Posts

Internal memo: Lightricks, creator of photo editing app Facetune, is splitting its consumer app unit from its GenAI unit LTX to better capture the growth in AI (Echo Wang/Reuters)

Documents submitted by Waymo and Tesla to the US government reveal new info about the remote assistance programs for their robotaxis, staffed by human operators (Aarian Marshall/Wired)

The EU's DSA probe into Shein is just the latest of the company's problems, which are stacking up in many of its big markets as it seeks to push through an IPO (Financial Times)

A profile of Neil Shen of HSG, formerly Sequoia China, which raised $9B from US investors before US restrictions and has funded Manus and other Chinese startups (Wall Street Journal)

Sam Altman says discussions about AI's energy usage are "unfair", as it takes "20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time" to train a human (Anthony Ha/TechCrunch)

Projects with open codebases like VLC and Blender are seeing a decline in the average quality of submissions, likely as AI coding tools lower barriers to entry (Russell Brandom/TechCrunch)

Google is ending Gmailify and POP access in Gmail; new users will lose access in Q1 2026, and existing users will keep both features until later in 2026 (David Nield/Wired)

English-language Wikipedia bans Archive.today after editors discover it was used to direct a DDoS attack and tampered with snapshots; 695K+ links to be removed (Jon Brodkin/Ars Technica)

Interviews with Cluely's Roy Lee, Donald Boat, and other highly "agentic" young men, as agency becomes more valuable than technical skills in Silicon Valley (Sam Kriss/Harper's)

Code Metal, which uses AI to let engineers translate legacy code into modern languages, raised a $125M Series B led by Salesforce Ventures at a $1.25B valuation (Lauren Goode/Wired)

Sources: Google may invest $100M in Fluidstack at a $7.5B valuation and has backstopped crypto miners that are building datacenters, seeking to expand TPU use (Wall Street Journal)

Reddit is testing an AI search feature that takes community recommendations and shows matching products from its advertisers in the results (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)