SoftBank buys $676M old Sharp plant for its OpenAI collab in Japan

SoftBank is marching ahead on its ambitions to build out a major AI operation in its home market of Japan, on its own steam and in strategic partnership with others like OpenAI. On Friday, the tech company confirmed it would pay $676 million for factory previously used by Sharp to build LCD panels to convert […]
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‘Please unleash us,’ Europe’s telcos urge regulators as industry bangs drum for more mega-deals

CEOs of several European telecoms firms are calling on regulators to make it easier for them to combine their operations with other businesses.

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Waymo was slapped with nearly 600 parking tickets last year in SF alone

Waymo now has more than 300 driverless vehicles zipping passengers around San Francisco, but while they follow traffic laws, parking is another matter entirely. According to city records cited by the Washington Post, these rolling robots racked up 589 citations totaling $65,065 in fines last year for parking violations that ranged from blocking traffic to […]
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Anti-aging zealot Bryan Johnson wants to start ‘foodome sequencing’

In the same way that genome sequencing determines the genetic makeup of an organism, Bryan Johnson — the investor and founder behind the Don’t Die movement – wants to start “foodome” sequencing.  “We’re going to sequence the U.S. ‘foodome,’ which means test 20% of foods that constitute 80% of the American diet based on stuff […]
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Is Microsoft in Hot Water With The FTC Over AI Operations Antitrust Issues?

An antitrust probe opened in the final days of the Biden administration will continue under Trump’s Federal Trade Commission.

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Sesame, the startup behind the viral virtual assistant Maya, releases its base AI model

AI company Sesame has released the base model that powers Maya, the impressively realistic voice assistant. The model, which is 1 billion parameters in size (“parameters” referring to individual components of the model), is under an Apache 2.0 license, meaning it can be used commercially with few restrictions. Called CSM-1B, the model generates “RVQ audio codes” from text […]
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Rad Power Bikes already has a new CEO

Rad Power Bikes has named a new CEO, just a few days after its previous leader stepped down. The e-bike company has tapped Kathi Lentzsch, who has spent the last few decades helping turn around underperforming companies in both the consumer and B2B spaces. The change comes as Rad Power continues to shift away from […]
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Y Combinator’s police surveillance darling Flock Safety raises $275M at $7.5B valuation

Flock Safety and one of its long-time VCs, Bedrock Capital, announced Thursday that the startup raised a fresh $275 million at a $7.5 billion valuation. Flock makes computer vision-enabled video surveillance technology used by law enforcement as well as businesses, property management companies, and so on. It’s best known for its automatic license plate recognition […]
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Toast, Shift4 lead drop in fintechs as investors exit stocks tied to consumer spending

Fintech stocks are under pressure as investors worry about companies heavily reliant on consumer spending.

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Y Combinator urges the White House to support Europe’s Digital Markets Act

Y Combinator, one of the world’s most prolific startup accelerators, sent a letter on Wednesday urging the Trump Administration to openly support Europe’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), a wide-ranging piece of legislation that aims to crack open Big Tech’s market power. The DMA designates six tech companies as “gatekeepers” to the internet — Alphabet, Amazon, […]
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