Techmeme: Gemini and Glassnode research: centralized treasuries, including governments, ETFs, and public companies, hold and control 30.9% of bitcoin's circulating supply (Martin Young/Cointelegraph)

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Emanuel Maiberg / 404 Media:

Meta sues Joy Timeline, which makes nudify app CrushAI, in Hong Kong to prevent it from advertising on Meta apps; in January, 90% of its traffic came from Meta — As part of what it claims is a new crackdown, Meta is suing a nudify app and “strengthening” its enforcement.

More: Meta Newsroom, The Verge, PCMag, Engadget, The Hill, CNN, Quartz, Proactive, Yahoo Finance, UPI, BBC, CBS News, KNSD-TV, TechCrunch, and Bloomberg

Bluesky: @samleecole and @emanuelmaiberg. X: @metanewsroom. LinkedIn: Marie Hoffman

Andrew Cunningham / Ars Technica:

An interview with Craig Federighi on iPadOS 26's multitasking UI, Stage Manager's interface limitations, and why the iPad's Mac-style multitasking took so long — Federighi talks to Ars about why the iPad's Mac-style multitasking took so long. — CUPERTINO, Calif.—When Apple Senior Vice President …

More: TechCrunch, iClarified, BGR, MacDailyNews, Spyglass, 9to5Mac, MacRumors, zollotech on YouTube, Max Tech on YouTube, Creative Strategies, Tom's Guide, ZDNET, 9to5Mac, Android Central, Pixel Envy, iPhone in Canada, and iDrop News

X: @caro_milanesi, @leakerapple, @vadimyuryev, @mgsiegler, and @rjeytech

Forums: r/apple, Ars OpenForum, and MacRumors Forums

Bill Toulas / BleepingComputer:

An Interpol-led law enforcement action in 26 countries disrupted infostealer operations, leading to takedowns of 20K+ malicious IPs and domains and 32 arrests — An international law enforcement action codenamed “Operation Secure” targeted infostealer malware infrastructure …

Justine Calma / The Verge:

Google is working with the US National Hurricane Center to test an AI model that forecasts cyclones and launches Weather Lab to share its AI weather models — It's working with the US National Hurricane Center to test out its new AI-based tropical cyclone model.

More: 9to5Google, VentureBeat, Google DeepMind, New York Times, and The Keyword

Marcus Mendes / 9to5Mac:

Apple unveils updates to help parents protect kids and teens online, such as easier Child Accounts setup, stronger defaults, and granular App Store age ratings — Apple today announced a sweeping set of updates aimed at helping parents protect kids and teens online, as part of its broader push …

More: Apple, Thurrott, iDownloadBlog.com, Engadget, Business Standard, The Mac Observer, The Verge, iThinkDifferent, iClarified, Cult of Mac, and AppleInsider

Bloomberg:

Arm CEO Rene Haas sides with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, saying US export controls on China threaten to slow overall tech advances and harm consumers and companies — “If you narrow access to to technology and you force other ecosystems to grow up, it's not good,” Haas said Thursday in an interview …

More: CNBC, Tom's Hardware, Benzinga, South China Morning Post, Cryptopolitan, and Blockchain.News. Forums: r/China

Erik Hayden / The Hollywood Reporter:

SAG-AFTRA ends the 320+ day video game performers strike after reaching a tentative new Interactive Media Agreement contract with the major video game companies — The union had taken a stand on artificial intelligence, among other concerns, as it looked to advocate for voice and performance capture workers.

More: SAG-AFTRA, Polygon, TechRaptor, PocketGamer.biz, Eurogamer.net, PC Gamer, Variety, Engadget, NBC News, Deadline, and Blue's News. Bluesky: @sagaftra.org

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MIT Technology Review:

How Amsterdam's experiment to create a fair welfare AI model, which considered 15 characteristics to evaluate welfare applicants for potential fraud, failed — This story is a partnership between MIT Technology Review, Lighthouse Reports, and Trouw, and was supported by the Pulitzer Center.

More: Lighthouse Reports and Lighthouse Reports

Bluesky: @wavesblog, @niallfirth, @jtemple, and @eileenguo. Forums: r/Amsterdam

Martin Young / Cointelegraph:

Gemini and Glassnode research: centralized treasuries, including governments, ETFs, and public companies, hold and control 30.9% of bitcoin's circulating supply — Centralized treasuries, including governments, ETFs and public companies, now control approximately $668 billion of Bitcoin's circulating supply.

More: Gemini, Blockworks, Inside Bitcoins, Gemini, crypto.news, BeInCrypto, and CoinDesk

Cynthia Littleton / Variety:

A look at Apple's vision for Apple TV+ and its film business, as Tim Cook says the company's $200M+ bet on “F1 the Movie” is about more than selling iPhones — Apple CEO and Formula 1 superstar Lewis Hamilton join forces on ‘F1 the Movie’ to take the tech giant's film business to new heights

More: The Sun, Benzinga, Latest from Short list, The Mac Observer, iClarified, MacRumors, On my Om, AppleInsider, 9to5Mac, and MacDailyNews

X: @impatrickt, @variety, @vincenzolandino, @simsgazette, @om, @om, @maxwinebach, @parkerortolani, and @dylanbyers

Forums: r/MediaMergers, r/boxoffice, r/apple, r/tvPlus, and MacRumors Forums

See also Mediagazer

Zoe Kleinman / BBC:

The UK passes the Data (Use and Access) Bill, criticized by creatives, without an amendment to force companies to declare using copyrighted material to train AI — A bill which sparked an extraordinary stand-off between some of the UK's most high-profile artists - and their backers in the House of Lords - has finally been passed.

More: Taylor Wessing, BusinessCloud, and UKTN

See also Mediagazer

Savyata Mishra / Reuters:

Mattel partners with OpenAI to create AI-powered toys and games, with the first product expected in 2025, and integrates ChatGPT Enterprise in its business — Mattel (MAT.O) has teamed up with OpenAI to develop toys and games with artificial intelligence, and expects to launch …

More: TechCrunch, Mattel, Inc., PYMNTS.com, Bloomberg, Adweek, NERDS.xyz, The Wrap, OpenAI, The Hollywood Reporter, and Benzinga

The Information:

Sources: Meta's Scale AI bet came from Mark Zuckerberg wanting new leadership for Meta's AI efforts, Meta executives' relationships with Alexandr Wang, and more — Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg has tried to fix a seemingly existential problem in recent months.

More: Futurism, implicator.ai, Bloomberg Law, The Straits Times, The Japan Times, and Axios. Bluesky: @prietschka

Julie Bort / TechCrunch:

Landbase, whose GPT-4o-based AI tool automates outreach marketing, raised a $30M Series A co-led by Ashton Kutcher's Sound Ventures and Picus Capital — When Daniel Saks was working as a co-CEO of the previous startup he co-founded, AppDirect, billionaire Michael Dell sent him a LinkedIn message asking for a meeting.

More: FinSMEs and SiliconANGLE

New York Times:

Sources: FTC is discussing a consent decree on the Omnicom-Interpublic merger, prohibiting the combined company from boycotting platforms over political content — The Federal Trade Commission is considering restrictions on Omnicom and Interpublic to prevent the combined company from refusing …

More: Reason. Bluesky: @annmlipton. X: @benmullin

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Ian Thomas / CNBC:

Pittsburgh-based Gecko Robotics, which makes robots that inspect infrastructure, raised a $125M Series D at a $1.25B valuation, up from $633M in December 2023 — Gecko Robotics announced on Thursday that it raised $125 million in a Series D funding round, raising the AI and robotics company's valuation to $1.25 billion.

More: SiliconANGLE and Pittsburgh Business Journal

Dana Hull / Bloomberg:

Tesla sues ex-Optimus engineer Zhongjie Li, who worked at Tesla from 2022 to 2024, accusing him of stealing humanoid robot info and setting up a rival startup — Zhongjie “Jay” Li worked at Tesla between August 2022 and September 2024, according to a complaint filed in a San Francisco Federal Court late on Wednesday.

More: New York Post

Kerry Flynn / Axios:

Lyft ramps up its ad business with three new ad formats; CEO David Risher said that Lyft is on track to reach a $100M annualized ad revenue run rate by 2025 end — Lyft is ramping up its ad business with new formats, the ride-hailing company exclusively tells Axios.

More: Restaurant Business. Bluesky: @chicagomike

Nitasha Tiku / Washington Post:

TollBit: from Q4 2024 to Q1 2025, traffic from AI retrieval bots to 266 websites, half run by national and local news organizations, grew 49%, as AI usage jumps — As consumers switch from Google search to ChatGPT, a new kind of bot is scraping data for AI. — Summary4

More: TollBit. Bluesky: @jacklynch000

See also Mediagazer

Julie Bort / TechCrunch:

Spain-based Multiverse Computing, which uses quantum-inspired AI model compression tech to shrink LLMs by up to 95%, raised a €189M Series B and has 100 clients — Spanish startup Multiverse Computing on Thursday said it has raised an enormous Series B round of €189 million …

More: PitchBook, Tech.eu, Proactive, The Quantum Insider, EU-Startups, WinBuzzer, HPCwire, insideAI News, and SiliconANGLE

Samantha Cole / 404 Media:

A spam marketing operation exploited some domains owned by Nvidia, Stanford, NPR, and the US CDC to host AI slop articles redirecting users to an SEO spam site — Web domains owned by Nvidia, Stanford, NPR, and the U.S. government are hosting pages full of AI slop articles that redirect to a spam marketing site.

More: TechCrunch, TechRadar, and Futurism

Bluesky: @bartona104 and @jasonkoebler. Mastodon: @andybaio@xoxo.zone

Forums: r/technology and Slashdot

Paayal Zaveri / Bloomberg:

Nominal, which makes industrial design software for space, energy, and defense tech, raised $75M led by Sequoia Capital, after raising $27.5M in April 2024 — Nominal wants to make it easier for companies in defense, energy and manufacturing to develop new products.

More: FinSMEs and Sourcery

Michael J. de la Merced / New York Times:

Meter, which sells and maintains packages of custom data center networking equipment, raised $170M led by General Catalyst at a $1B+ valuation — The company has collected $170 million in new capital as it seeks to help connect data centers and other businesses in the age of artificial intelligence.

More: Pulse 2.0

Jordan Novet / CNBC:

Databricks says it expects to generate $3.7B in annualized revenue by July, up 50% YoY; in Q1, it had nearly 50 of its 15,000+ customers spending $10M+ annually — Databricks, a data analytics software vendor, said on Wednesday that it expects to generate $3.7 billion in annualized revenue by July, with year-over-year growth of 50%.

More: Investor's Business Daily, Databricks, Tech in Asia, and Bloomberg

LinkedIn: Ali Ghodsi, Ramesh Babu Muthuvel, Pramod Gosavi, Patrick Vinton, Brody Ford, and Michael Nixon

Chris Dolmetsch / Bloomberg:

The US prosecution of quant trader Richard Ho could define how quant algorithms can become stolen property and have a major impact on Wall Street's talent war — The prosecution of a trader could define how a quant algorithm can become stolen property and have a huge impact on Wall Street's talent war.

X: @alephblog

Sri Muppidi / The Information:

Sources: OpenAI talked to Saudi Arabia's PIF, India-based Reliance, and the UAE's MGX about investing in the next installment of its $40B round led by SoftBank — OpenAI has talked to Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries and existing shareholder …

More: Reuters, MENAbytes, Analytics India Magazine, Fortune India, Arabian Business, Business Today, Business Standard, Tech in Asia, The Economic Times, Benzinga, and Reuters

Pedro Nakamura / Rest of World:

How an AI assistant developed by Brazilian nonprofit NoHarm is helping pharmacists in remote Amazon clinics process prescriptions more quickly and catch errors — At overburdened clinics, pharmacists use AI to catch dangerous errors. It's frontier tech meets frontier medicine — with global implications.

Bluesky: @restofworld.org

Emily Mason / Bloomberg:

A profile of Airwallex co-founder Jack Zhang, who turned down Stripe's $1.2B offer seven years ago; the fintech is now valued at $6.2B and plans an IPO in 2026 — Seven years ago, Airwallex co-founder Jack Zhang walked away from what looked like the deal of a lifetime.

X: @awxjack. LinkedIn: Bloomberg News and Ravi Adusumilli

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