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 …



Sunday, March 31, 2024

Demis Hassabis says the AI hype caused by a surge of money is clouding research; CB Insights: VCs invested $42.5B in 2,500 AI startup equity rounds in 2023 (John Thornhill/Financial Times)

John Thornhill / Financial Times:
Demis Hassabis says the AI hype caused by a surge of money is clouding research; CB Insights: VCs invested $42.5B in 2,500 AI startup equity rounds in 2023  —  British AI pioneer says the billions of dollars being poured into start-ups is obscuring scientific progress in the field



Sources: Dell, HP, and other US tech firms have asked their Taiwanese suppliers to boost production of AI-related hardware in Mexico to reduce reliance on China (Wall Street Journal)

Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Dell, HP, and other US tech firms have asked their Taiwanese suppliers to boost production of AI-related hardware in Mexico to reduce reliance on China  —  Taiwan-based contract manufacturers step up investment south of the U.S. border for American clients



MrBeast's "retention editing", which uses quick cuts and loud sounds, took over social media, but may fade away as the YouTuber shifts to slower, focused videos (Taylor Lorenz/Washington Post)

Taylor Lorenz / Washington Post:
MrBeast's “retention editing”, which uses quick cuts and loud sounds, took over social media, but may fade away as the YouTuber shifts to slower, focused videos  —  The popularity of so-called retention editing made a generation of creators go viral, but when every video looks the same it's harder than ever to stand out



Baidu reports Q1 revenue up 1% YoY to ~$4.4B, above ~$4.35B est., the slowest growth in over a year, and net income down 6% YoY to ~$755M, above ~$554M est. (Zheping Huang/Bloomberg)

Zheping Huang / Bloomberg : Baidu reports Q1 revenue up 1% YoY to ~$4.4B, above ~$4.35B est., the slowest growth in over a year, and net ...