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Aditya Kalra / Reuters: In reports dated August 9, Indian antitrust regulator CCI found that Amazon and Flipkart violated local competition laws by giving preference to select sellers  —  An Indian antitrust investigation has found U.S. e-commerce giant Amazon (AMZN.O) and Walmart's (WMT.N) Flipkart violated local competition laws …

Menaka Doshi / Bloomberg: India's new M&A rule for deals exceeding ~$240M could create hurdles for startups that hope to be acquired in their early years to access funding and scale  —  Fears it could have a “chilling effect” on innovation. … Merger Control  —  A new anti-trust rule put into place this week …

Viola Zhou / Rest of World: Q&A with Alibaba.com president Kuo Zhang on the enduring importance of the US market, navigating geopolitical tensions, competing with Shein and Temu, and more  —  • LAS VEGAS, UNITED STATES  —  E-commerce giant Alibabai .com is setting its sights on America's mom-and-pop businesses.

Simon Willison / Simon Willison's Weblog: OpenAI's o1 models aren't as simple as the next step up from GPT-4o as they introduce major cost and performance trade-offs in exchange for improved “reasoning”  —  OpenAI released two major new preview models today: o1-preview and o1-mini (that mini one is also a preview …

Matt Burgess / Wired: Researchers detail GAZEploit, a now-fixed Vision Pro vulnerability allowing hackers to determine which key a user is typing based on the user's eye movement  —  The Vision Pro uses 3D avatars on calls and for streaming.  These researchers used eye tracking to work out the passwords and PINs people typed with their avatars.

Jennifer Ouellette / Ars Technica: In two experiments with 2,190 American conspiracy theorists, conversations with GPT-4 Turbo reduced their belief in conspiracy theories by about 20% on average  —  Co-author Gordon Pennycook: “The work overturns a lot of how we thought about conspiracies.”  —  Belief in conspiracy theories …

Duncan Riley / SiliconANGLE: Every, which offers startups an all-in-one finance and human resources suite that combines banking, cards, tax, payroll, and more, raised a $22.5M Series A  —  Back office stack for startups company Every Inc. announced today that it has raised $22.5 million in new funding to add more products to its back-office suite.

Jason Schreier / Bloomberg: All 25 staffers of Annapurna's gaming division resigned this month after CEO Megan Ellison pulled out of talks to spin off the unit as an independent entity  —  Megan Ellison-led firm sees staffers quit after spinoff talks fail.  —  The entire staff of Annapurna Interactive …

Oliver Darcy / Status: Vox Media says its annual Code Conference has been put on hold, calling it a “strong franchise” but declining to share further information about its future  —  Outside missing a year during the Covid-19 pandemic, it's the first time the annual technology conference has not taken place in its more than two-decade history.

Sarah McBride / Bloomberg: YC plans to expand to four cohorts per year, adding spring and fall sessions in 2025; each batch will be half the size of the most recent cohort of 256 startups  —  The startup accelerator now will accept four smaller groups of startups instead of two larger ones.

Amir Efrati / The Information: Source: OpenAI's ChatGPT has 11M+ paying subscribers, including 1M for its higher-priced business plans, implying it's generating $225M+ in revenue per month  —  OpenAI's ChatGPT has more than 10 million paying subscribers and another 1 million subscribers that are part of higher-priced plans …

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: The White House says Adobe, Cohere, Microsoft, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Common Crawl made voluntary commitments to fight AI-generated image-based sexual abuse  —  The White House has announced that several major AI vendors, including OpenAI and Microsoft, have committed to taking steps …

Brody Ford / Bloomberg: Adobe reports Q3 revenue up 11% YoY to $5.41B, vs. $5.37B est., Digital Media revenue up 11% to $4B, Q4 revenue guidance below est.; ADBE drops 9%+ after hours  —  - Company has added AI tools to its signature creative software  — Revenue gains 11% in reported quarter; profit tops estimate

Ina Fried / Axios: Salesforce rolls out Agentforce, a suite of AI agents that handle tasks in sales, marketing, commerce, and customer service, starting at $2 per conversation  —  - Out of the box, Salesforce is offering a handful of agents that can handle tasks such as sales rep, service agent, personal shopper and sales coach.

Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch: At an Acquired podcast event, Mark Zuckerberg said his biggest career mistake was taking too much ownership for issues out of Meta's control  —  The home of the Golden State Warriors was packed on Tuesday evening this week, but it wasn't to watch Steph Curry.

Tom Warren / The Verge: Microsoft plans to make changes to Windows that will help CrowdStrike, Broadcom, and other security vendors operate outside of the Windows kernel  —  Microsoft is announcing plans to make changes to Windows that will help CrowdStrike and other security vendors operate outside of the Windows kernel.

Vincent Manancourt / Politico: Nick Clegg says Elon Musk turned X into “a sort of one man, sort of hyper-partisan and ideological hobby horse”, contrasting Meta's content moderation with X's  —  The Meta exec and former British deputy PM launched a broadside at X owner Elon Musk.  —  LONDON — Watch out Elon, Sir Nick's out to get you.

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Sergey Brin says he works at Google “pretty much every day” and that recent AI algorithmic improvements are “outpacing the increased compute” put into models  —  Google co-founder and ex-Alphabet president Sergey Brin said he's back working at Google “pretty much every day” …

David Shepardson / Reuters: CTIA: Americans used over 100T MB of wireless data in 2023, up 36% YoY, the largest single-year increase; the number of wireless connections rose 6% YoY to 558M  —  Americans used just over 100 trillion megabytes of wireless data in 2023, up 36% over the prior year in the largest single-year increase …

Jiahui Huang / Wall Street Journal: In a memo to commemorate Alibaba's 25th anniversary, Jack Ma said the competition will make the company stronger, urging trust “in the power of market forces”  —  “Only with competition can we become stronger and allow the industry to remain healthy,” Ma said

Jake Evans / ABC: Facebook admits to scraping every Australian adult user's public data to train AI, with no opt-out option because it is not required to do so under privacy law  —  In short:  —  Facebook is scraping the public data of all Australian adults on the platform, it has acknowledged in an inquiry.

Wendy Davis / MediaPost: A federal judge blocks Utah from enforcing the Minor Protection in Social Media Act, set to take effect on October 1, saying the law likely violates the 1A  —  A federal judge has blocked Utah from enforcing a new law that would have restricted social media platforms' ability to serve content to minors under 18.

Taylor Swift / Taylor Swift on Instagram: Taylor Swift says she's voting for Kamala Harris, noting that Donald Trump sharing an AI-generated image of her “endorsing” him prompted her to reveal her plans  —  Like many of you, I watched the debate tonight.  If you haven't already, now is a great time to do your research …

Carl Franzen / VentureBeat: Matt Shumer, who was accused of fraud over HyperWrite's 70B-parameter AI model, says he “got ahead” of himself but doesn't explain why the model underperformed  —  Matt Shumer, co-founder and CEO of OthersideAI, also known as its signature AI assistant writing product HyperWrite …