(Crunchbase) Venture funding to Black-founded U.S. startups last year totaled only $705 million — marking the first time since 2016 that the figure failed to even reach $1 billion, Crunchbase data shows. The decline in capital to Black-founded companies greatly outpaces the overall decline in startup funding. While total venture dollars in the U.S. fell 37% last year,…

(Bloomberg) There are lies, damned lies and statistics – and then there’s IRR. The internal rate of return metric used by private-capital managers has long had critics in finance and academia because it is easily manipulated and hard to compare with the transparent returns of, say, stocks and bonds. Still, it survives because there is…

(WSJ) Private-equity firms are desperate to cash out of investments. But enthusiasm for initial public offerings is low after several stock-market debuts flopped. Enter so-called private IPOs. Read more here.

(Washington Post) Pentagon officials were hanging on to every word as Matthew Knight, OpenAI’s head of security, explained how the latest version of ChatGPT had succeeded in deciphering cryptic conversations within a Russian hacking group, a task that human analysts had found challenging. “These logs were in Russian shorthand internet slang,” Knight said. “We had a Russian…

(Institutional Investor) ESG may be a dirty acronym to some institutions these days, but one endowment is going all-in on it. The California Endowment, a private non-profit focused on expanding access to affordable and quality healthcare in the state, is expected to announce that it is planning to move its entire $4 billion in assets…

(Reuters) The European Union will investigate whether ByteDance’s TikTok breached online content rules aimed at protecting children and ensuring transparent advertising, an official said on Monday, putting the social media platform at risk of a hefty fine. Read more here.

(Verge) The New York Times’ lawsuit against OpenAI is part of a broader, industry-shaking copyright challenge that could define the future of AI… There’s a lot going on in the world of generative AI, but maybe the biggest is the increasing number of copyright lawsuits being filed against AI companies like OpenAI and Stability AI. So…

(Axios) Google is joining Microsoft, Meta and Adobe in supporting a standard for labeling media that can describe who created an image or video, when and how it was created, and the credibility of its source, the company announced today. Why it matters: With Android smartphones holding a 70% global market share, and 2.5 billion YouTube users, Google’s move gives…

(TechCrunch) The Oversight Board, the external advisory group that Meta created to review its moderation decisions on Facebook and Instagram, issued a decision on Monday concerning a doctored seven-second video of President Biden that made the rounds on social media last year. The original video showed the president accompanying his granddaughter Natalie Biden to cast her ballot during early voting…

(NYT) After a series of tense exchanges between senators and tech executives that clocked in at just under four hours, the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on online child safety came to an end on Wednesday with no clear resolutions in sight. The audience included several family members of victims, who cheered as senators berated the…