From the newsroom
Breaking moves, funding rounds and the companies shaping tomorrow — reported daily.
Microsoft has officially banned its employees from using the DeepSeek app. Microsoft Vice Chairman and President Brad Smith confirmed this during a U.S. Senate hearing, citing data security and propaganda risks. “We don’t allow our employees to use the DeepSeek app,” Smith said, referring to the desktop and mobile app. “We don’t offer it…
In a world where tech giants flaunt trillion-parameter AI models and billion-dollar GPU clusters, Palo Alto-based startup Fastino is taking a radically different path training powerful, task-specific AI models using low-cost gaming GPUs. Fastino has just raised $17.5 million in seed funding, led by Khosla Ventures, bringing its total funding to nearly $25 million. The…
In another strategic move, Employer.com has acquired MainStreet.com, a fintech startup focused on helping startups claim R&D tax credits. The acquisition amount remains undisclosed, but it’s the latest sign of Employer.com’s aggressive growth strategy in workforce and business back office management. MainStreet, based in San Jose and founded in 2019, had early success by…
Reddit is moving beyond community-driven content and targeting a new audience: searchers. In the Q1 2025 earnings call, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman announced a new product, Reddit Answers, an Reddit’s AI-powered feature for users who search Google and add “Reddit” to find real opinions and advice. Launched in beta in December 2024, Reddit’s AI…
Tesla’s board has reportedly taken steps to search for Elon Musk’s potential successor, according to a recent Wall Street Journal report. The move comes as Tesla battles declining sales, shrinking profits, and growing investor unease over Musk’s political activities in Washington. About a month ago, board members quietly approached executive search firms to explore possible…
Meta just launched LlamaCon, their first-ever conference. I’m at the Meta HQ in Menlo Park. The mission was clear: beat OpenAI by accelerating the adoption of their open-source Llama models. They released two big things: a Meta AI chatbot app for consumers and a Llama API for developers. The chatbot app is integrated with…
In its latest security report, Google has revealed that government-backed hackers were the top users of zero-day exploits in 2024. Out of the 75 total zero-day vulnerabilities discovered last year, 23 were attributed to state-sponsored actors. Zero-day exploits are serious software flaws unknown to the vendor at the time of the attack. Google reported that…
Bluesky, the decentralized social network built on the AT Protocol, went down yesterday evening. Decentralized platforms can still go down. The outage lasted about an hour and users couldn’t access the service through web or mobile apps. Bluesky confirmed the issue on their status page, “Major PDS Networking Problems”. PDS stands for personal data…
IBM has cancelled 15 federal contracts in Q1 2025 due to budget cuts by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) totalling $100m in future payments. According to Reuters and Bloomberg, most of these were with USAID. IBM’s consulting business makes up about 34% of its total revenue but the company is downplaying the long…
An Oversight Board Demands Meta’s Revise Hate Speech Policies The Oversight Board expressed serious concerns about Meta’s new hate speech policies. In its latest response, the independent advisory group said Meta made these changes too fast and without proper consultation. The Board, which was set up to advise Meta on content moderation, asked the…
In a bold and controversial move, 21-year-old Chungin “Roy” Lee has raised $5.3 million in seed funding for his AI startup, Cluely, a tool designed to help users “cheat on everything.” The funding comes from prominent investors Abstract Ventures and Susa Ventures. During job interviews, Lee and co-founder Neel Shanmugam created an AI tool called…
Opera is taking mobile browsing to the next level by bringing its AI assistant, Aria, to Opera Mini on Android. This is for users with low-end smartphones and limited data access, especially in areas where data saving is key. Aria, powered by OpenAI and Google models, gives you instant answers, latest news, image generation…
