Techmeme
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Series, founded by two seniors at Yale to build an AI-powered social network on iMessage, raised a $5.1M pre-seed from Reddit CEO Steve Huffman and others (Dominic-Madori Davis/TechCrunch)
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The Wire by Acutus, an AI-generated site with articles attacking AI industry critics, appears to be funded by the OpenAI-backed super PAC Leading The Future (@themidasproj)
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Nvidia stock jumps 4.3% to close at a record for the first time since Oct., pushing Nvidia's market cap past $5T, as a rally in Intel pushed chipmakers higher (Jordan Novet/CNBC)
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Sam Altman apologizes to a Canadian town for not alerting police to the activity of a mass shooting suspect when her ChatGPT account was suspended (Wall Street Journal)
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Intel stock closes up 23.6%, its best performance since October 1987, as Intel shows signs of renewed growth amid the AI boom; the stock is up 124% YTD (CNBC)
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ComfyUI, which gives creators granular control over image, video, and audio outputs from diffusion models, raised $30M at a $500M valuation (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)
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Sources: Stanford University professor James Zou aims to raise ~$100M at a ~$1B valuation for Human Intelligence, which aims to use AI to study physiology (Rebecca Torrence/Bloomberg)
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Maine's governor vetoes a bill that would have led to US' first state pause on data centers, citing its failure to exempt a project in a distressed mill town (Jenna Russell/New York Times)
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Source: Meta has a system in India to "automatically restrict content, at scale" to meet local law, massively expanding the country's censorship powers (Aroon Deep/The Hindu)
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X launches its standalone messaging app XChat on the App Store, saying it supports end-to-end encryption and has no ads (Zac Hall/9to5Mac)
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Sources: AI startups are struggling to access Nvidia GPUs as Microsoft and other cloud providers divert supply to internal teams and large customers like OpenAI (The Information)
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Sources: JPMorgan and other banks struggled to spread the risk of billions in loans they made to build data centers leased to Oracle in Texas and Wisconsin (Wall Street Journal)
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The DOJ joins xAI in its legal challenge to a new Colorado law that seeks to prevent discrimination by AI tools in employment and other areas (Madlin Mekelburg/Bloomberg)
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Anthropic says Google is committing to invest $10B now in cash at a $350B valuation and will invest another $30B if Anthropic hits performance targets (Bloomberg)
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France's forecasting office refers suspected weather sensor tampering at Paris airport to police, after detecting unusual readings alongside Polymarket betting (Joe Wertz/Bloomberg)