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Berlin-based finmid, which makes embedded fintech solutions for SMBs, raised a 23M Series A at a 100M post money valuation, bringing total raised to 35M (Anna Heim/TechCrunch)

Microsoft invests $1.5B in Abu Dhabi-based AI group G42 for a minority stake, as G42 severed its ties with Chinese suppliers; Brad Smith will sit on G42's board (Financial Times)

Tel Aviv-based Bridgewise, which uses AI to provide investment analysis to brokerages, wealth advisors, and exchanges, raised a $21M Series A led by SIX Group (Saritha Rai/Bloomberg)

Baidu says that eight months after launch, its AI chatbot Ernie Bot now has 200M+ users and 85K enterprise clients, after reaching 100M+ users in December (Josh Ye/Reuters)

South Korea-based AI startup Upstage raised a $72M Series B from investors including SK Networks and SBVA, formerly known as SoftBank Ventures Asia (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg)

Kode Labs, which develops tools that integrate data from building management systems and IoT devices, raised a $30M Series B led by Maverix Private Equity (Tim De Chant/TechCrunch)

Sources: the UK plans talks this month with Apple, Meta, and others to push a voluntary charter granting parents more control of social media use by young teens (Ellen Milligan/Bloomberg)

Mark Zuckerberg wins his bid to avoid personal liability in about two dozen lawsuits accusing Meta and other companies of addicting children to their products (Rachel Graf/Bloomberg)

Google's Jigsaw expands Perspective API, a set of ML tools that help moderators and researchers identify toxicity, with seven attributes, including nuance (Billy Perrigo/TIME)

EU antitrust regulators are questioning Broadcom about changes to VMware's licensing conditions, following complaints from EU business users and a trade group (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters)

Limitless launches the $99 Limitless Pendant, a wearable AI gadget that transcribes meetings and provides real-time notes and summaries, shipping in August (David Pierce/The Verge)

Letter: X's lawyers tell Brazil's Supreme Court that the social media platform will comply with every ruling issued by the court or Brazil's top electoral court (Ricardo Brito/Reuters)

How scammers, often from Nigeria, are using sextortion to target teenage boys on social media in the US, leading to at least 20 suicides over an 18-month period (Olivia Carville/Bloomberg)

Meta plans to launch a new education product for Quest that will let teachers access education apps for students ages 13+ and manage multiple headsets at once (Jennifer A. Kingson/Axios)

Sources: Tesla is focused on building a giant Texas datacenter for its robotaxi project, which is now a top priority, after postponing work on a cheaper vehicle (Fred Lambert/Electrek)

As nine US states advance online child safety bills, a look at tech giants' lobbying efforts against the legislation, led by industry group NetChoice (Katie McQue/The Guardian)

Impressions of Waymo's robotaxis after several rides: amazing tech that quickly feels "normal", but it failed to understand a traffic cop's hand signals (Peter Kafka/Business Insider)

ISD: fake footage of Iran's attack on Israel went viral on X, including AI-made videos and photos, with many posts from verified accounts and "OSINT experts" (Vittoria Elliott/Wired)

CISA said locks from RealPage's Chirp Systems, reportedly on ~50K US dwellings, can be unlocked via a hack; Chirp was told in 2021 but is quiet about the flaw (Brian Krebs/Krebs on Security)

Stanford's AI Index report: training top AI models gets more expensive, AI still trails humans on complex tasks, people have become more worried about AI, more (Artificial Intelligence Index)

Sources: Instagram is in the early stages of testing "Creator AI" chatbots for top influencers, which would automate DM responses to fans in a creator's "voice" (New York Times)

Source: a16z closed $7.2B for its newest set of funds, with allocations for AI infrastructure, AI apps, its "American Dynamism" strategy, and more (Kia Kokalitcheva/Axios)

Sources detail how China-based ByteDance and US TikTok operations remain intertwined, with some US staff effectively reporting to ByteDance, data sharing, more (Alexandra Sternlicht/Fortune)

Q&A with Dropbox CEO Drew Houston on adding AI tools, evolving beyond file syncing, rejecting Steve Jobs' buyout offer, online storage, remote working, and more (Nilay Patel/The Verge)

An interview with Framework CEO Nirav Patel on ongoing firmware and software issues with its repairable laptops, the planned fixes, Intel and AMD, and more (Andrew Cunningham/Ars Technica)

Adobe is in the early stages of developing a way to let users tap third-party tools from OpenAI, Runway, and Pika Labs to generate and use video in Premiere Pro (Stephen Nellis/Reuters)

AT&T, Charter, Comcast, and Verizon quietly lobby to weaken a $42.5B program to improve US internet access, aiming to block new rules on poor customers' bills (Tony Romm/Washington Post)

Adobe releases Acrobat AI Assistant to summarize and answer questions about documents for $4.99/month as an "early access" rate, and a mobile version in beta (Alex Koller/CNBC)

As Microsoft begins its most ambitious security overhaul in two decades, critics question if Microsoft has sufficient incentive to make deep and lasting changes (Bloomberg)

Meta plans to temporarily shut down Threads in Turkey from April 29 to comply with an interim order prohibiting data sharing between Threads and Instagram (Meta)

Singapore-based used car marketplace Carro raised ~$100M in pre-IPO funding at a $1.5B+ valuation and reports its first annual operating profit (Olivia Poh/Bloomberg)

Bitcoin's next halving, set for around April 20, will cut miners' validating transactions to 450 from 900 now, costing the industry ~$10B in annual revenue (David Pan/Bloomberg)

Source: cloud data management startup Rubrik plans to sell 23M shares priced between $28 and $31 each, raising up to $713M and reaching a $5.4B valuation (Echo Wang/Reuters)

OpenAI opens a Tokyo office, releases a Japanese language GPT-4 model, and taps former president of AWS's Japan arm Tadao Nagasaki to lead an enterprise push (Bloomberg)

The US awards Samsung $6.4B in CHIPS Act funding and says the company plans to make 2nm chips at its Taylor, Texas plant by 2026, two years ahead of TSMC (Financial Times)

A look at BlackPlanet, a social network for African Americans that went live in 1999, had ~15M users in 2008, and arguably laid the foundation for Black Twitter (Hannah Giorgis/The Atlantic)

An overview of Bureau of Labor Statistics data, which shows California's percentage of US tech jobs has continued to steadily decline since 2020 (Joseph Politano/Apricitas Economics)

In Q1, 289.4M smartphones were shipped globally, up 7.8% YoY; iPhone shipments fell 9.6% YoY, more than any top brand, and Xiaomi shipments grew 33.8% YoY (IDC)

As Netflix's new film chief Dan Lin takes charge, the company aims to shift its film strategy to focus on audience appeal and cost efficiency (Nicole Sperling/New York Times)

LinkedIn: the number of companies with a designated head of AI position or a chief AI officer (CAIO) has almost tripled globally in the past five years (Emma Jacobs/Financial Times)

Source: Google's new Pixel 9 series, next-gen Pixel Fold, and 5G tablet that is under development will feature a new modem that supports satellite connectivity (Kamila Wojciechowska/Android Authority)

A look at chip design companies like Oppstar that aim to push Malaysia, the world's sixth-largest semiconductor exporter, to the higher end of the value chain (Tsubasa Suruga/Nikkei Asia)

Q&A with Ukraine's Cyberpolice Department chief Yevhenii Panchenko on his role after Russia's invasion, battling pro-Russian hacking groups, and more (Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai/TechCrunch)

Analysis: software and services companies have almost $30B of debt that's classed as distressed, the most in any industry apart from real estate (Reshmi Basu/Bloomberg)

An analysis of 200M+ student papers submitted over the past year: ~11% of papers showed signs of AI help and ~3% of papers contained at least 80% AI writing (Pilita Clark/Financial Times)

A look at Vana, which raised $20M to let users get paid to share their Reddit posts and other data to train AI models; Reddit banned Vana's subreddit (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

Sources detail how Senate Commerce Committee chair Maria Cantwell, who recently proposed a privacy bill, has undermined privacy negotiations for years (Cristiano Lima-Strong/Washington Post)

Meta says it is testing its Meta AI chatbot with WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger users in India and parts of Africa (TechCrunch)

An experiment to see how a Threads feed would work on Mastodon, using lists and testing third-party clients, which shows the bright future of the fediverse (Anuj Ahooja/augment)

Bluesky says it is now allowing heads of state to sign up, and adds features including hashtags in profile bios and the ability to long press a link to share (Wes Davis/The Verge)

Airchat, Naval Ravikant's social media app built around audio recordings, which the app transcribes, relaunches on iOS and Android; it is currently invite-only (Anthony Ha/TechCrunch)

A look at the book The Anxious Generation, as some say author Jonathan Haidt falls short in showing that social media is causing a teen mental health crisis (Zo Schiffer/Platformer)

Q&A with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei about AI models costing ~$10B to train, why AI models are close to being "able to replicate and survive in the wild", more (New York Times)

Elon Musk's xAI previews Grok-1.5 Vision, its first multimodal model, and says the AI model will be available soon to "early testers and existing Grok users" (Ken Yeung/VentureBeat)

Twitch has become a major Spanish-language platform, with streamers like TheGrefg and Ibai Llanos hosting live sporting events that attract massive audiences (Sherwood News)

A profile of NYC-based Nanotronics, which has raised $162M and is making modular chipmaking plants that can be assembled on site and be functional within a year (Belle Lin/Wall Street Journal)

Huawei unveils the new MateBook X Pro, its first AI PC, running on HarmonyOS and powered by Intel Core Ultra 9, available in China from April 18 for up to ~$2K (Nikkei Asia)

Google researchers detail a technique that gives LLMs the ability to work with text of infinite length while keeping memory and compute requirements constant (Ben Dickson/VentureBeat)

A US official says the OFAC is investigating several US and foreign companies for shipments of chips with military applications that ultimately end up in Russia (Bloomberg)

After Sam Altman and others called for AI regulation, some executives including Box CEO Aaron Levie say the US should not rush like the EU did (Steven Levy/Wired)

Source: Akamai is in advanced talks to buy Noname Security, which finds and fixes API vulnerabilities, for $500M; the startup was valued at $1B in December 2021 (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)

Sources: Salesforce is in advanced talks to acquire cloud data management company Informatica, whose market cap crossed $11B after its shares jumped 43% in 2024 (Wall Street Journal)

SAG-AFTRA reaches a tentative deal with major record labels, including WMG and Sony Music Entertainment, that includes protections over the use of AI (Reuters)

Microsoft starts testing ads inside the Start menu on Windows 11 in the Insider builds in the US, and says the app promotions can be disabled in Settings (Tom Warren/The Verge)

A case study of the creation of an AI-powered local "news" website, directed to produce partisan stories on a US Senate race; a Fiverr developer made it for $80 (Jack Brewster/Wall Street Journal)

Tesla drops the price of its Full Self-Driving software subscription, which the company now calls FSD (Supervised), from $199 per month to $99 per month (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)

Palo Alto Networks alerts customers that hackers are exploiting a zero-day in its popular GlobalProtect VPN product and promises a patch by April 14 (Jonathan Greig/The Record)

As Meta lowers the minimum age for WhatsApp users from 16 to 13 in the UK and EU, after announcing the move in February, child safety groups criticize the move (Jamie Grierson/The Guardian)

A US judge sentences ex-Amazon security engineer Shakeeb Ahmed to three years in prison for stealing $12.3M+ from Nirvana and another crypto exchange in 2022 (Chris Dolmetsch/Bloomberg)

Meta is testing an AI-powered search bar in Instagram to let users chat with Meta AI and discover content (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

Epic asks a US court to require Google to allow alt app stores in Play Store and limit Google's ability to restrict alt app store preloading on Android phones (Mike Scarcella/Reuters)

Chinese-owned Dutch chipmaker Nexperia is investigating a breach in March; report: customer data of companies including Apple, Huawei, and SpaceX was stolen (Bloomberg)

Last week, LinkedIn began letting advertisers pay to amplify posts from some users through Thought Leader ads, as it enters the market of influencer marketing (Jordan Novet/CNBC)

OpenAI gives premium ChatGPT users access to an updated GPT-4 Turbo, promising more direct, less verbose responses, and use of more conversational language (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

Roku says hackers accessed ~576K accounts using credential stuffing, and made purchases in ~400 cases, after a similar breach affecting ~15K accounts in March (Alex Weprin/The Hollywood Reporter)

Google tests removing links to CA news sites to measure the impact of the California Journalism Preservation Act and pauses investments in the CA news ecosystem (Jaffer Zaidi/The Keyword)

Adobe used images created by tools like Midjourney and uploaded to its stock marketplace by users, to train Firefly; Adobe says ~5% of images were AI-generated (Bloomberg)

South Korea will host the second global AI safety summit on May 21-22, six months after the UK held the inaugural event at Bletchley Park (Martin Coulter/Reuters)

Berachain, a bear-themed crypto project building a Layer 1 blockchain, raised a $100M Series B through a SAFT, a simple agreement for future tokens (Hannah Miller/Bloomberg)

Sources: StubHub aims to go public by late summer but may call off the listing if it can't get close to the $16.5B valuation from a funding round in 2021 (Cory Weinberg/The Information)

Entertainment Headlines Today
[Fri-26-Apr-2024]

"5 inches and above is unhealthy. 2 - 3 inches are medically certified" Nigerian women speak on the size of their partners' sexual organs - Linda Ikeji

"I can't breathe" Harrowing video shows handcuffed black man's last words as police knelt on him before he died - Linda Ikeji

15-year-old Girl Reported Missing After She Was Sent To The Bank To Withdraw Money - Tori

20% of Nigerians use Bitcoin to transact daily - New report claims - Linda Ikeji

2023 polls reflect will of voters despite irregularities US Report - Linda Ikeji

5 Inches And Above Is Unhealthy Nigerian Women Speak On The Size Of their Partners S3xual Organs - Gistlover

5 Inches And Above Is Unhealthy, 2 - 3 inches Are Medically Certified - Nigerian Women Speak On The Size Of their Partners' S3xual Organs - Tori

74-year-old woman robs bank at gunpoint after losing her life savings to online scammers - Linda Ikeji

74-year-old Woman Robs Bank at Gunpoint After Losing Her Life Savings to Online Scammers (Photo) - Tori

A 37-member tripartite committee on minimum wage set up by FG to continue negotiations on new minimum wage. - Pulse

A good man cooks for his wife Rapper Erigga advices Nigerian men - Kemi Filani

A handful of commercial motorcyclists were seen plying the streets as several filling stations were not dispensing fuel. - Pulse

According to her, UNICEF focuses on strengthening government budget systems to ensure that public resources reach children most in need. - Pulse

According to him, it would further sanitise the university system, and promote sanctity and academic excellence. - Pulse

Actor Yul Edochie shares photo from the Baptism of his second son with Judy Austin - Linda Ikeji

Actor Yul Edochie Talks About Having More Kids And Late Son Kambi Returning.. - Stella Dimoko Korkus

Actress Uche Ogbodo Gives Advice To Colleagues Looking For Husbands And Wives... - Stella Dimoko Korkus

Actress Yetunde Bakare Rants..... - Stella Dimoko Korkus

Adekunle Gold Has A New Single Rodo | Listen - Bellanaija

Again, JAMB Extends 2024 Direct Entry Registration - Tori

Air Peace Plane Makes Emergency Landing At Lagos Airport - Tori

Airport Puff-Puff Sellers Claim To Be Aviation Experts In Nigeria ' Keyamo Alleged - Information Nigeria

Akin Alabis Masterclasses: Transforming Filmmakers - Daily Times

Alaafins Estranged Wife, Queen Dami Shares Cryptic Post About Death - Gistlover

Alaafins Ex-Wife, Queen Dami Shares Cryptic Post About Death - Tori

All I can say is wow Eniola Badmus short of words as she expresses gratitude to her Maker - Kemi Filani

Alleged N80.2Billion Fraud: Honour EFCC Invitation While You Have The Chance, Senator Natasha Tells Yahaya Bello - Tori

Almost 400 bodies found in mass grave in Gaza hospital - Linda Ikeji

American International School Writes EFCC, to Refund $760,000 Paid for Yahaya Bello Childrens Fees (Screenshots) - Tori

American School Writes EFCC, To Refund $760,000 Paid From Kogi Coffers For Yahaya Bello Children's Fees - Information Nigeria

AMVCAs: Ini Dima-Okojie, Folu Stormshare excitement ahead of 10th edition - The Nation

Anee Icha is Finding Joy in Acting & Championing Mental Wellness | #BNMeetTheStar - Bellanaija

Anenih explained that the selection process was carried out under the direct supervision of the leaders of the party headed by Obaseki. - Pulse

APC Crisis: Protesters Storm Party's Secretariat, Demand Ganduje's Resignation - Information Nigeria

Arms Deal: We Traced N4.6bn To Bafarawas Son - EFCC Witness Tells Court - Tori

Asylum Seeker Found Guilty Of Murder In UK After Stabbing Housemate, Killing Passerby In Revenge For Israel Actions In Gaza - Tori

Audit Report Showed Dana Air Unfit For Operations ' Keyamo - Information Nigeria

Avengers: Nasboi Features Kanayo O. Kanayo, Speed Darlington Other in Funny Video to Support His New Song - Gistlover

Avoid Panic Buying, Petrol Prices Not Changing ' NNPC To Nigerians - Information Nigeria

AVRS fulfills obligations to members - The Nation

Baddie begets baddie- Solomon Buchi pokes fun at Justin Dean for crying over daughter twerking like mother - Gistlover

Bandits kill Nigerian Army commander in Katsina - Linda Ikeji

Bandits kill pastor in Kaduna - Linda Ikeji

Bandits Kill Pastor in Kaduna (Photo) - Tori

Bandits Kill Two, Abduct Several Others In Zamfara Community - Tori

Bandits kill two, abduct several others in Zamfara community - Linda Ikeji

Because Odumeje Cant Speak Good English Doesnt Make Him Fake Nkechi Blessing - Tori

Behind The Viewfinder: An Extraordinary Journey Across Diverse Landscapes, Emotions, Cultures - New Telegraph

Behind The Viewfinder: An Extraordinary Journey Across Diverse Landscapes, Emotions, Cultures - New Telegraph

Behind The Viewfinder: An Extraordinary Journey Across Diverse Landscapes, Emotions, Cultures - New Telegraph

Behind The Viewfinder: An Extraordinary Journey Across Diverse Landscapes, Emotions, Cultures - New Telegraph

Bella Shmurda Honours Mohbads Memory with New EP R2 Sept 12 - Bellanaija

Bella Shmurda releases new EP ahead of his upcoming album. - Pulse

Biggies grandbabies- Reactions as Marias son meets Frodds daughter - Gistlover

Boredom Eliminating Post - Stella Dimoko Korkus

BREAKING: Many Trapped As Building Collapses In Kano - Tori

BREAKING: Oyo LG Polls: Hoodlums Attack Electoral Officials, Snatch Ballot Papers (Photo) - Tori

BSc Law: Nigerians Blast Anyim Vera For Seeking Financial Help to Maintain Celebrity Status - Tori

Businessman Tony Elumelu Shares EPIC Throwback Photo With Wife Awele.... - Stella Dimoko Korkus