyright Office are known to be unfriendly to the tech industry and not the kind of people that AI proponents would support  —  What initially appeared to be a power play by Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) …

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai / TechCrunch: WhatsApp v. NSO Group: NSO kept targeting WhatsApp users even after Meta sued, it spent $59M on R&D in 2024, and its customers pay ~$3M-$30M to use Pegasus  —  On Tuesday, WhatsApp scored a major victory against NSO Group when a jury ordered the infamous spyware maker to pay …

Ian King / Bloomberg: AMD and Humain partner to invest up to $10B on AI infrastructure over the next five years, including in data centers stretching from Saudi Arabia to the US  —  Silicon Valley Is Coming for the Pentagon's $1 Trillion Budget  —  The Trump administration wants startups to remake the US military …

Tage Kene-Okafor / TechCrunch: Cairo-based Nawy, Africa's largest proptech platform combining listings with brokerage services, raised a $52M Series A led by Partech Africa  —  For decades, buying property in Egypt meant navigating a fragmented real estate market, relying on personal networks, dealing with commission-driven brokers …

Alex Wilkins / New Scientist: A look at Foresight, an AI model trained on anonymized NHS data from 57M people in England, which could help predict diseases or forecast hospitalization rates  —  The makers of an AI model called Foresight say it could help predict disease or hospitalisation rates, but others have expressed concern …

Ernesto Van der Sar / TorrentFreak: How OpenDNS, Cloudflare, and Google responded to EU court orders to block DNS resolution for pirate sites; OpenDNS left France and Belgium instead of complying  —  Pirate site blocking orders issued against DNS resolvers including OpenDNS, Google, and Cloudflare are stacking up in Europe.

Jo Constantz / Bloomberg: A look at “AI-native” startups, which integrate AI into their workflows and team structures, allowing them to operate with fewer employees and consolidate tasks  —  Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy is now trying to tame the bureaucracy this created, arguing the company needs …

Will Knight / Wired: Singapore unveils a blueprint for global collaboration on AI safety, developed in consensus with researchers and experts from the US, China, and other countries  —  In a rare moment of global consensus, AI researchers from the US, Europe, and Asia came together in Singapore to form a plan for researching AI risks.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro / New York Times: Q&A with Whitney Wolfe Herd about returning as Bumble CEO, Tinder lawsuit, being bullish about using AI in dating apps, funding for female founders, and more  —  Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York Times  —  It feels like a lifetime ago, but when Whitney Wolfe Herd co-founded her first company …

Nicole Kobie / Wired: As the consumer metaverse falters, the World Economic Forum projects the industrial metaverse will reach $100B by 2030, led by platforms like Nvidia Omniverse  —  Forget Mark Zuckerberg's vision of VR meetings; the industrial metaverse bridges digital and physical worlds in a way that's actually useful.

Financial Times: Sources: OpenAI is negotiating with Microsoft to enable a future IPO; Microsoft offers to cut its equity stake for continued access to OpenAI tech beyond 2030  —  High-stakes talks to revise terms of multibillion-dollar partnership are key to plans to adopt for-profit model

Tyler Cowen / Conversations with Tyler: Q&A with Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark on the parts of the economy AGI will affect last, why he's relatively bearish on AI-fueled economic growth, and more  —  And the inevitable future of AI-enhanced parenting  — SUBSCRIBE - Apple - Google - Stitcher - Spotify - YouTube

Nicholas Kristof / New York Times: Court filing: internal docs show Pornhub had 706,000 videos in May 2020 flagged for child rape or other problems, often not removed until flagged 16+ times  —  What goes through the minds of people working at porn companies profiting from videos of children being raped?

Benj Edwards / Ars Technica: CMU researchers unveil LegoGPT, an AI model that designs physically stable Lego structures from text prompts and currently supports eight standard brick types  —  On Thursday, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University unveiled LegoGPT, an AI model that creates physically stable Lego structures from text prompts.

Vishal Singh / Silicon Canals: London-based StackOne, which develops tech to integrate SaaS products and AI agents with enterprise systems more efficiently, raised a $20M Series A led by GV  —  London-based StackOne has raised $20M (nearly €17.67M) in a Series A funding round.  This brings the company's total raised capital to $24M.

FinSMEs: Thoma Bravo invests $100M+ in HubSync, a Tennessee-based tax and accounting automation and client experience platform for accounting firms and tax professionals  —  HubSync, a Franklin, TN-based provider of a tax and accounting platform, received an over $100M Growth investment from Thoma Bravo.

Financial Times: Lloyd's of London insurers have launched a product to cover companies for losses if sued over AI chatbot errors, with policies developed by YC-backed Armilla  —  Policies will pay out for costs such as legal fees and court damages if AI tools underperform  —  Simply sign up to the Artificial …

Harsh Upadhyay / Entrackr: US SEC filing: Vanguard marks down Ola's valuation to $1.25B, a drop of 80%+ from a 2021 peak of $7.3B, as the ride-hailing company loses market share in India  —  Vanguard had valued the Bhavish Aggarwal-led company at less than $2 billion ($1.88 billion) for the first time.

Bloomberg: A profile of OpenAI's CEO of Applications Fidji Simo, who is tasked with broadening ChatGPT amid a straining Microsoft relationship and a battle with Elon Musk  —  Simo will oversee executives and seek to broaden the company's hit chatbot into a Swiss Army knife of artificial intelligence software.

Jessica Mathews / Fortune: The Trump administration's plan to cut the budget of the NSF, considered key to US tech leadership, by about 57% to $3.9B is alarming the startup and VC sector  —  From NASA to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Trump's reform agenda has thrown numerous federal agencies under …