- Parents and school staff say student activity monitoring software that aims to intercept self-harm before it happens, while helpful, has unintended consequences (Ellen Barry/New York Times)
- A look at Vinted, a popular app in the EU for selling secondhand clothes, which went from a near collapse to worth €5B and plans a US expansion in coming years (Trefor Moss/Wall Street Journal)
- Sources: EU regulators asked Google for more info in October about a secret ads partnership with Meta which skirted Google's own rules for targeting minors (Financial Times)
- A growing cohort of AI startups are recruiting scores of experts to train models on highly specialized tasks for sensitive sectors like defense and health care (Saritha Rai/Bloomberg)
- Stability AI CEO Prem Akkaraju, who was hired in June 2024, says the startup has seen "triple digit growth" and has "a clean balance sheet, no debt" (Kali Hays/Fortune)
- How WhatsApp has evolved from a messaging app into a comprehensive business platform, aggressively luring businesses to its suite of paid messaging products (Issie Lapowsky/Rest of World)
- A deep dive into "debanking", which crypto advocates, including a16z, claim has been used against them by US political actors and agencies without due process (Patrick McKenzie/Bits about Money)
- Norwegian payment service Vipps launches the world's first alternative to Apple Pay on iPhone, following Apple's move to open up NFC access to devs in iOS 18.1 (Tim Hardwick/MacRumors)
- Oracle reports Q2 revenue up 9% YoY to $14.06B, vs. $14.1B est., says it made a deal with Meta for training Llama models on its cloud; ORCL down 6%+ after hours (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC)
- OpenAI says the depiction of minors is limited with Sora, and only a "subset" of users can create videos of a real person using uploaded footage of that person (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)
- In a mockup posted on GitHub, Bluesky teases Bluesky+, a $8 per month paid subscription offering profile customizations, higher video upload limits, and more (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
- OpenAI launches Sora, available as part of ChatGPT Plus, letting users generate up to 50 videos at 480p or fewer videos at 720p each month, in select countries (OpenAI)
- Review of OpenAI's Sora video generator: excels at depicting landscapes, people, stylistic content, but it often fails with basic physics like object permanence (Marques Brownlee/Marques Brownlee on YouTube)
- Google says it had a major quantum error correction breakthrough, unveils its Willow quantum chip with 105 improved qubits, and shares benchmarks and a roadmap (John Russell/HPCwire)
- Q&A with Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman on AGI, Copilot, AI agents, the OpenAI deal, joining Microsoft in March 2024, managing ~10K staff, DeepMind, and more (Nilay Patel/The Verge)