Author: GT

Google held its Google Cloud Next conference in Las Vegas this week, where it announced dozens of new features, like its next generation AI processing chip, called Ironwood, and its latest AI model, Gemini 2.5 Flash. It also announced a long list of AI startups that have signed to use its cloud. Among them are some of the most watched startups in the world. As we previously reported, this list includes Safe Superintelligence (SSI), the startup founded by OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. It also includes: Anysphere, which makes the uber-popular AI-powered code editor Cursor. Google says…

Earlier this week, Meta landed in hot water for using an experimental, unreleased version of its Llama 4 Maverick model to achieve a high score on a crowdsourced benchmark, LM Arena. The incident prompted the maintainers of LM Arena to apologize, change their policies, and score the unmodified, vanilla Maverick. Turns out, it’s not very competitive. The unmodified Maverick, “Llama-4-Maverick-17B-128E-Instruct,” was ranked below models including OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro as of Friday. Many of these models are months old. The release version of Llama 4 has been added to LMArena after it was…

(Reuters) -Binance executives met U.S. Treasury officials last month and discussed loosening government oversight of the company, while exploring a business deal with President Donald Trump’s crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, the Wall Street Journal said. Executives of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange asked Treasury officials to remove a U.S. monitor overseeing its compliance with anti-money-laundering laws, the paper said on Friday, citing people familiar with the talks. Binance has also been in talks to list a new dollar-pegged cryptocurrency from World Liberty Financial, it added. At the meeting, Binance CEO Richard Teng and Chief Legal Officer Eleanor Hughes asked…

Thirteen years ago, Forerunner Ventures began helping to usher in a new era of consumer startups, including Warby Parker, Bonobos, and Glossier. None has gone through a traditional IPO process. Warby Parker was taken public through a special purpose acquisition vehicle. Bonobos was acquired by Walmart. Glossier is still privately held, along with many other design-forward brands in Forerunner’s portfolio.  That’s not a failure, according to Forerunner founder Kirsten Green. In today’s landscape, nearly every alternative to the traditional IPO has become the new norm. Consider that companies like fintech Chime and smart ring outfit Ōura, founded in 2012 and…

China wants to increase tariffs on $50 billion of U.S. goods targeted in a tit-for-tat over President Trump from 84% to 125% in April. According to reports, it will also open fire on approximately $144 billion of U.S. exports, including agricultural commodities. As the trade war escalated, market volatility increased, and investors looked for safe-haven assets to protect themselves against the economic impairment caused by the trade conflict. Florida and North Carolina have also filed bills designed to encourage Bitcoin adoption. In Florida, public funds could invest in Bitcoin, and in North Carolina, it would receive legal tender recognition in…

Social network Bluesky is rolling out a new version of its software, which adopts some of the features former X users have missed. Nope, it’s not an edit button! Instead, the open social network is adding support for chat reactions in its direct messages feature and is revamping its search page as “Explore,” directing users to trends, suggested accounts, Starter Packs, and more. The features both take inspiration from X, which has let users react to direct messages with an emoji since 2020. X expanded the feature a few years later, allowing users to choose any emoji beyond the default…

Tariffs, tariffs, tariffs. Trump’s on-again, off-again import levies dominated the week. At the beginning, tariffs sent stocks and crypto appreciably lower. By the end, with all new non-China tariffs paused for 90 days, markets were up again. Bitcoin returned to a level ($82,000) that it was at this time last week. And analysts debated whether, in the panic of the previous days, it showed “safe haven” qualities (like gold) or whether it was a risk-asset like many others. The consensus was that bitcoin performed resiliently rather than completely reassuringly. Our Asia reporting team led the way on our markets coverage.…

It’s time for BeReal to get real — it’s difficult to turn a profit on a social photo-sharing app without selling ads or memberships. Now, after its €500 million exit to French mobile publisher Voodoo, BeReal is rolling out advertising in the U.S. Its initial products include in-feed ads in the app’s same dual-camera post style, as well as full day brand takeovers. The app already tested ads with companies like Levi’s, Nike, Netflix, and Amazon but will now launch a full U.S. advertising platform. The company appointed Ben Moore, previously of TikTok, to lead a U.S. team focused on…

This year, the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR) — a D.C.-based group and McDonald’s shareholder known for asking companies like Microsoft and Amazon to adopt Bitcoin — asked McDonald’s to consider adding Bitcoin to its treasury during its 2025 annual shareholders’ meeting, set for next month. “McDonald’s seems to have long ago understood what many other corporations have yet to: that a company’s value, especially during inflationary times, is measured not only by how profitable its primary business is, but also by how wisely it invests its assets and protects its profits from debasement,” the NCPPR said. The NCPPR added that…

AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and other top AI labs are increasingly being used to assist with programming tasks. Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in October that 25% of new code at the company is generated by AI, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has expressed ambitions to widely deploy AI coding models within the social media giant. Yet even some of the best models today struggle to resolve software bugs that wouldn’t trip up experienced devs. A new study from Microsoft Research, Microsoft’s R&D division, reveals that models, including Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet and OpenAI’s o3-mini, fail to debug many…