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(Euro News) The tech giant says it “strongly disputes” the allegations after the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) filed criminal complaints in France and Belgium. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has filed criminal complaints in France and Belgium against subsidiaries of Apple, accusing the tech giant of using conflict minerals. Lawyers representing the…

(TechCrunch) Generative AI may look like magic, but behind the development of these systems are armies of employees at companies like Google, OpenAI, and others, known as “prompt engineers” and analysts, who rate the accuracy of chatbots’ outputs to improve their AI. But a new internal guideline passed down from Google to contractors working on…

(TechCrunch) Paragon, an Israeli spyware maker that has largely kept a low profile in recent years, was acquired last week by American private equity giant AE Industrial Partners, according to Israeli news reports.  Tech news website Calcalist reported that the investment firm bought Paragon for $500 million, and depending on how the company grows, the…

(Pitchbook) Over 40% of unicorns have been in venture portfolios for at least nine years, pressuring a hallmark of VC: the 10-year fund structure. Companies with valuations of at least $1 billion now make up two-thirds of the US venture market. Their inability to exit is raising questions about the wisdom of the decade-long fund,…

(TechCrunch) Running a startup can be expensive, requiring a multitude of different subscriptions. Cap table management software, which helps founders organize their funding, can cost thousands of dollars a year. San Francisco-based Carta is the market leader in this industry. But some startup founders say Carta is making it too hard to cancel their subscriptions. The…

(The Verge) In an announcement today, Chatbot service Character.AI says it will soon be launching parental controls for teenage users, and it described safety measures it’s taken in the past few months, including a separate large language model (LLM) for users under 18. The announcement comes after press scrutiny and two lawsuits that claim it…

(Pitchbook) In 2024, 30 firms raised 75% of all capital raised by VC funds in the US, a powerful signal of how the tech pullback is concentrating influence among the venture industry’s heavyweights. Just nine of them took in $35 billion—half of the total raised, according to PitchBook data. And just one firm, Andreessen Horowitz,…

(The Financial Times) OpenAI is in discussions to ditch a provision that shuts Microsoft out of its most advanced models when the start-up achieves “artificial general intelligence”, as it seeks to unlock billions of dollars of future investment. Under current terms, when OpenAI creates AGI — defined as a “highly autonomous system that outperforms humans…

(Wall Street Journal) Palantir Technologies is partnering with defense-technology company Anduril Industries to launch a consortium the companies said will ensure that the U.S. government leads the world in artificial intelligence. The companies on Friday said the partnership will focus on solving two main problems: data readiness and processing data at scale. Most useful national…

(ProMarket) As financial markets take on societal challenges like climate change, new research from Robin Döttling, Doron Levit, Nadya Malenko and Magdalena Rola-Janicka explores how shareholder democracy interacts with the political process to impact public goods provisions. The authors investigate the potential of investor-driven governance to supplement the shortfalls of the regulatory system, highlighting both…