Techmeme
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Singapore-based Startale, developer of the Strium blockchain for tokenized securities and JPYSC and USDSC stablecoins, raised a $63M Series A from SBI and Sony (Francisco Rodrigues/CoinDesk)
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Source: Meta on Wednesday laid off around 700 employees in the Reality Labs unit, as well as some in recruiting, sales, and Facebook (Eli Tan/New York Times)
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Nintendo says new first-party games exclusive to Switch 2 will have different prices for physical and digital versions in the US, beginning in May (Andy Robinson/Video Games Chronicle)
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ARC Prize Foundation unveils ARC-AGI-3, an AI benchmark with simple video-game-like scenarios designed to measure on-the-fly reasoning rather than memory recall (Mark Sullivan/Fast Company)
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Reddit says it will label automated accounts that provide a service to users and will require accounts suspected of being bots to verify they are human (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
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The jury in Los Angeles' social media trial awards the plaintiff $3M in compensatory damages and $3M in punitive damages; Meta will pay 70% and YouTube 30% (New York Times)
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Social media addiction trial: a Los Angeles jury finds Meta and YouTube were negligent and failed to warn users about the dangers of using their platforms (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC)
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Google launches Lyria 3 Pro music generation model, with better creative control and allowing users to create three-minute tracks, up from Lyria 3's 30 seconds (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
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Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez plan to introduce legislation to pause new data center construction until AI safeguards are in place (Maria Curi/Axios)
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Sources: cloud provider Vultr is seeking to raise $1B+ to expand its AI computing capacity, after raising $333M at a $3.5B valuation in 2024 (The Information)
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Epic Microsystems, which designs power delivery architecture for better thermal and efficiency management of AI data centers, raised a $21M Series A (Chris Metinko/Axios)
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Source: as part of its Google deal, Apple has full access to the Gemini model in its own data centers and can use distillation to produce smaller models (The Information)
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Charlotte-based Lucid Bots, which manufactures autonomous drones for cleaning windows, raised a $20M Series B co-led by Cubit and Idea Fund (Rebecca Szkutak/TechCrunch)
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Google Research details TurboQuant, a quantization algorithm to enable massive compression of LLMs and vector search engines without sacrificing accuracy (Google Research)
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SCOTUS rules unanimously that Cox could not be held liable for the piracy of thousands of songs online, after music labels sued the internet provider in 2018 (Ann E. Marimow/New York Times)