Monday, May 27, 2024

A look at the growing importance of ads for video streaming services, as Antenna says that 56% of new subscribers chose the cheaper ad-supported tier in Q1 2024 (John Koblin/New York Times)

John Koblin / New York Times:
A look at the growing importance of ads for video streaming services, as Antenna says that 56% of new subscribers chose the cheaper ad-supported tier in Q1 2024  —  Ads are here, there — almost everywhere — on streaming services now.  —  Not long ago, streaming TV came with a promise …



Dating apps are trying to woo Gen Z women by boosting moderation tools and more; Tinder has consistently lost MAUs since 2021 and paid subs fell under 10M in Q1 (Stephanie Stacey/Financial Times)

Stephanie Stacey / Financial Times:
Dating apps are trying to woo Gen Z women by boosting moderation tools and more; Tinder has consistently lost MAUs since 2021 and paid subs fell under 10M in Q1  —  Gen Z is a priority for Tinder and Bumble but threats and unsolicited material from potential suitors often turn users off



Elon Musk says all of the $6B in xAI's Series B is new money rather than shares "given" to investors in Musk's takeover of Twitter (Axios)

Axios:
Elon Musk says all of the $6B in xAI's Series B is new money rather than shares “given” to investors in Musk's takeover of Twitter  —  - That said, there's plenty of overlap in the investor list, and it's unclear if the original Twitter/X backers also received additional equity in xAI …



Data.ai: of the top 20 education apps in the US App Store, five are AI agents that help with school assignments, the two most popular of which are Chinese-owned (Rita Liao/TechCrunch)

Rita Liao / TechCrunch:
Data.ai: of the top 20 education apps in the US App Store, five are AI agents that help with school assignments, the two most popular of which are Chinese-owned  —  Evan, a high school sophomore from Houston, was stuck on a calculus problem.  He pulled up Answer AI on his iPhone …



Sunday, May 26, 2024

A look at the UK's $5.5B gaming industry, as PE firm EQT makes a ~$2.8B purchase offer for Keyword Studios, and other developers shore up their balance sheets (Financial Times)

Financial Times:
A look at the UK's $5.5B gaming industry, as PE firm EQT makes a ~$2.8B purchase offer for Keyword Studios, and other developers shore up their balance sheets  —  Developers shore up their balance sheets after a difficult few years  —  Pass the controller.



A closer look at Apple's AI strategy: Project Greymatter, local and cloud LLM data processing, Siri, approach to the chatbot partnership with OpenAI, and more (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
A closer look at Apple's AI strategy: Project Greymatter, local and cloud LLM data processing, Siri, approach to the chatbot partnership with OpenAI, and more  —  Though Apple's first set of modern AI features won't be as impressive as rival offerings, the company is betting that its massive customer base can give it an edge.



How Shein and Temu, which are spending billions on digital ads and offering steep discounts or free products, have become big threats to Amazon in the US (Louise Matsakis/Big Technology)

Louise Matsakis / Big Technology:
How Shein and Temu, which are spending billions on digital ads and offering steep discounts or free products, have become big threats to Amazon in the US  —  In the fall of 2020, Amazon looked unstoppable.  The pandemic lockdowns had supercharged its e-commerce business …



Four of the top seven best-reviewed games on Metacritic in 2024, not counting remakes, are indies, with Animal Well and Balatro in the top three (Jason Schreier/Bloomberg)

Jason Schreier / Bloomberg:
Four of the top seven best-reviewed games on Metacritic in 2024, not counting remakes, are indies, with Animal Well and Balatro in the top three  —  Halfway through 2024, four of the top seven best-reviewed games, not counting remakes, are indies  —  Hi everyone.



Saturday, May 25, 2024

Congress has quietly diverted $3.5B from the US CHIPS Act to Secure Enclave, a classified project proposed by Intel to build chips for defense needs (Christine Mui/Politico)

Christine Mui / Politico:
Congress has quietly diverted $3.5B from the US CHIPS Act to Secure Enclave, a classified project proposed by Intel to build chips for defense needs  —  The Commerce Department was expecting to hand out new federal money to high-tech research.  Congress sent it to a secretive natsec program instead.



How SLMs like Microsoft's Phi-3, which can run locally on phones or PCs without big compromises, open up new AI use cases by being more responsive and private (Will Knight/Wired)

Will Knight / Wired:
How SLMs like Microsoft's Phi-3, which can run locally on phones or PCs without big compromises, open up new AI use cases by being more responsive and private  —  Research at Microsoft shows it's possible to make AI models small enough to run on phones or laptops without major compromises to their smarts.



A test of 11 WhatsApp-based fact-checking "tip lines" during elections in India finds long delays and inconsistencies in responses (Rest of World)

Rest of World:
A test of 11 WhatsApp-based fact-checking “tip lines” during elections in India finds long delays and inconsistencies in responses  —  Rest of World tested 11 leading WhatsApp-based chatbots that promise to help Indian voters identify misinformation.



An analysis of ChatGPT's answers to 517 programming questions on Stack Overflow: 52% of answers contain misinformation, 77% are more verbose than human answers (Sharon Adarlo/Futurism)

Sharon Adarlo / Futurism:
An analysis of ChatGPT's answers to 517 programming questions on Stack Overflow: 52% of answers contain misinformation, 77% are more verbose than human answers  —  Not So Smart  —  In recent years, computer programmers have flocked to chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT to help them code …



Google proposes Search tweaks in Europe to comply with the DMA, including removing the map showing hotel locations and results in Germany, Belgium, and Estonia (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters)

Foo Yun Chee / Reuters : Google proposes Search tweaks in Europe to comply with the DMA, including removing the map showing hotel locatio...