Bookmarks (982)

Kenza Bryan / Financial Times: Microsoft to buy 3.5M carbon credits, estimated to be worth about $200M, from Re.green over 25 years to restore parts of Brazil's Amazon and Atlantic forests  —  Tech giant acquires carbon credits worth around $200mn, as energy usage surges due to generative artificial intelligence

Becky Bracken / Dark Reading: The Trump administration removed all advisory committee members within the DHS, including those in CISA and CSRB, which was investigating Salt Typhoon  —  In a letter sent today, the acting DHS secretary terminated membership to all advisory boards, including the Cyber Safety Review Board …

Financial Times: Sources: Google is investing over $1B more in Anthropic, which is also nearing a further $2B funding round from Lightspeed and other VCs at a ~$60B valuation  —  Artificial intelligence group closes in on $60bn valuation  —  Google is making a fresh investment of more than $1bn into OpenAI rival Anthropic …

Tsubasa Suruga / Nikkei Asia: DealStreetAsia: Southeast Asian startups raised $4.56B in 2024, down 42% YoY and falling to a fifth of a 2021 peak, as the number of deals fell 10% YoY to 633  —  SINGAPORE — Southeast Asia's startup funding in 2024 dropped for the third consecutive year, falling to a fifth of the peak it recorded in 2021 …

Bloomberg: An internal probe into SoftBank-backed eFishery, one of Indonesia's most prominent startups, finds the agritech company allegedly faked most of its 2024 sales  —  - EFishery board investigating startup's sales, profit numbers  — Indonesian firm has raised hundreds of millions of dollars

Gerrit De Vynck / Washington Post: Documents: Google gave Israel access to its latest AI tools from the early weeks of the Israel-Hamas war, directly assisting the Defense Ministry and the IDF  —  The company fulfilled requests from Israel's military for more access to AI tools, as it sought to compete with Amazon, documents obtained by The Post show.

James O'Donnell / MIT Technology Review: Filing: OpenAI spent $1.76M on lobbying in 2024, up from 2023's $260K, with focus on the AI Advancement and Reliability Act and the Future of AI Innovation Act  —  OpenAI spent $1.76 million on government lobbying in 2024 and $510,000 in the last three months of the year alone …

Washington Post: Sources: a deep philosophical rift over how DOGE should operate helped spur Vivek Ramaswamy's exit, with Donald Trump's Jan. 20 EO embodying Elon Musk's vision  —  A deep philosophical rift between the two billionaire leaders of the “Department of Government Efficiency” left Musk to run the group.

Financial Times: Sources: ByteDance plans to spend ~$5.5B to acquire AI chips in China in 2025, double the amount spent in 2024, with ~60% going to Chinese suppliers like Huawei  —  Chinese company seeks growth from new technology as social media business comes under pressure in US

Mike Wheatley / SiliconANGLE: Render, which offers developers cloud services for building, deploying, and running apps and websites, raised an $80M Series C led by Georgian  —  Developer-focused cloud infrastructure startup Render Services Inc. says it's ready to disrupt traditional giants such as Amazon Web Services Inc …

Bloomberg: StackBlitz, which offers an AI tool to create websites using text prompts, says it's finalizing raising $83.5M at a $700M valuation, following a $22M Series A  —  - StackBlitz is set to raise over $80 million from investors  — Struggling startup turned around fortunes with AI product

New York Times: Trump grants a pardon to Ross Ulbricht, the creator of Silk Road and a cryptocurrency cult hero, serving a life sentence on money laundering and drug charges  —  Ross Ulbricht was serving a life sentence for creating a site in a shady corner of the internet to sell heroin, cocaine and other illicit substances.

Stephen Pastis / Forbes: Highnote, which offers businesses a card-issuing software, raised a $90M Series B led by Adams Street Partners, a source says at a $750M+ valuation  —  The San Francisco company raised $90 million.  It aims to combine the different payments services offered by Stripe and Marqeta into one platform.

Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat: Survey of 3,000+ game devs: 11% were laid off in the past year, 58% back unionization, 30% say generative AI is having a negative impact on the industry, more  —  The 2025 GDC survey revealed the impact of industry-wide layoffs in 2024 where one of every 11 game developers lost a job.

Bloomberg: Trump says he would be open to Elon Musk or Larry Ellison purchasing TikTok US as part of a joint venture that would give the US government 50% ownership  —  “I have the right to make a deal,” Trump said at an event alongside Ellison at the White House on Tuesday.

Jay Peters / The Verge: Card game Marvel Snap, published by ByteDance-owned Nuverse, is back online in the US and plans to “partner with a new publisher” to prevent future bans  —  Marvel Snap is back online in the US after access was cut off Saturday night due to the law that banned TikTok and other ByteDance-owned apps.

Eleanor Olcott / Financial Times: Huawei plans to challenge Nvidia in China's AI chip market by positioning its latest Ascend AI processors as the hardware of choice for “inference” tasks  —  Tech giant pushes its artificial intelligence chips as hardware of choice for ‘inference’ tasks

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Trump signs an EO renaming the US Digital Service to the US DOGE Service, directing agency heads to form “DOGE Teams” of at least four members within 30 days  —  The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an advisory commission spearheaded by billionaire Elon Musk recommending deep cuts …

Bobby Allyn / NPR: Trump signs an EO that pauses the TikTok ban for 75 days to give ByteDance more time to reach a deal and provides a “liability shield” to TikTok's providers  —  President Trump signed an executive order on Monday seeking to hit pause on a law banning TikTok and to provide …

The Information: Source: Meta is offering creators with large TikTok followings bonuses ranging from $10K to $50K/month to post videos on Instagram Reels before other platforms  —  Instagram isn't letting a good TikTok crisis go to waste.  —  Representatives for the Meta Platforms-owned app in the last week …

Cat Zakrzewski / Washington Post: Trump signs an EO to end “federal censorship” of online platforms, and directs the AG to probe if the Biden admin engaged in censorship of Americans' views  —  President Donald Trump signed an executive order intended to stop “government censorship,” a sweeping action …

David Shepardson / Reuters: Trump revokes a 2023 executive order signed by Biden that sought to reduce the risks that AI poses to consumers, workers, and national security  —  U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday revoked a 2023 executive order signed by Joe Biden that sought to reduce the risks that artificial intelligence poses …

Matt Novak / Gizmodo: During a speech following Donald Trump's inauguration, Elon Musk delivered what many saw as two “Nazi salutes”  —  The billionaire Tesla CEO has a history of racist comments. … Elon Musk gave what appeared to be Nazi salutes at a rally held at Capitol One Arena on Monday …

Kirsten Korosec / TechCrunch: Jan. 17 filing: the US NHTSA said it “upgraded” its April 2024 probe into Ford's BlueCruise, a driver assistance system that was active during two fatal crashes  —  A U.S. federal safety regulator has “upgraded” its investigation into Ford's hands-free advanced driver assistance system known …

Hafiz Rashid / New Republic: Did Elon Musk Seriously Just Do a Nazi Salute at Trump's Inauguration?  —  During a speech at Capitol One Arena Monday following Donald Trump's inauguration, Elon Musk appeared to deliver a Roman salute not once, but twice.  —  The gesture is associated with Nazi Germany …

PYMNTS.com: Stuttgart-based robotics startup Sereact, which develops Vision Language Action Models and whose customers include BMW and Daimler Truck, raised a $26M Series A  —  German tech company Sereact has raised $26 million for its AI-powered robotics efforts.  —  The company's Series A round …

Tim Copeland / The Block: A memecoin named Official Barron Trump hit a $460M market cap before falling 95%; a Pump.fun user behind it has debuted other unofficial coins called “official”  —  - A memecoin called Official Barron Trump rose to a $460 million market cap on speculation that it might have been launched by Barron Trump himself.

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: Metropolis, an AI-powered parking service, acquires Oosto, formerly known as AnyVision, for just $125M in stock, well under the $380M it raised over the years  —  The general hype around all things AI is not lifting all boats, as certain startups continue to struggle and look for exits.

Simon Willison / Simon Willison's Weblog: Chinese AI lab DeepSeek debuts DeepSeek-R1, an MIT-licensed model that does well with math, code, and reasoning tasks, alongside other open and distilled models  —  DeepSeek are the Chinese AI lab who dropped the best currently available open weights LLM on Christmas day, DeepSeek v3.

Financial Times: Democratic Republic of Congo lawyers say Belgium has started a criminal probe into allegations that Apple has knowingly sourced “blood minerals” from the DRC  —  Lawyers for DRC allege iPhones and other electronics use minerals supplied by armed groups behind atrocities

Richard Lawler / The Verge: Card game Marvel Snap, published by ByteDance-owned Nuverse, cuts off access for US gamers, as the TikTok divest-or-ban law impacts other ByteDance-linked apps  —  The divest-or-ban law aimed at TikTok is also taking down other ByteDance-linked apps, including the popular card game Marvel Snap.

Jonathan Vanian / CNBC: TikTok is not available for download in the App Store and Play Store in the US, as the app halts service in the country to comply with the divest-or-ban law  —  Apple and Google removed TikTok from their app stores Saturday night, complying with a law requiring China's ByteDance to divest …

NBC News: ByteDance's TikTok and CapCut suspend service in the US, telling users “Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok”  —  Users reported being unable to access TikTok Saturday after a pop-up message from the company came up on their screens saying “a law banning TikTok has been enacted.”

Will Oremus / Washington Post: TikTok bans in countries around the world have played out quite differently; Instagram Reels largely replaced TikTok in India, following TikTok's ban in 2020  —  India's 2020 crackdown helped give rise to Instagram Reels, which has largely replaced it there.  But TikTok has proved more resilient elsewhere.

Matthew Green / A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering: A close look at some privacy implications of AI interfacing with messaging apps and other E2EE systems, Apple's approach to “Private Cloud Compute”, and more  —  Recently I came across a fantastic new paper by a group of NYU and Cornell researchers entitled “How to think about end-to-end encryption and AI.”

Kevin Roose / New York Times: As the TikTok eulogies pour in from some creators, very few Americans seem concerned that one of the nation's most popular social media apps will disappear  —  So this may be the way TikTok ends: not with a bang, but with a whimper.  —  Over the past few weeks, as the Jan. 19 deadline loomed …

Joseph Menn / Washington Post: A whistleblower complaint claims Amazon paid $380M for licensing robot maker Covariant's tech and hiring its staff, and the deal merits antitrust scrutiny  —  Filing details $400 million license for smart robot system and claims retail giant's “reverse acquihire” contract limits competition and merits antitrust scrutiny.

Hayden Field / CNBC: Source: Perplexity AI made a TikTok US bid to ByteDance, proposing a merger that brings video to Perplexity, with ByteDance investors retaining their stakes  —  Perplexity AI officially made a play for TikTok on Saturday, submitting a bid to its parent company, ByteDance …

Financial Times: A profile of Charlwin Mao, founder of Xiaohongshu or “Little Red Book”, who claims the name references the color of his university Stanford and ex-employer Bain  —  A sudden surge of US users on Xiaohongshu, also known as RedNote, could threaten China's Great Firewall

Politico: Congressional leaders seem flummoxed by the growing popularity of Chinese-owned apps Xiaohongshu and Lemon8, an unintended consequence of the TikTok ban  —  The Chinese apps RedNote and Lemon8 have exploded in popularity as TikTok faces an imminent ban and the Supreme Court upheld the law forcing its sale.

NBC News: Trump says he will “most likely” give TikTok a 90-day reprieve after he takes office on Monday “because it's appropriate”  —  Trump spoke to NBC News' Kristen Welker in an exclusive phone interview Saturday, discussing his plans on what to do about the popular social media app.

Ana Faguy / BBC: The White House says TikTok's threat to shut down is a “stunt” as there is “no reason for TikTok or other companies to take actions” before Trump takes office  —  The White House has said a threat by TikTok to shut down in the US on Sunday unless tech firms get assurances …

Zack Abrams / The Block: Vitalik Buterin outlines “large changes” to Ethereum Foundation leadership structure, after fellow Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin called for new EF leadership  —  - Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, in a post on X, said “large changes” to the leadership structure of the Ethereum Foundation (EF) are underway.

Wes Davis / The Verge: Instagram now lets users upload Reels that are up to 3 minutes long, doubling the 90-second limit, as TikTok is set to go dark on Sunday  —  Instagram will now let you upload Reels that are up to 3 minutes long, doubling the 90-second limit the platform had in place before, Instagram boss Adam Mosseri announced today.

Axios: CoinGecko: $TRUMP rose more than 600% overnight and was trading at just over $32 as of 11AM ET, giving it a fully diluted market capitalization of $32B+  —  - It also speaks to the nature of the crypto industry that someone could have $25 billion worth of something that literally did not exist 24 hours previously.

Andrew Hayward / Decrypt: Donald Trump is promoting a Solana memecoin called TRUMP from his social media accounts, with 200M $TRUMP available now and growing to 1B “over three years”  —  Talk about a Friday night surprise.  President-elect Donald Trump's social media accounts shared what appears …

Zaheer Kachwala / Reuters: Filing: Nasdaq-listed Qorvo reveals activist investor Starboard's 7.7% stake, amid stiff competition and slowing orders for the company's smartphone chips  —  Starboard Value has built a 7.7% stake in Qorvo (QRVO.O), the chipmaker revealed in a filing on Friday, as the activist investor looks to boost the company's weak share price.

Jasper Goodman / Politico: Leading crypto firms have given at least $10M to the Trump inaugural fund; Ripple, a major target of SEC enforcement action, donated $5M in digital tokens  —  Crypto executives and their lobbyists are scrambling to gain sway over the incoming administration.

Antonio Regalado / MIT Technology Review: OpenAI worked with Retro Biosciences to develop GPT-4b micro, an AI model that it says can engineer proteins capable of turning regular cells into stem cells  —  When you think of AI's contributions to science, you probably think of AlphaFold, the Google DeepMind protein-folding program that earned its creator a Nobel Prize last year.

Salvador Rodriguez / CNBC: TikTok says it will go dark in the US on Sunday unless the Biden admin provides a “definitive statement” to critical service providers assuring non-enforcement  —  TikTok said its services will go dark on Sunday unless the Biden administration gives a definitive statement providing assurances …