Techmeme
April 14, 2023, 3:25 PM

Top News

James Vincent / The Verge:
Financial Times:
Sources: Musk plans a new startup to rival OpenAI, is talking to Tesla and SpaceX investors, may use Twitter for training data and Tesla for computing resources  —  Billionaire seeks to hire engineers, attract investors and acquire chips needed to build large language model
Sarah E. Needleman / Wall Street Journal:
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 …
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:
Instagram adds creator-focused updates to Reels, including a dedicated trends section, expansion of gifts to more countries, and enhanced editing tools  —  As governments around the world express growing concerns about TikTok, its rival Instagram Reels is getting a series of new updates aimed at creators.
Richard Waters / Financial Times:
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
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
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.
@twitterwrite:
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/...
Callie Holtermann / New York Times:
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.
Sheila Dang / Reuters:
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 …
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
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 …
Chris Metinko / Crunchbase News:
VC funding for cybersecurity startups fell to $2.7B in Q1 2023, down 58% from $6.5B in Q1 2022; the number of announced deals dropped 45% YoY to 149  —  Although venture funding struggled mightily in the first quarter, funding to cybersecurity startups specifically remained relatively …
Alex Weprin / The Hollywood Reporter:
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 …
Tom Dotan / Wall Street Journal:

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More News

Tonya Riley / CyberScoop:
J. Clara Chan / The Hollywood Reporter:
Paul Sawers / TechCrunch:

Earlier Picks

Igor Bonifacic / Engadget:
Kris Holt / Engadget:
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge: