Friday, April 5, 2024

CB Insights: global VC investment in fintech fell 16% QoQ to $7.3B over 904 deals in Q1 2024, the lowest amount of funding the sector has seen since 2017 (Mary Ann Azevedo/TechCrunch)

Mary Ann Azevedo / TechCrunch:
CB Insights: global VC investment in fintech fell 16% QoQ to $7.3B over 904 deals in Q1 2024, the lowest amount of funding the sector has seen since 2017  —  When it comes to funding, the fintech sector didn't have a very good start to the year.  —  Fintech funding slid by 16% quarter …



Microsoft warns that China plans to disrupt elections in the US, South Korea, and India this year with AI-generated content after making a dry run in Taiwan (Dan Milmo/The Guardian)

Dan Milmo / The Guardian:
Microsoft warns that China plans to disrupt elections in the US, South Korea, and India this year with AI-generated content after making a dry run in Taiwan  —  Beijing did a test run in Taiwan using AI-generated content to influence voters away from a pro-sovereignty candidate



Sources: Samsung plans to more than double its total chip investment in Taylor, Texas to ~$44B, a significant breakthrough for US' chip manufacturing plans (Wall Street Journal)

Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Samsung plans to more than double its total chip investment in Taylor, Texas to ~$44B, a significant breakthrough for US' chip manufacturing plans  —  South Korean firm plans to add a second semiconductor factory and advanced-packaging facility at its new hub outside Austin



Wednesday, April 3, 2024

Patreon rolls out a Reddit-like community moderation feature that lets podcasters, artists, writers, and other creators assign community members as moderators (Mia Sato/The Verge)

Mia Sato / The Verge:
Patreon rolls out a Reddit-like community moderation feature that lets podcasters, artists, writers, and other creators assign community members as moderators  —  Patreon is taking a page out of Reddit's book.  Now, podcasters, artists, writers, and other creators on the subscription-focused creator platform …



Stability AI releases Stable Audio 2.0, letting users create three minute sound clips from copyright-free audio samples, available for free via its website (Emilia David/The Verge)

Emilia David / The Verge:
Stability AI releases Stable Audio 2.0, letting users create three minute sound clips from copyright-free audio samples, available for free via its website  —  Stable Audio 2., an audio generation model for Stability AI, now lets users upload their own audio samples which they can then transform using prompts …



Opera now lets Opera One users download and run 150 LLMs from 50+ families locally, including Llama and Google's Gemma, via the Ollama open source framework (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch:
Opera now lets Opera One users download and run 150 LLMs from 50+ families locally, including Llama and Google's Gemma, via the Ollama open source framework  —  Web browser company Opera announced today it will now allow users to download and use Large Language Models (LLMs) locally on their computer.



Sources: crypto VC firm Paradigm is in talks to raise $750M to $850M for a new fund, which would be the largest since the crash; a16z raised $4.5B in May 2022 (Hannah Miller/Bloomberg)

Hannah Miller / Bloomberg:
Sources: crypto VC firm Paradigm is in talks to raise $750M to $850M for a new fund, which would be the largest since the crash; a16z raised $4.5B in May 2022  —  - New fund would be industry's largest since crypto downturn  — Paradigm was a major investor in bankrupt exchange FTX



Monday, April 1, 2024

Filing: Donald Trump's Truth Social lost $58M+ on $4.1M in revenue during 2023; Trump Media & Technology Group is valued at $7B+ after going public on March 26 (Dan Primack/Axios)

Dan Primack / Axios:
Filing: Donald Trump's Truth Social lost $58M+ on $4.1M in revenue during 2023; Trump Media & Technology Group is valued at $7B+ after going public on March 26  —  - All of the company's revenue comes from advertising on Truth Social, per the disclosures.



Interviews and Telegram messages detail how Russian middlemen used Tether to avoid US sanctions and procure parts for drones and other high-tech equipment (Wall Street Journal)

Wall Street Journal:
Interviews and Telegram messages detail how Russian middlemen used Tether to avoid US sanctions and procure parts for drones and other high-tech equipment  —  How Russian middlemen used tether to avoid U.S. sanctions and procure parts for drones and other high-tech equipment



Sources: OpenAI discussed training GPT-5 on public YouTube video transcripts; AI industry's need for high-quality text data may outstrip supply within two years (Deepa Seetharaman/Wall Street Journal)

Deepa Seetharaman / Wall Street Journal:
Sources: OpenAI discussed training GPT-5 on public YouTube video transcripts; AI industry's need for high-quality text data may outstrip supply within two years  —  Firms such as OpenAI and Anthropic are working to find enough information to train next-generation artificial-intelligence models



Microsoft plans to unbundle Teams from Office 365 globally starting April 1 amid antitrust scrutiny, after a similar unbundling in EU in August 2023 (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters)

Foo Yun Chee / Reuters:
Microsoft plans to unbundle Teams from Office 365 globally starting April 1 amid antitrust scrutiny, after a similar unbundling in EU in August 2023  —  Microsoft (MSFT.O) will sell its chat and video app Teams separately from its Office product globally, the U.S. tech giant said on Monday …



Arizona's Maricopa County is set to have the second largest concentration of US data centers by 2028, as the state races to increase electricity production (Pranshu Verma/Washington Post)

Pranshu Verma / Washington Post : Arizona's Maricopa County is set to have the second largest concentration of US data centers by 202...