Borekas Founder Uzi Wizman on Creating a Food Business from Social Media
Interview with Uzi Wizman, founder of Borekas and PSY Street Kitchen, about growing a brand from an Instagram Story and sharing culture with the world.
Google DeepMind wants to know if chatbots are just virtue signaling
Google DeepMind is calling for the moral behavior of large language models—such as what they do when called on to act as companions, therapists, medical advisors, and so on—to be scrutinized with the same kind of rigor as their ability to code or do math. As LLMs improve, people are asking them to play more…
Tradeshift raises $70M, launches financing JV with HSBC focused on B2B trade
Global trade has been in a slump, in part due to ongoing economic pressures in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Now, with some glimmers of recovery on the horizon, a startup that’s built business around tools to enable B2B trading has raised some money and is launching a JV that it hopes will kickstart […]
Socket lands $20M investment to help companies secure open source software
Socket, a startup that provides a scanning tool to detect security vulnerabilities in open source code, today announced that it raised $20 million in a Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). The tranche had participation from Abstract Ventures, Wndrco, Unusual Ventures and an impressively high-profile list of angel investors, including the co-founders of […]
Neon, a relational database startup, lands ~$30M investment
Neon, a startup that’s building a serverless open source alternative to AWS Aurora Postgres, today announced that it raised around $45 million in a new funding round, about $30 million of which came from Menlo VC. Bringing its total raised to $104 million, the new cash will be put toward improving Neon’s developer experience and […]
Generative AI services pulled from Apple App Store in China ahead of new regulations
Multiple generative AI apps have been removed from Apple’s China App Store, two weeks ahead of the country’s new generative AI regulations that are set to take effect on August 15. The move came after Chinese developers received notices from Apple informing them of their apps’ removal. In its letter to OpenCat, a native ChatGPT […]
Uber reports first quarterly operating profit in Q2 2023 results
Uber has reported an operating profit during a fiscal quarter for the first time in its history. The company reported its second quarter earnings for 2023 [PDF] on Tuesday morning, which included a net income of $394 million for the quarter, up $1.0 billion year-over-year and $588 million versus the preceding quarter. The company attributed […]
BBC is testing being on Mastodon, says fediverse better fit for public purposes than Twitter or Threads
In another sign of shifting forces in the social media universe, the UK’s national public service broadcaster, the BBC, is dipping a toe into the fediverse by setting up its own Mastodon instance. The BBC is labelling its move as an experiment — and, to be clear, the organization is not abandoning its presence on […]
How Should Young Adults Divide Their Paychecks?
I got the inspiration for this article after speaking with a 23-year-old unsure of how to divide his paycheck every two weeks. How much did he need to put in…
Steg.AI puts deep learning on the job in a clever evolution of watermarking
Watermarking an image to mark is one’s own is something that has value across countless domains, but these days it’s more difficult than just adding a logo in the corner. Steg.AI lets creators embed a nearly invisible watermark using deep learning, defying the usual “resize and resave” countermeasures. Ownership of digital assets has had a […]
These new tools could help protect our pictures from AI
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Earlier this year, when I realized how ridiculously easy generative AI has made it to manipulate people’s images, I maxed out the privacy settings on my social media accounts and swapped…