Profile: 5bc1c11a...
An ex-Snap engineer debuts Butterflies, a social network where users can create AI personas that then interact with users and other AIs via posts and DMs (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)
Forbes demands Perplexity not infringe on Forbes IP and drop Forbes-sourced articles; Perplexity-made content remains without attribution, including on YouTube (Sara Fischer/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2024/06/18/forbes-perplexity-ai-legal-action-copyright
Devs say Apple is denying or delaying notarization of iOS apps, including emulators and AltStore apps, to enforce its rules, defeating the point of the EU's DMA (Jason Snell/Six Colors)
https://sixcolors.com/link/2024/06/apple-refuses-to-notarize-emulator-app/
HPE and Nvidia unveil private cloud offerings for generative AI workloads coming this fall, including HPE Private Cloud AI, a co-developed "turnkey" option (Larry Dignan/Constellation Research)
Nvidia passes Microsoft during intraday trading to become the most valuable public company, with a ~$3.33T market cap; NVDA is up over 9x since January 2023 (Kif Leswing/CNBC)
Filings: X is still working on Venmo-like payments features, with a 2024 US launch target; X had $1.48B in revenue in first six months of 2023, down ~40% YoY (Bloomberg)
AI search engine startup Genspark launches, offering a Sparkpage overview for queries, and raised a $60M seed led by Lanchi at a $260M post-money valuation (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/18/genspark-is-the-latest-attempt-at-an-ai-powered-search-engine/
ASUS VivoBook S 15 Copilot+ PC review: Snapdragon X Elite is incredible, all day battery life, gorgeous 15.6" OLED screen, and $1,299 for 1TB SSD and 16GB RAM (Zac Bowden/Windows Central)
https://www.windowscentral.com/hardware/laptops/asus-vivobook-s-15-copilot-pc-review
Source: Apple told at least one supplier it has suspended work on the next Apple Vision Pro; sources: it's still aiming to debut a cheaper model by end of 2025 (The Information)
A study of 10 chatbots, including from Perplexity and OpenAI, shows how often they repeat Russian disinfo and cite fugitive John Dougan's fake local news sites (Ina Fried/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2024/06/18/ai-chatbots-russian-propaganda
London-based SurrealDB, which helps developers consolidate their databases, raised $20M led by FirstMark and Georgian, taking its total funding to $26M (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/18/surrealdb-is-helping-developers-consolidate-their-databases/
Xreal unveils the $199+ Beam Pro, a 6.5-inch device that powers Xreal's glasses, runs Android 14-based NebulaOS, uses a Snapdragon chip, and has two USB-C ports (David Pierce/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/18/24180298/xreal-beam-pro-ar-glasses-usb-c-launch
Maryland-based Huntress, an SMB-focused managed security platform, raised a $150M Series D led by Kleiner Perkins, Meritech, and Sapphire at a $1.5B+ valuation (James Rundle/Wall Street Journal)
Blackstone plans to buy Japanese digital comic provider Infocom in a ~$1.7B deal, in its biggest private equity transaction in Japan to date (Lisa Du/Bloomberg)
Autonomous trucking startup Waabi raised a $200M Series B led by Uber and Khosla Ventures, after an $83.5M Series A in 2021, and aims for a full launch in 2025 (Zaheer Kachwala/Reuters)
Sources: Apple is set to settle a long-running EU antitrust investigation over payments, after the EU accepted measures that Apple committed to in January 2024 (Javier Espinoza/Financial Times)
Amazon Labor Union members vote to join forces with the 1.3M-member Teamsters union; ALU President Christian Smalls says Teamsters allocated $8M for organizing (Noam Scheiber/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/18/business/economy/amazon-labor-union-teamsters.html
Margrethe Vestager says Apple has a number of "very serious" issues under the EU's DMA, and the conclusions of an investigation will arrive "hopefully soon" (Arjun Kharpal/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/18/apple-issues-very-serious-under-landmark-eu-rules-vestager.html
Some Google users, frustrated by the results, turn to Reddit as a search alternative; a weeklong test finds Reddit is best for product recommendations and more (Ann-Marie Alcántara/Wall Street Journal)
Sources: Huawei is considering taking a cut of in-app purchases on its Harmony OS, and has discussed a ~20% fee with developers, below Apple and Google's 30% (Pei Li/Bloomberg)