Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Perplexity says it will begin experimenting with ads on its platform in the US starting this week; ads will be formatted as “sponsored follow-up questions” — AI-powered search engine Perplexity says it’ll begin experimenting with ads on its platform starting this week.
Vega, which is developing AltOS, a platform to help alternative asset managers further their distributions, raised a $20M Series A led by Apollo and Motive (Irene Garcia Perez/Bloomberg)
Irene Garcia Perez / Bloomberg:
Vega, which is developing AltOS, a platform to help alternative asset managers further their distributions, raised a $20M Series A led by Apollo and Motive — – Vega is scaling a tech platform for alternative asset managers — Apollo, Motive Partners lead $20 million Series A funding
Modern Times Group agrees to acquire Tel Aviv-based mobile game maker Plarium for $620M and up to $200M more if Plarium hits financial targets over 2025 to 2028 (Dean Takahashi/VentureBeat)
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:
Modern Times Group agrees to acquire Tel Aviv-based mobile game maker Plarium for $620M and up to $200M more if Plarium hits financial targets over 2025 to 2028 — Modern Times Group has agreed to buy Plarium, the maker of RPG Raid: Shadow Legends, from Aristocrat Leisure for $620 million.
PointFive, which helps companies track usage across multiple clouds, raised a $20M Series A led by Salesforce Ventures, after raising a $16M seed in June 2024 (Ingrid Lunden/TechCrunch)
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
PointFive, which helps companies track usage across multiple clouds, raised a $20M Series A led by Salesforce Ventures, after raising a $16M seed in June 2024 — Enterprise spend on cloud services continues to go up, up, up — to the tune of $675 billion this year — thanks …
SoftBank’s telecom unit plans to build an AI supercomputer in Japan using Nvidia’s DGX B200 platform, and a follow-up effort featuring the Grace Blackwell chip (Bloomberg)
Bloomberg:
SoftBank’s telecom unit plans to build an AI supercomputer in Japan using Nvidia’s DGX B200 platform, and a follow-up effort featuring the Grace Blackwell chip — – Nvidia’s highly anticipated Blackwell line will power machine — The two companies deliver the news from AI Summit in Tokyo
FrontierMath, a new benchmark for evaluating AI model’s advanced mathematical reasoning, shows current AI systems solve less than 2% of its challenging problems (Michael Nuñez/VentureBeat)
Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat:
FrontierMath, a new benchmark for evaluating AI model’s advanced mathematical reasoning, shows current AI systems solve less than 2% of its challenging problems — Artificial intelligence systems may be good at generating text, recognizing images, and even solving basic math problems …
Air National guardsman Jack Teixeira is sentenced to 15 years for stealing classified information from the Pentagon and sharing it on Discord in 2022 and 2023 (NBC News)
NBC News:
Air National guardsman Jack Teixeira is sentenced to 15 years for stealing classified information from the Pentagon and sharing it on Discord in 2022 and 2023 — The former Massachusetts Air National Guard member pleaded guilty in March to leaking highly classified military documents online, including about the war in Ukraine.
Donald Trump says Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will lead the Department of Government Efficiency, to provide “advice and guidance from outside of Government” (Eric Beech/Reuters)
Eric Beech / Reuters:
Donald Trump says Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will lead the Department of Government Efficiency, to provide “advice and guidance from outside of Government” — U.S. President-elect Donald Trump said on Tuesday Elon Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy …
Sources: Gail Slater, a top aide to JD Vance, and Mark Meador, a former enforcer at the DOJ’s antitrust unit and the FTC, are the front-runners to lead the FTC (Financial Times)
Financial Times:
Sources: Gail Slater, a top aide to JD Vance, and Mark Meador, a former enforcer at the DOJ’s antitrust unit and the FTC, are the front-runners to lead the FTC — Contenders for prime slots include a top aide to JD Vance and former Department of Justice lawyers
Sources: Marc Lore’s food delivery startup Wonder is in advanced talks to buy Grubhub from Just Eat Takeaway; Just Eat bought Grubhub in 2021 in a $7B+ deal (Wall Street Journal)
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Marc Lore’s food delivery startup Wonder is in advanced talks to buy Grubhub from Just Eat Takeaway; Just Eat bought Grubhub in 2021 in a $7B+ deal — Marc Lore’s Wonder is close to a deal to buy the food-delivery startup from Europe’s Just Eat Takeaway.com
