Author: GT

Raj Aggarwal is leaving AWS after nearly three years as the company’s GM of generative AI and revenue acceleration, according to a LinkedIn post Aggarwal published Wednesday. “I’m proud of the pioneering work our team did in generative AI from its earliest days,” Aggarwal said in his post. “We built what might be the world’s first large-scale generative AI products — launched to tens of thousands of sellers, used hundreds of thousands of times, driving a 4.9% increase in pipeline generation.” Aggarwal played a notable role in AWS’ recent push into generative AI. In the LinkedIn post, he mentioned his…

(Bloomberg) — The crypto industry is on a roll in Washington and it’s not just because of Donald Trump. Most Read from Bloomberg A key ally is rising in the Democratic party and the industry just demonstrated its political might by sweeping away a long-entrenched antagonist with a flood of campaign money. Crypto-friendly stablecoin legislation is poised to pass the Senate after years of the industry’s Capitol Hill agenda languishing. Prospects for other priorities also are improving. Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, a long-standing supporter of the crypto industry, moved up in her party’s leadership ranks to head…

Nvidia has reportedly acquired Gretel, a San Diego-based startup that’s developed a platform to generate synthetic AI training data. Terms of the acquisition are unknown. The price tag was said to be nine figures, exceeding Gretel’s most recent valuation of $320 million, according to Wired. Gretel and its team of roughly 80 employees will be folded into Nvidia, where its tech will be deployed as part of the former’s suit of generative AI services for developers, Wired reported. Gretel was founded in 2019 by Alex Watson, Laszlo Bock, John Myers, and Ali Golshan, who also serves as the company’s CEO. The…

Bitcoin is trading around $84,393.09, up nearly 4% following the Federal Reserve’s decision to leave interest rates unchanged and retain its target range of 4.25% to 4.5%. Policymakers did not backtrack on rate cuts, but they did reiterate expectations for two cuts later in 2025 — a mixed signal for risk assets such as Bitcoin. The markets had already predicted very little chance of a rate increase at the FOMC this week, but investors were following economic growth and inflation updates closely. The Fed has also cut its GDP growth forecast to 1.7% for 2025, a 0.4% point drop from…

NEW YORK (AP) — A former Meta official’s explosive insider account sold 60,000 copies in its first week and reached the top 10 on Amazon.com’s best-seller list amid efforts by the social media giant to discredit the book. Released last week by Flatiron Books, a Macmillan imprint, Sarah Wynn-Williams’ “Careless People” alleges cruel and otherwise disturbing behavior by Mark Zuckerberg, Joel Kaplan and other executives and describes Zuckerberg’s alleged efforts to win favor with Chinese officials. Meta has countered that Wynn-Williams, a former director of global public policy who left what was then Facebook in 2017, violated a severance agreement…

The “big three” cryptocurrencies are on the move today. Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC), Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH), and Dogecoin (CRYPTO: DOGE) are up 2.9%, 7.3%, and 3%, respectively, as of 2:30 p.m. ET. Earlier in the day, however, they were up as much as 3.6%, 8.7%, and 4.7%, respectively. The S&P 500 is up 0.8% and the Nasdaq Composite is up 1.1%. All three cryptocurrencies got a boost from news that the SEC’s appeal in its case against XRP would be dropped, a major step that confirms the Trump administration’s softer approach to crypto regulation, boosting the whole market. Ripple, the company…

Chat platform WhatsApp said today that it will limit the number of broadcast messages individual users and businesses can send to curb spam on the app. In the coming weeks, the company will start testing limits on individual broadcast messages. Under these limits, WhatsApp will put a monthly limit on the number of broadcasts. While there will be moving limits during the test, one example Meta gave was allowing 30 messages per month. Meta said that if individual users want to send more messages to a large number of people, they could use Status updates or channels. The company is…

The electric vehicle transition is really a story about China. There, subsidies have helped juice not just automakers, but the entire battery supply chain behind them. Those incentives, plus decades of industrial policy focused on controlled critical mineral supply chains, has left American and European automakers flat-footed. Take graphite, for example. Every lithium-ion battery today, regardless of the chemistry, requires some or all of the anode to be made of graphite, and Chinese companies make 99% of all graphite anode materials, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.  “If you try to make graphite here in the United States, it’s always going…

DENVER (AP) — Perhaps the surest sign that artificial intelligence really is taking over the world will come the day it wins your favorite March Madness bracket pool.The day could be coming soon.In an experiment that a) was bound to happen, b) might actually make us all look smarter and c) should probably also scare the daylights out of everyone, a successful CEO-turned-disruptor is running a $1 million March Madness bracket challenge that pits his AI programmers’ picks against those belonging to one of the world’s best-known sports gamblers.“We’re not a crystal ball,” says Alan Levy, whose platform, 4C Predictions,…

The Turkish lira (TRY) fell to a record low against the dollar following the surprise arrest of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s rival and Istanbul mayor Ekrem Imamoglu. The currency slumped a record of nearly 41 per U.S. dollar, a 10% slide on the day. The volatility saw a sharp rise in trading volumes in the bitcoin-lira (BTC/TRY) pair on leading cryptocurrency exchange Binance. Imamoglu’s Republican People’s Party (CHP) described the arrest as a coup to replace the will of the people. The party was set to hold a primary election next week, with Imamoglu widely expected to emerge as the presidential candidate.…