Good morning! This is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.
In today's Techpresso:
💰 Elon Musk raises $6B to compete with OpenAI
🚫 ByteDance 'would rather' torpedo TikTok than sell it off
💵 Alphabet issues first-ever dividend
📈 Snap sees shares surge as improved ad system pays off
🫠 FTC accuses Jeff Bezos, Andy Jessy and others of deleting chats amid antitrust investigation
🎁 + 7 other news you might like
🔮 + 3 handpicked research papers and tools
💰 Elon Musk raises $6B to compete with OpenAILINK
xAI, Elon Musk's AI company, is nearing a funding round of $6 billion at a pre-money valuation of $18 billion, aiming to be a competitor to OpenAI.
The funding round has attracted significant interest from investors, including Sequoia Capital and Future Ventures, and terms were adjusted from an initial $3 billion at a $15 billion valuation due to demand.
X, Musk’s social network, not only has a stake in xAI but also integrates its chatbot Grok, showcasing xAI’s broader ambition to merge the digital with the physical through data from Musk's companies.
🚫 ByteDance 'would rather' torpedo TikTok than sell it offLINK
ByteDance would prefer to shut down TikTok in the US rather than sell it, due to the importance of its algorithms to the company's overall operations.
TikTok operates at a loss and contributes a small share to ByteDance's total revenue, making a potential US shutdown more acceptable to the parent company.
Despite facing potential legislation that could ban the app in the US, ByteDance has publicly stated it has no plans to sell TikTok, reinforcing its stance against divesting the app's core algorithms.
💵 Alphabet issues first-ever dividendLINK
Google's parent company, Alphabet, announced it will start issuing cash dividends to its stockholders for the first time, beginning June 17, at 20 cents per share.
Alphabet reported a revenue of $80.54 billion and a net income of $23.662 billion for the first quarter of 2024, surpassing analyst expectations.
The company also highlighted strong performance in its Search, YouTube, and Cloud divisions, and mentioned a major reorganization merging its AI and Research divisions, as well as its hardware and Android/Chrome teams.
📈 Snap sees shares surge as improved ad system pays offLINK
Shares in Snapchat's parent company soared 21% during after-hours trading as it exceeded Wall Street’s expectations for quarterly revenue and user growth.
The company's advertising system enhancements led to a faster-than-expected improvement in performance, contributing to a 21% increase in first-quarter revenue to $1.2 billion.
Snapchat's daily active users reached 422 million in the first quarter, surpassing analysts' expectations, while the company forecasts revenue between $1.23bn and $1.26bn for the second quarter.
🫠 FTC accuses Jeff Bezos, Andy Jessy and others of deleting chats amid antitrust investigationLINK
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) accuses Amazon executives, including Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy, of erasing text messages during an antitrust investigation.
From April 2019 to May 2022, these executives allegedly used the messaging app Signal, which can auto-delete messages, potentially destroying evidence relevant to the FTC's case.
In response to allegations of monopolistic practices, Amazon has requested the dismissal of the FTC's lawsuit, while a trial is set for October 2026.
Other news you might like
CEOs of OpenAI, Google and Microsoft to join other tech leaders on federal AI safety panel.LINK
FCC officially votes to reinstate net neutrality.LINK
Microsoft’s heavy bet on AI pays off as it beats expectations in latest quarter.LINK
Generative AI could soon decimate the call center industry, says CEO.LINK
World's largest 3D printer can build home in 80 hours.LINK
Stripe co-founder says high interest rates flushed out Silicon Valley's 'wackiest' ideas.LINK
School athletic director arrested for framing principal using AI voice synthesis.LINK
Latest research and tools
OpenVoice: a voice cloning tool that offers accurate tone color cloning, flexible voice style control, and zero-shot cross-lingual voice cloning, with its V2 version enhancing audio quality, adding native multi-lingual support, and allowing free commercial use under the MIT License.LINK
NixOS's moderation culture: reflects issues within its community, highlighted by recent controversies including a ban in November 2023 and disputes over RFC proposals.LINK
CatLIP: the paper introduces a method for improving the accuracy of clip vision models while achieving 2.7x faster pre-training on web-scale data.LINK
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