Twitter increases the tweet length for Blue subscribers to 10,000 characters, up from the 4,000 set in February 2023, and adds bold and italic text formatting  —  We're making improvements to the writing and reading experience on Twitter! Starting today, Twitter now supports Tweets up to 10,000 characters in length, with bold and italic text formatting. Sign up for Twitter Blue to access these new features, and apply to enable... https://twitter.com/...

Spotify plans to shut down Heardle on May 5, after acquiring the Wordle-inspired music guessing game in July 2022, to focus on other music discovery objectives  —  Spotify is closing down Heardle, the Wordle-inspired music guessing game it acquired last July for an undisclosed sum.

Sources: the European parliament is close to finalizing tough new measures on AI, including forcing chatbot makers to reveal if they use copyrighted material  —  Proposals include requiring chatbot makers to reveal if they are using copyrighted material  —  The European parliament …

Intel becoming a chip foundry is its biggest business shift in nearly 40 years, meaning US industrial policy rests on one of tech's most complex turnarounds yet  —  Once the leading player in the semiconductor industry, the company is attempting to pull off one of tech's most complex turnrounds

Sam Altman says OpenAI won't train GPT-5 for “some time” and the letter to pause AI development missed “most technical nuance about where we need the pause”  —  In a discussion about threats posed by AI systems, Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO and co-founder …

Parlement Technologies sells Parler to digital media company Starboard, which plans to temporarily shut down the right-wing social network ahead of a relaunch  —  Social network popular with conservatives will be overhauled for a relaunch  —  Parler, a social network that was popularized …

Sensor Tower: Twitter's top 50 advertisers spent $83M over the past two months, down from $102M YoY; Mars, AT&T, Volkswagen, and Stellantis haven't returned  —  Twitter-owner Elon Musk has said advertisers are returning to the social media platform, but statements from several companies …

BeReal fights to retain users as some find its authenticity monotonous; Apptopia: the app's daily users fell to under 6M in March 2023 from ~15M in October 2022  —  BeReal was pitched as Gen Z's safe haven from the artifice of social media.  For some, authenticity only proved interesting for so long.

WhatsApp rolls out new device verification and account protection features, including defenses against SIM jacking and other social engineering attacks  —  WhatsApp has begun rolling out a handful of new security features.  The most notable sees the company doing more to protect users …

Q&A with Substack CEO Chris Best about Notes, asking for investment without sharing financial details, and more, as he evades some content moderation questions  —  Can Substack handle the wrath of Elon Musk and the pain of content moderation?  —  It is fair to say that Substack …

Denver-based Elevate, which provides a dashboard for employees to manage their pre-tax benefits, raised $28M led by Anthemis, bringing its total funding to $43M  —  Elevate, a consumer benefits administration platform, today announced that it raised $28 million in a funding round led by Anthemis …

Hacking Policy Council launches to advocate for laws that protect security researchers' work; founding members include HackerOne, Bugcrowd, Google, and Intel  —  “There are advocacy groups for reptile owners but not hackers, so that seems like a miss,” said Ilona Cohen of HackerOne.

Filing: Amazon paid Andy Jassy $1.3M in 2022 after he got a $200M+ stock grant in 2021; in his first annual letter, Jassy talks efficiency, ads, LLMs, and more  —  Jassy had earned $212 million in 2021.  —  Amazon CEO Andy Jassy saw his 2022 compensation crater in 2022 …