Monday, June 16, 2025

Amazon Ads and Roku sign a new ad initiative to give media buyers access to 80%+ of US connected-TV households, set to launch by Q4 2025, using Amazon's DSP (Dade Hayes/Deadline)

Dade Hayes / Deadline:
Amazon Ads and Roku sign a new ad initiative to give media buyers access to 80%+ of US connected-TV households, set to launch by Q4 2025, using Amazon's DSP  —  In a milestone agreement, Amazon Ads and Roku are teaming on a new advertising initiative that will give media buyers access to more than 80% of U.S. connected-TV households.



A survey of UK academic integrity violations finds nearly 7,000 proven AI cheating cases in 2023-24, or 5.1 per 1,000 students, up from 1.6 per 1,000 in 2022-23 (Michael Goodier/The Guardian)

Michael Goodier / The Guardian:
A survey of UK academic integrity violations finds nearly 7,000 proven AI cheating cases in 2023-24, or 5.1 per 1,000 students, up from 1.6 per 1,000 in 2022-23  —  Guardian investigation finds almost 7,000 proven cases of cheating - and experts says these are tip of the iceberg



TikTok rolls out new AI ad features, including the ability for marketers to use text or images to create AI-generated video, as part of its Symphony ad suite (Kurt Wagner/Bloomberg)

Kurt Wagner / Bloomberg:
TikTok rolls out new AI ad features, including the ability for marketers to use text or images to create AI-generated video, as part of its Symphony ad suite  —  TikTok is rolling out a set of new artificial intelligence-powered advertising features, including the ability for marketers …



Sunday, June 15, 2025

A look at Apple's upgrades to CarPlay, iPadOS, and visionOS, and the new Liquid Glass redesign of its operating systems announced at WWDC (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
A look at Apple's upgrades to CarPlay, iPadOS, and visionOS, and the new Liquid Glass redesign of its operating systems announced at WWDC  —  Apple's unveiling of iOS 26 and the Liquid Glass interface was the most discussed part of its developers conference, but the real gems were its enhancements …



New York City-based Abacum, which offers AI-powered financial planning and analysis tools to companies, raised a $60B Series B led by Scale Venture Partners (Chris Metinko/Axios)

Chris Metinko / Axios:
New York City-based Abacum, which offers AI-powered financial planning and analysis tools to companies, raised a $60B Series B led by Scale Venture Partners  —  Abacum, business financial planning startup, landed a $60 million Series B round led by Scale Venture Partners, co-founder and CEO Julio Martínez tells Axios Pro.



Dealogic: tech deals accounted for $421B of the $1.67T in global deals announced in the first five months of 2025, with 75% of tech M&A involving AI software (Milana Vinn/Reuters)

Milana Vinn / Reuters:
Dealogic: tech deals accounted for $421B of the $1.67T in global deals announced in the first five months of 2025, with 75% of tech M&A involving AI software  —  Weighed down by tariffs and geopolitical uncertainty, dealmaking has slowed to a crawl across most industries except one: the unglamorous world of data infrastructure.



Anthropic details how it built its multi-agent Claude Research system, claiming significant improvements in internal evaluations over single-agent systems (Anthropic)

Anthropic:
Anthropic details how it built its multi-agent Claude Research system, claiming significant improvements in internal evaluations over single-agent systems  —  Our Research feature uses multiple Claude agents to explore complex topics more effectively.  We share the engineering challenges …



Saturday, June 14, 2025

A look at seven rebuttals to Apple's paper on limitations of Large Reasoning Models, and why none make a compelling case (Gary Marcus/Marcus on AI)

Gary Marcus / Marcus on AI:
A look at seven rebuttals to Apple's paper on limitations of Large Reasoning Models, and why none make a compelling case  —  Also: another paper that seals the deal  —  The Apple paper on limitations in the “reasoning” of Large Reasoning Models, which raised challenges for the latest scaling hypothesis, has clearly touched a nerve.



Salt Lake City, which faces a staffing shortfall, plans to implement AI-assisted 911 call triaging to handle ~30% of about 450K non-emergency calls per year (Salt Lake Tribune)

Salt Lake Tribune:
Salt Lake City, which faces a staffing shortfall, plans to implement AI-assisted 911 call triaging to handle ~30% of about 450K non-emergency calls per year  —  Move to artificial intelligence for some nonemergency calls is expected to help human responders focus on the urgent ones.



A profile of Chess.com, which has popularized online chess among pro athletes, as CEO Erik Allebest says the site has over $100M in annual revenue and 35M MAUs (Ira Boudway/Bloomberg)

Ira Boudway / Bloomberg:
A profile of Chess.com, which has popularized online chess among pro athletes, as CEO Erik Allebest says the site has over $100M in annual revenue and 35M MAUs  —  Social media is a minefield for pro sports players.  But online chess offers rankings, instant analysis, wholesome interactions and few trolls.



How Chinese AI companies bypass US chip restrictions by transporting hard drives with AI training data to Malaysian data centers housing advanced Nvidia chips (Wall Street Journal)

Wall Street Journal:
How Chinese AI companies bypass US chip restrictions by transporting hard drives with AI training data to Malaysian data centers housing advanced Nvidia chips  —  Engineers carry data to countries where Nvidia chips are available, frustrating Washington's aims



Friday, June 13, 2025

The Army Reserve launches Detachment 201, an innovation corps with Palantir CTO, Meta CTO, and other tech execs advising on AI and tech as lieutenant colonels (Heather Somerville/Wall Street Journal)

Heather Somerville / Wall Street Journal:
The Army Reserve launches Detachment 201, an innovation corps with Palantir CTO, Meta CTO, and other tech execs advising on AI and tech as lieutenant colonels  —  Silicon Valley executives are joining a new innovation corps in Army Reserve  —  The nerd brigade is reporting for duty.



Google plans to shut down Android's Instant Apps, which let users launch apps without installing them, later this year citing low usage and engagement (Dominic Preston/The Verge)

Dominic Preston / The Verge:
Google plans to shut down Android's Instant Apps, which let users launch apps without installing them, later this year citing low usage and engagement  —  The installation-free apps will join the Google graveyard in December. … Google has confirmed that it plans to shut …



Sources: Tencent is in early talks to acquire Nexon, the South Korean gaming giant behind Dungeon & Fighter Mobile; Tencent pursued a Nexon acquisition in 2019 (Dong Cao/Bloomberg)

Dong Cao / Bloomberg:
Sources: Tencent is in early talks to acquire Nexon, the South Korean gaming giant behind Dungeon & Fighter Mobile; Tencent pursued a Nexon acquisition in 2019  —  Shenzhen-based Tencent has reached out to the family of Nexon's late founder Kim Jung-ju to discuss the possibility of an acquisition …



Sources: after five Thinking Machines staff left, investors are rattled, potentially impacting fundraising; two researchers quit via Slack during an all-hands (The Information)

The Information : Sources: after five Thinking Machines staff left, investors are rattled, potentially impacting fundraising; two researc...