Kevin Hartz tends to be first through the door. In 2001, he co-founded Xoom, back when sending money across borders meant standing in line at Western Union. In 2013, it went public, and in 2015, PayPal paid $1.1 billion for it. Four years after launching Xoom, he co-founded Eventbrite, which went public in 2018 and … Read more
A federal judge has granted Meta-owned WhatsApp’s request for a permanent injunction blocking Israeli cyberintelligence company NSO Group from targeting the messaging app’s users. At the same time, the judge dramatically reduced the fine that NSO Group must pay to Meta. Earlier this year, a jury decided that the cyberintelligence company would have to pay … Read more
Wikipedia is often described as the last good website on an internet increasingly filled with toxic social media and AI slop, but it seems the online encyclopedia is not completely immune to broader trends, with human pageviews falling 8% year-over-year, according to a new blog post from Marshall Miller of the Wikimedia Foundation. The foundation … Read more
The AI era is giving fracking a second act, a surprising twist for an industry that, even during its early 2010s boom years, was blamed by climate advocates for poisoned water tables, man-made earthquakes, and the stubborn persistence of fossil fuels. AI companies are building massive data centers near major gas-production sites, often generating their … Read more
Silicon Valley leaders including White House AI & Crypto Czar David Sacks and OpenAI Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon caused a stir online this week for their comments about groups promoting AI safety. In separate instances, they alleged that certain advocates of AI safety are not as virtuous as they appear, and are either acting … Read more
Senate Republicans shared a deepfake video of Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, designed to make it seem like Democrats are celebrating the ongoing government shutdown, which has lasted 16 days. In the deepfake, an AI-generated Schumer repeats the phrase “every day gets better for us,” an actual quote taken out of context from … Read more
Silicon Valley’s rule? It’s not cool to be cautious. As OpenAI removes guardrails and VCs criticize companies like Anthropic for supporting AI safety regulations, it’s becoming clearer who the industry thinks should shape AI development. On this episode of Equity, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Max Zeff discuss how the line between innovation and responsibility … Read more
In Evelyn Mora’s early career, she realized that fashion designers, although often deeply focused on sustainability, couldn’t stage environmentally friendly large-scale fashion shows. In 2021, she launched VLGE, a gaming and immersive-world-building platform that specializes in working with brands. It lets brands build their own worlds, fill them with interactive content and games, and export said … Read more
Reddit announced Thursday that it is expanding its AI-powered search experience to five new languages: French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. With this expansion, the feature is now available in countries like Brazil, France, Germany, Spain, Mexico, and Italy. Users who have set one of these languages as their default, instead of English, can now … Read more
Electric aircraft startup Lilium may have ceased operations a year ago, but its insolvency filing wasn’t quite the end of the German-based company. There were multiple failed attempts to restructure the company, including a last-ditch effort by Mobile Uplift Corporation, a company set up by investors from Europe and North America, to acquire the operating … Read more
