Bruna Horvath / NBC News:
Zuckerberg says Meta will restore “free expression” on its platforms, including by replacing its fact-checking program with Community Notes, starting in the US — Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the move in a post Tuesday morning. — Meta is scrapping its fact-checking program …
Getty Images Holdings and Shutterstock agree to merge in a deal that creates a $3.7B company; Getty CEO Craig Peters will remain CEO of the combined business (Michael Flaherty/Axios)
Michael Flaherty / Axios:
Getty Images Holdings and Shutterstock agree to merge in a deal that creates a $3.7B company; Getty CEO Craig Peters will remain CEO of the combined business — – Shutterstock shareholders get one of the following: $28.84 per share in cash ($1.03 billion based on Shutterstock’s outstanding shares) …
Meta will lift restrictions on “topics that are part of mainstream discourse”, like immigration or gender, and focus on “illegal and high-severity violations” (Ingrid Lunden/TechCrunch)
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Meta will lift restrictions on “topics that are part of mainstream discourse”, like immigration or gender, and focus on “illegal and high-severity violations” — Meta, the parent of Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, today announced a major overhaul …
PitchBook: US startups raised $209B in 2024, up ~33% from 2023; AI startups raised $97B, the largest portion on record; VCs raised $76.1B, the lowest since 2019 (Sarah McBride/Bloomberg)
Sarah McBride / Bloomberg:
PitchBook: US startups raised $209B in 2024, up ~33% from 2023; AI startups raised $97B, the largest portion on record; VCs raised $76.1B, the lowest since 2019 — VC investors piled into AI megarounds in the US last year. — Venture capitalists put $97 billion into artificial intelligence startups …
Satya Nadella says Microsoft will invest about $3B to expand its Azure cloud and AI capacity in India and train 10 million people in AI in the country by 2030 (Reuters)
Reuters:
Satya Nadella says Microsoft will invest about $3B to expand its Azure cloud and AI capacity in India and train 10 million people in AI in the country by 2030 — Microsoft (MSFT.O) will invest about $3 billion to expand capacity for artificial intelligence and its Azure cloud-computing services in India …
Dutch chipmaker NXP agrees to buy TTTech Auto, a Vienna-based automotive safety software provider, for $625M in cash, aiming to boost its automotive operations (Toby Sterling/Reuters)
Toby Sterling / Reuters:
Dutch chipmaker NXP agrees to buy TTTech Auto, a Vienna-based automotive safety software provider, for $625M in cash, aiming to boost its automotive operations — Dutch computer chip maker NXP said on Tuesday it has agreed to buy Austria’s TTTech Auto for $625 million, to strengthen its automotive operations.
US bitcoin miners, including Riot Platforms, leveraged BTC’s recent price surge to raise $3.7B+ from investors since November, and used the funds to buy coins (Niamh Rowe/Financial Times)
Niamh Rowe / Financial Times:
US bitcoin miners, including Riot Platforms, leveraged BTC’s recent price surge to raise $3.7B+ from investors since November, and used the funds to buy coins — US-listed groups tap investors for cash as competition for resources intensifies — US bitcoin miners are accumulating war chests …
Jensen Huang predicts robotics could become “the largest technology industry the world has ever seen”; Nvidia: the humanoids market to reach $38B in 20 years (Financial Times)
Financial Times:
Jensen Huang predicts robotics could become “the largest technology industry the world has ever seen”; Nvidia: the humanoids market to reach $38B in 20 years — Jensen Huang unveils AI models for humanoids and self-driving car partnership with Toyota at CES keynote
Nvidia updates its Autonomous Game Characters, says the NPCs can “perceive, plan, and act like human players” in games like PUBG, with “small language models” (Jay Peters/The Verge)
Jay Peters / The Verge:
Nvidia updates its Autonomous Game Characters, says the NPCs can “perceive, plan, and act like human players” in games like PUBG, with “small language models” — Nvidia has spent the last two years showing off its digital “ACE” characters that can have in-game conversations with you using generative AI.
Jensen Huang says Nvidia’s Cosmos models for humanoids were trained on 20M hours of real footage of “humans walking, hands moving, manipulating things” (Will Knight/Wired)
Will Knight / Wired:
Jensen Huang says Nvidia’s Cosmos models for humanoids were trained on 20M hours of real footage of “humans walking, hands moving, manipulating things” — Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says the new family of foundational AI models was trained on 20 million hours of “humans walking; hands moving, manipulating things.”
