Techmeme: A look at the rise of “pure play” bitcoin companies like Twenty One, as the stock market is paying far more for crypto exposure than the crypto market itself is (Matt Levine/Bloomberg)

Top News

Test conversations with some Meta AI digital companions, including celebrity-voiced ones, show them engaging in sexual chats even when users identify as minors — Chatbots on Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp are empowered to engage in ‘romantic role-play’ that can turn explicit.

More: TechSpot. Bluesky: @wadewarrens and @patwhite7000

X: @mattyglesias, @wsj, @marcportermagee, and @zamaan_qureshi. LinkedIn: Sarah Gardner

Forums: Hacker News and r/ABoringDystopia

Furquan Ameen / Rest of World:

Experts say that India is behind China in deep tech innovation due to its historical focus on services, lower R&D investment, and a brain drain of AI talent — India's government urges the private sector to take the lead in tech innovation, while industry experts say it's complicated.

Bluesky: @restofworld.org and @rinachandran

X: @furquansid, @restofworld, and @nit_set. LinkedIn: Furquan Ameen

Prachi Verma / The Economic Times:

India faces a shortage of agentic AI professionals, with executives estimating fewer than 100K in the country while demand is projected to hit ~200K by 2026 — India is grappling with a critical shortage of agentic AI professionals as demand surges, driven by the shift towards sophisticated AI agents capable …

More: StartupNews.fyi. X: @ettech and @ettech

Simon Willison / Simon Willison's Weblog:

Watching OpenAI's o3 guess a photo's location, including the model running Python code to examine license plates, is surreal, dystopian, and entertaining — Watching OpenAI's new o3 model guess where a photo was taken is one of those moments where decades of science fiction suddenly come to life.

Bluesky: @wildebees, @stagefright, and @robmanuelyeah. Forums: Hacker News

Financial Times:

Sources: ~300 London-based DeepMind staff sought to unionize with the CWU in recent weeks, to challenge AI sales to defense groups and Google's ties to Israel — Move by employees at Google's AI arm follows discontent after weapons and surveillance pledge is dropped

More: TechCrunch, The Decoder, Cryptopolitan, Reuters, The Economic Times, and StartupNews.fyi

Bluesky: @atreyo.dev. X: @zachweinberg. Forums: r/ukpolitics

Matt Levine / Bloomberg:

A look at the rise of “pure play” bitcoin companies like Twenty One, as the stock market is paying far more for crypto exposure than the crypto market itself is — Twenty One, Trumpcoin dinner, KKR empathy, carry on co-investments and quantitative analysis of hockey. — Project Mystery

More: CoinDesk and Coinpedia Fintech News

Isabelle Bousquette / Wall Street Journal:

Prompt engineering roles, one of the buzziest jobs in 2023, become obsolete as AI models better intuit user intent and companies train staff in writing prompts — Prompt engineering, a role aimed at crafting the perfect input to send to a large language model, was poised to become one of the hottest jobs in artificial intelligence.

Bluesky: @tappedlands.com and @skynetandchill.com. Mastodon: @harrymccracken@mastodon …

LinkedIn: Ariel Guersenzvaig and Isabelle Bousquette

Coco Feng / South China Morning Post:

Filing: China's leading flash memory chipmaker YMTC raised ~$219M from Hebei Yangyuan Zhihui Beverage Co. at a ~$22.1B valuation in December 2023 — The deal was signed in December 2023 but was only announced on Friday as it ‘involved commercial secrets’, Yangyuan said

Financial Times:

Trump's tariffs could slow robot adoption in the US, as buyer demand weakens and supplies of key components like magnets and actuators are disrupted — Depressed buyers and global supply chains could delay the adoption of futuristic technology — Elon Musk, facing disarray in his corporate …

More: Tech Xplore. Bluesky: @evansutton

Owen Carry / Know Your Meme:

4chan is back online after being down for 10 days, following a hack that leaked the emails of its lead administrators called “janitors” — 4chan is officially back online today. — The imageboard site had been down for 10 days, ever since a hack that restored its /QA/ board …

More: 4chan Blog, WinBuzzer, Boing Boing, and 4chan Blog

X: @4chan, @4chan, and @4chan. Forums: Slashdot

Francisco Rodrigues / CoinDesk:

Stripe plans to test a stablecoin payments product aimed at companies outside the US, the UK, and the EU, using tech from Bridge, which Stripe acquired recently — Stripe CEO Patrick Collison said a stablecoin tool for companies outside US, UK and EU is ready for testing. — What to know:

More: Bitcoin Insider, The Daily Hodl, and Cointelegraph

X: @patrickc and @backseatvc

Ryan Lawler / Axios:

Salsa, which provides APIs and UI components that let vertical SaaS platforms offer payroll as a feature to their customers, raised a $20M Series A led by Altos — Salsa, a startup providing embedded payroll infrastructure to vertical SaaS platforms, raised $20 million in Series A funding, CEO John Kramer tells Axios exclusively.

More: FinSMEs, Salsa, The Paypers, Finextra, PYMNTS.com, FinTech Global, and VC News Daily

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