Author: GT

The Walt Disney Co. signage on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, US, on Wednesday, May 7, 2025. Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty ImagesThe Walt Disney Company sent a cease and desist letter to Character.AI last week, warning the artificial intelligence startup to stop using copyrighted characters without authorization, a Disney spokesperson confirmed to CNBC on Tuesday.A spokesperson for Character.AI said it removed the characters mentioned in the letter, and that “it’s always up to rightsholders to decide how people may interact with their IP.” The spokesperson acknowledged that while some characters on its…

It’s no secret that vibe coding — using AI-powered coding tools to build apps and websites via natural language prompts — is exploding in popularity. In July, Swedish vibe-coding startup Lovable hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) just eight months after launch. It plans to close the year at $250 million ARR and thinks it will hit $1 billion ARR within the next 12 months. Meanwhile, Replit said earlier this month that its ARR soared from $2.8 million to $150 million in less than a year. These companies’ remarkable growth has fueled a wave of competitors, many of which are also quickly…

The Federal Communications Commission voted to end discounts for library Wi-Fi hotspot lending and school bus connectivity programs on Tuesday, drawing criticism from lawmakers and librarians who say the moves will make it more difficult for people who are low-income or live in rural areas to access the internet. The 2-1 vote on hotspot lending reverses a Biden-era expansion of the discounts that allowed schools and libraries to use E-Rate funds for school bus Wi-Fi and hotspots so people could go online outside of schools and libraries.The FCC said the agency “lacked legal authority for this expansion and that the…

Venture capital is filled with investors who claim they’ve got inside access to the next big thing. Meanwhile, Gabriel Jarrosson, a French engineer-turned-YouTuber-turned-investor, has built his VC firm around a single filter: If it isn’t a Y Combinator company, he won’t invest in it. That discipline pushed Jarrosson from filming scrappy venture explainers in Paris to managing more than $12 million in assets at Lobster Capital, with a larger second fund already in the works, according to recent SEC filings. His logic is simple: He believes YC’s track record of producing billion-dollar companies beats chasing startups elsewhere. In 2017, frustrated…

The beaming of solar power from space back down to earth using lasers sounds like science fiction, and was even floated in an Isaac Asimov short story back in the 1940s.But that is exactly what a California-based startup is testing: Mini solar farms in the form of low-orbit satellites.California-based startup Aetherflux plans to send its satellite technology into orbit on a SpaceX rocket next year. Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt is the company’s CEO.”We’re going to do a constellation of satellites where each one transmits power with infrared lasers,” said Bhatt. “And the benefits of this are, number one, you get…

Jamie Siminoff, founder of Ring, speaks during an Amazon product event in the Manhattan borough of New York City on Sept. 30, 2025.Charly Triballeau | AFP | Getty ImagesIn 2023, Jamie Siminoff called up Amazon’s former devices boss, Dave Limp, to say he was stepping down from leading the video doorbell company he sold to the e-commerce giant for $839 million in 2018.Siminoff, who started Ring in 2013, said Limp and Amazon offered him the opportunity to work elsewhere at the company, but he declined.”I said, ‘I think I have to leave,'” Siminoff recalled in an interview on Friday. “I…

ChatGPT users in the U.S. can now make Etsy and soon Shopify purchases within conversations, marking a next step toward the future of online shopping — both for consumers and the platforms that control product discovery, recommendation, and payments. In other words, OpenAI might be on the path to reshaping who holds power in e-commerce.  OpenAI’s new “Instant Checkout” feature is available to ChatGPT Pro, Plus, and Free logged-in users buying from U.S.-based Etsy sellers, with more than 1 million Shopify merchants like Glossier, Skims, Spanx, and Vuori “coming soon,” per OpenAI.   Instant Checkout builds on previous shopping features on ChatGPT that surfaced relevant products, images, reviews, prices, and direct links to merchants in response to shopping questions like…

NEW YORK (AP) — Like thousands of actors, Tilly Norwood is looking for a Hollywood agent. But unlike most young performers aspiring to make it in the film industry, Tilly Norwood is an entirely artificial intelligence-made character. Norwood, dubbed Hollywood’s first “AI actor,” is the product of a company named Xicoia, which bills itself as the world’s first artificial intelligence talent studio. Since the Dutch producer and comedian Eline Van der Velden launched the digital character’s prospective career, Tilly Norwood has been all the talk in Hollywood. But not in a good way. Guilds, actors and filmmakers have met the…

Daniel Ek, founder and chief executive officer of Spotify, attends the Cannes Lions 2016 on June 22, 2016 in Cannes, France. Antoine Antoniol | Getty ImagesSpotify CEO Daniel Ek will step down from his position and move to the role of executive chairman, the company said Tuesday.Spotify shares dipped 6% following the announcement.Ek, who co-founded the streaming platform in 2006, will be replaced by current co-presidents and longtime executives Gustav Söderström and Alex Norström as co-CEOs, the company said in a release. The transition will happen Jan. 1, 2026.”Over the last few years, I’ve turned over a large part of the…

Researchers at DeepSeek on Monday released a new experimental model called V3.2-exp, designed to have dramatically lower inference costs when used in long-context operations. DeepSeek announced the model with a post on Hugging Face, also posting a linked academic paper on GitHub. The most important feature of the new model is called DeepSeek Sparse Attention, an intricate system described in detail in the diagram below. In essence, the system uses a module called a “lightning indexer” to prioritize specific excerpts from the context window. After that, a separate system called a “fine-grained token selection system” chooses specific tokens from within…