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.



PE firm Everstone combines India's Wingify, which helps A/B test sites, and France's AB Tasty, which improves e-commerce UX; Everstone bought Wingify for $200M (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch : PE firm Everstone combines India's Wingify, which helps A/B test sites, and France's AB Tasty, which...