- Trump's tariffs could slow robot adoption in the US, as buyer demand weakens and supplies of key components like magnets and actuators are disrupted (Financial Times)
- Tel Aviv-based Sentra, whose cloud data security software now includes controls aimed at keeping AI prompts free from restricted data, raised a $50M Series B (Ryan Naraine/SecurityWeek)
- Salsa, which provides APIs and UI components that let vertical SaaS platforms offer payroll as a feature to their customers, raised a $20M Series A led by Altos (Ryan Lawler/Axios)
- Alpaca, which offers APIs for financial firms to connect and trade in US stocks, raised a $52M Series C to expand into the Middle East, Europe, and Asia (Kate Park/TechCrunch)
- NYC-based Healthee, whose AI assistant Zoe lets its clients' workers navigate health insurance and benefits options, raised a $50M Series B led by Key1 Capital (Erin Brodwin/Axios)
- Filing: China's leading flash memory chipmaker YMTC raised ~$219M from Hebei Yangyuan Zhihui Beverage Co. at a ~$22.1B valuation in December 2023 (Coco Feng/South China Morning Post)
- 4chan is back online after being down for 10 days, following a hack that leaked the emails of its lead administrators, known as "janitors" (Owen Carry/Know Your Meme)
- Test conversations with some Meta AI digital companions, including celebrity-voiced ones, show them engaging in sexual chats even when users identify as minors (Jeff Horwitz/Wall Street Journal)
- Bitcoin miners' earnings power and stocks have diverged from the asset they help produce, as the hashrate languishes amid technical and macroeconomic headwinds (Sidhartha Shukla/Bloomberg)
- Prompt engineering roles, one of the buzziest jobs in 2023, become obsolete as AI models better intuit user intent and companies train staff in writing prompts (Isabelle Bousquette/Wall Street Journal)
- At a major Hong Kong electronics exhibition, some Chinese companies say they are exploring ways to lower or skirt tariffs while others plan to wait them out (Luz Ding/Bloomberg)
- Stripe plans to test a stablecoin payments product aimed at companies outside the US, the UK, and the EU, using tech from Bridge, which Stripe acquired recently (Francisco Rodrigues/CoinDesk)
- Watching OpenAI's o3 guess a photo's location feels surreal, dystopian, and entertaining, including running Python code to examine details like license plates (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog)
- Sources: ~300 London-based DeepMind staff sought to unionize with the CWU in recent weeks, to challenge AI sales to defense groups and Google's ties to Israel (Financial Times)
- a16z, which owns ~20% of Deel, a stake worth $2.5B+, is advising Deel in fighting Rippling, whose CEO Parker Conrad said a16z pushed him out of Zenefits in 2016 (The Information)