Mike Pastore / Search Engine Land:
Adobe: traffic from AI sources to US retail sites in February rose 1,200% from July 2024; 39% of US consumers used generative AI for shopping, 53% plan to do so — Traffic from generative AI surged to U.S. retail sites over the holiday season and that trend has continued into 2025, according to new Adobe data.
Daryna Antoniuk / The Record:
Telegram’s Pavel Durov has left France, reportedly after a judge authorized him to leave the country for “several weeks”; the investigation is ongoing — The Russian-born founder and owner of the messaging app Telegram said he returned to Dubai after spending several months …
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Amazon devices chief Panos Panay aims to unveil the first products he has overseen in the fall, talks of new premium devices, hints at wearables like AR glasses — The introduction of tonier hardware, which will coexist with lower- and mid-priced products, is a bid to give consumers more choice …
Jason Koebler / 404 Media:
AI slop, shared by thousands of prolific accounts, is brute forcing virality, and platforms like Meta embrace it; some AI videos get 350M+ views — Consider, for a moment, that this AI-generated video of a bizarre creature turning into a spider, turning into a nightmare giraffe inside of a busy mall has been viewed 362 million times.
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Users report that Gemini 2.0 Flash is very good at removing watermarks from images; many models allow this but some, like Claude 3.7 Sonnet and GPT-4o, do not — Users on social media have discovered a controversial use case for Google’s new Gemini AI model: removing watermarks from images …
Natalie Lung / Bloomberg:
Bumble rolls out new ID verification in the US, the UK, Australia, France, India, and six other markets, as founder Whitney Wolfe Herd returns as its CEO — Bumble Inc. is adding ID verification to its dating app alongside other new features, an attempt to court safety-conscious younger users …
Qianer Liu / The Information:
Sources: Google plans to partner with Taiwanese chipmaker MediaTek on its next-gen TPUs, set for 2026, but will still work with Broadcom — Google plans to work with a new firm to help design and produce some of its artificial intelligence chips: MediaTek.
Paige Smith / Bloomberg:
Robinhood partners with Kalshi to launch a prediction markets hub in the US for retail traders, starting with bets on the federal funds rate and March Madness — Prediction markets have grown in popularity among investors, spurred on by the surge of wagers ahead of the November US presidential race …
Sean Michael Kerner / VentureBeat:
Zoom unveils AI Companion updates to add agentic AI features, including calendar management, meeting tools, and document creation, rolling out by July 2025 — Zoom became a household name during the pandemic as remote work became the norm nearly overnight.
Max A. Cherney / Reuters:
Sources: Intel’s new CEO Lip-Bu Tan has considered restructuring Intel’s AI approach and cutting staff to address a slow and bloated middle management layer — Intel’s incoming CEO Lip-Bu Tan has considered significant changes to its chip manufacturing methods and artificial intelligence strategies ahead …
