(404 Media) The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced sweeping action against some of the most important companies in the location data industry on Tuesday, including those that power surveillance tools used by a wide spread of U.S. law enforcement agencies and demanding they delete data related to certain sensitive areas like health clinics and places…

(The Information) The growth of Temu and Shein has spurred the rise of little-known delivery startups that help them keep prices ultralow for shoppers. Now those budget delivery services are facing a growing number of legal complaints about their pay practices. With a click of a button, shoppers on these and other sites like AliExpress…

(TechCrunch) Attorneys for tech billionaire Elon Musk have filed for a preliminary injunction against OpenAI, several of its co-founders, and its investor and close collaborator, Microsoft, to prevent OpenAI and other named defendants from engaging in what Musk’s counsel claims is anticompetitive behavior. The motion for an injunction, which was filed late on Friday in…

(Financial Times) In 2024, artificial intelligence is consistently front-page news. From Nvidia hitting a $3tn market cap to the growing energy usage of data centres, it is the most discussed technology of our time. And it is a technology that the US dominates, with three of the most valuable AI start-ups, Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI,…

(TechCrunch) Illumen Capital is doubling down on its support for fund managers and founders from underrepresented communities.  The firm is an impact fund of funds that has previously supported ways to address racial bias in investing. Yesterday, the firm, founded by Daryn Dodson, announced the raise of a $32.75 million “Catalyst Fund “to once again…

(WSJ) Silicon Valley’s venture-capital firms are having an easy time finding promising startups to back. The hard part is cashing out. Last year, U.S. venture firms returned $26 billion worth of shares back to their investors, the lowest amount since 2011, according to the data provider PitchBook. Startup investors say 2024 has continued the trend,…

(The Information) OpenAI’s loss of Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati and safety systems chief Lilian Weng has galvanized concern among some of the remaining women at the firm that the management isn’t doing enough to promote and retain women, two people who have worked at the ChatGPT maker said. One female staffer circulated a memo…

(Platformer) Over the past week, several stories sourced to people inside the big AI labs have reported that the race to build superintelligence is hitting a wall. Specifically, they say, the approach that has carried the industry from OpenAI’s first large language model to the LLMs we have today has begun to show diminishing returns. …

(Futurism) Character.AI is an explosively popular startup — with $2.7 billion in financial backing from Google — that allows its tens of millions of users to interact with chatbots that have been outfitted with various personalities. With that type of funding and scale, not to mention its popularity with young users, you might assume the…

(Financial Times) The drawn-out downturn in private market returns is hitting one group of investors especially hard: Ivy League university endowments. Leading US university endowments, many of which allocate outsized portions of their portfolios to private equity and venture capital, have underperformed the university average for the second year in a row, with prominent ones…