~techmeme | Bookmarks (1014)

Stephanie Stacey / Financial Times: Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, and Grindr are building or testing AI tools and chatbots to generate icebreakers, coach users, and more, in a bid to bring back users  —  Tinder, Hinge, Bumble and Grindr are racing to create chatbots that can coach Gen Z users to flirt

Wall Street Journal: Big YouTube shows including Hot Ones and Good Mythical Morning attract large audiences but aren't yet getting Primetime Emmy nominations and ensuing ad revenue  —  ‘Hot Ones,’ ‘Chicken Shop Date’ and ‘Good Mythical Morning’ draw big audiences but aren't getting the kind of ad dollars and accolades TV shows do

New York Times: How Brazil's experiment to fight fake news during the 2022 elections, giving a justice broad power to order social media content removal, led to the ban on X  —  To combat disinformation, Brazil gave one judge broad power to police the internet.  Now, after he blocked X, some are wondering whether that was a good idea.

Eric Newcomer / Newcomer: A look at the farcical situation at Bolt as it insists in a letter that Silverbear is on the hook to invest $200M; source: Bolt lost $310M on $27M 2023 revenue  —  I've got the company's financial performance, a letter to investors, and a statement from Ashesh Shah at The London Fund.

Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority: In a lawsuit, OSOM's ex-chief privacy officer alleges that the CEO of the smartphone startup misused funds to pay for his racing hobby and lavish lifestyle  —  Lawsuit alleges that OSOM's founder misused company funds to pay for Lamborghinis and his racing hobby

New York Times: Bluesky reports a record spike in usage as many X users in Brazil move to Bluesky and Threads; Brazil is X's fifth-largest international market, with 20M+ users  —  The platform went dark across Brazil on Saturday, sending online commentators to new digital town squares.

The Information: Coatue founder Philippe Laffont has left the board of ByteDance following a report that Coatue was considering selling a portion of its ByteDance stake  —  Coatue Management founder Philippe Laffont has left the board of ByteDance, the parent of TikTok, according to the company's website.

Nick Burns / Americas Quarterly: A profile of Alexandre de Moraes as even some supporters wonder if the Brazilian Supreme Court judge has become too powerful and gone too far by banning X  —  An escalating clash with Elon Musk and damaging revelations in the press are intensifying a long-running debate about whether Alexandre de Moraes is too powerful.

Mike Masnick / Techdirt: X is right to stand up to Brazil's unjust “hostage laws,” but Musk's fight highlights his cynical free speech stance after he caved to Modi's censorship demands  —  In the battle between Elon Musk and Brazil, there are no heroes — only two sides engaged in an epic display of hypocrisy and overreach.

Kevin Roose / New York Times: A reporter tries fixing his reputation with AI chatbots, including by adding a “strategic text sequence” to data sources, and via an AI optimization startup  —  When I set out to improve my tainted reputation with chatbots, I discovered a new world of A.I. manipulation.

Wall Street Journal: How the Israeli army's Unit 8200 became an incubator for cybersecurity startups, with its alumni starting Wiz, Palo Alto Networks, and other companies  —  Unit 8200 has become an incubator for cybersecurity startups defending the world's biggest companies against hackers

Ed Newton-Rex / Music Business Worldwide: It's time for audio services like Spotify to deal with AI by using labels and banning or downweighting music made with AI tools that don't license training data  —  The following MBW Views op/ed comes from Ed Newton-Rex (pictured inset), CEO of the ethical generative AI non-profit, Fairly Trained.

Matt Stoller / BIG: Social media companies' reliance on Section 230 protections is in jeopardy after a US court ruled TikTok's algorithmic curation is not protected by Section 230  —  “TikTok reads 230 of the Communications Decency Act to permit casual indifference to the death of a ten-year-old girl.”  - Judge Paul Matey

Taylor Soper / GeekWire: Amazon hires the founders of industrial robot maker Covariant and ~25% of its staff, and signs a non-exclusive license to Covariant's robotic foundation models  —  Amazon is hiring three of the founders from Covariant, a Bay Area startup that develops AI for advanced warehouse robotics systems.

Takashi Mochizuki / Bloomberg: Sources: Tencent and NetEase reconsider or scale back Japanese game studio investments, after the strategy yielded few hit games and the Chinese market revived  —  - China's biggest game publishers are rethinking expansion plans  — ‘Wukong’ success also encouraged looking domestically for hits

Bloomberg: Sources: Intel explores options to cope with historic slump, including a split of its product and foundry units and potentially scrapping some factory projects  —  - Once-dominant chipmaker looks to longtime bankers for help  — Possible moves could include split of product, foundry units

Asa Fitch / Wall Street Journal: Analysts and industry execs say Nvidia's Blackwell engineering challenges stem from combining two new processors and several memory components in a single chip  —  As the company pushes the chip-making envelope, manufacturing hurdles are causing delays and higher costs

Reuters: Indian quick grocery delivery startup Zepto raises $340M at a $5B valuation, up from $3.6B in June 2024, in a round led by General Catalyst  —  Indian grocery startup Zepto said on Thursday it has raised $340 million in a fresh round, just two months after its last fundraise.

Carl Franzen / VentureBeat: Alibaba releases Qwen2-VL, a new AI model that it says can analyze videos longer than 20 minutes to summarize and answer questions about the videos' content  —  Alibaba Cloud, the cloud services and storage division of the Chinese e-commerce giant, has announced the release of Qwen2-VL …

Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch: Google rolls out Gmail Q&A, a feature that allows users who pay for Gemini to chat with and use the AI assistant for their emails, on Android and soon on iOS  —  Gmail users on Android devices can now chat directly with Google's AI assistant, Gemini, about their emails in the Gmail app.

Jonathan Stempel / Reuters: A US district judge dismisses, with prejudice, a lawsuit accusing Elon Musk and Tesla of defrauding investors by hyping Dogecoin and conducting insider trading  —  Elon Musk and his electric vehicle company Tesla (TSLA.O) won the dismissal of a federal lawsuit accusing them of defrauding investors …

Leo Schwartz / Fortune: Bridge, which aims to build a global payment network around stablecoins, raised $40M led by Sequoia and Ribbit, taking its total funding to $58M  —  The crypto industry has long sought a “killer app” to bring digital assets into the mainstream.  Recently, though, some are pointing …

Jordan Novet / CNBC: MongoDB reports Q2 revenue up 13% YoY to $478.1M, vs. $464.1M est., and forecasts Q3 and FY 2025 revenue above estimates; MDB jumps 13%+ after hours  —  MongoDB shares jumped as much as 16% in extended trading on Thursday after the database software maker reported healthy fiscal second-quarter earnings and pushed up full-year guidance.

Jay Peters / The Verge: Meta is opening up Horizon Worlds to users aged 10 to 12 with parental approval, and rolls out a new age rating system for worlds to help parents supervise kids  —  As part of the rollout, parents will have a significant amount of control over what experiences their preteens can access …