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Techmeme

Amazon's Twitch begins testing livestream shopping ads allowing users to buy products "in real time", starting with e.l.f. Cosmetics (Peter Adams/Marketing Dive)

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Sources: French regulator ACPR is carrying out anti-money laundering checks on Binance and others, as it seeks to determine eligibility for EU MiCA licenses (Claudia Cohen/Bloomberg)

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Israel-based Second Nature, whose conversational AI helps train sales teams, raised a $22M Series B led by Sienna VC, taking its total raised to $80M (Meir Orbach/CTech)

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EssilorLuxottica stock jumps 10%+ after reporting Q3 revenue up 11.7% YoY to €6.9B, with wearables like Ray-Ban Meta contributing 4 percentage points to growth (CNBC)

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Meta plans new Instagram teen safety tools in 2026, letting parents block teens from chatting with AI characters and sending them "insights" from teens' chats (Robert Hart/The Verge)

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Anthropic's Skills for Claude, which are conceptually very simple, may become a bigger deal than MCP, whose high token usage is its most significant limitation (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog)

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Reddit says it is expanding Reddit Answers, its Google Gemini-powered search experience, to five new languages: French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

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OpenAI says it paused Sora's ability to generate videos resembling MLK Jr. at the request of his estate, after some users created "disrespectful depictions" (Maxwell Zeff/TechCrunch)

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How the FBI's hunt for the person who coerced a 13-year-old into livestreaming his suicide led to the arrest of a German member of the online predator group 764 (William Wan/Washington Post)

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Three labor unions filed a lawsuit in NY federal court to block the Trump administration from searching visa holders' social media for posts it deems hostile (David Ingram/NBC News)

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Source: OpenAI expects to spend 20% to 30% less on AI chips co-developed with Broadcom than on chips from Nvidia, which is notoriously backlogged on GPU orders (Shirin Ghaffary/Bloomberg)

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Hacker group Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters posts alleged names, phone numbers, and addresses of hundreds of DHS, ICE, FBI, and DOJ officials in a mass doxxing event (Joseph Cox/404 Media)

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Sources: Samsung to showcase its trifold phone at this month's APEC summit; attendees won't be allowed to touch it, as it's expected to be displayed under glass (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg)

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Wikimedia says Wikipedia is seeing a significant decline in human traffic, as more people access the site's information via AI chatbots without clicking through (Emanuel Maiberg/404 Media)

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Sources: Micron plans to stop selling server chips to data centers in China after a 2023 ban, but will continue selling chips to auto and smartphone sectors (Reuters)

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Sources: Nintendo has asked manufacturers to produce as many as 25M Switch 2 units by the end of March 2026, surpassing analysts' estimates of 17.6M (Bloomberg)

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Microsoft to bring Copilot Actions, which can use apps to complete certain tasks on local files in Windows 11, to the Windows Insider Program and Copilot Labs (Jordan Novet/CNBC)

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Internal documents: Salesforce pitched ICE on using its AI tech to nearly triple the agency's staff by hiring 10K new officers, improve investigations, and more (Heather Knight/New York Times)

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Kayak launches a ChatGPT-powered chatbot on its desktop and mobile website that lets users ask travel questions and compare flights, hotels, and car rentals (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

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Sources: Meta is set to seal an almost $30B financing package for its Louisiana data center; Meta will retain 20% ownership in the Hyperion data center site (Bloomberg)

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AI data centers are building on-site power plants to bypass the overloaded grid and meet soaring electricity demand amid permitting and supply challenges (Jennifer Hiller/Wall Street Journal)

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A look at ByteDance's Doubao, which became China's most popular AI app in August, with over 157M MAUs, thanks in part to its deep integration with Douyin (Zeyi Yang/Wired)

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Steam hit a new record with over 41.6M concurrent users on October 12, a surge largely sparked by the release of Battlefield 6 (Kosta Andreadis/TweakTown)

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Sources: CME Group plans to debut financial contracts tied to sports games and economic indicators by the end of 2025, including through its FanDuel partnership (Bloomberg)

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Aboon, an AI-powered platform for financial advisers to help business owners launch and manage 401(k) plans, raised a $17.5M seed led by Bain Capital Ventures (Davis Janowski/WealthManagement.com)

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Amazon's Ring partners with Flock to let law enforcement agencies that work with Flock request footage from Ring doorbell users (Amanda Silberling/TechCrunch)

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A profile of Joshua Kushner, including Thrive Capital's investments in GitHub and Stripe and its role in reinstating Sam Altman as OpenAI CEO in November 2023 (Jeremy Stern/Colossus)

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Sources: Apple readies a slimmer M6 MacBook Pro featuring an OLED touch display with a hole-punch design replacing the notch, for late 2026 or early 2027 (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

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Email: Ron Conway, a close friend of Marc Benioff for 25+ years, stepped down from the Salesforce Foundation board, citing Benioff's comments supporting Trump (Heather Knight/New York Times)

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Apple and NBCUniversal announce an Apple TV and Peacock Premium bundle for $14.99 per month, a 30% discount over the individual subscriptions (Alex Weprin/The Hollywood Reporter)

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Coinbase launches Coinbase Business, a stablecoin payment platform to let businesses send and receive USDC; Coinbase shares USDC yield revenue 50/50 with Circle (Ian Allison/CoinDesk)

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Source: OpenAI has proposed a "sign in with ChatGPT" feature to some companies, which could then transfer the cost of using OpenAI's models to their customers (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information)

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Anthropic announces Skills for Claude, a tool with folders of instructions, scripts, and resources that Claude can load to improve performance on some tasks (Hayden Field/The Verge)

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a16z Crypto invests $50M in Solana infrastructure provider Jito through a private token sale, likely one of a16z's largest crypto investments in recent years (Daniel Kuhn/The Block)

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Ripple acquires GTreasury, a platform used by Fortune 500 companies for managing cash, foreign exchange, and risk, for $1B, set to close in the coming months (Krisztian Sandor/CoinDesk)

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Pinterest adds new tools that let users limit how much AI-generated content they see in their feed in certain categories, including beauty, art, and home decor (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

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Minneapolis-based SharpLink Gaming, the second largest publicly traded ether treasury firm, raised $76.5M in a direct offering of 4.5M shares at a 12% premium (CoinDesk)

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DoorDash and Waymo announce a partnership to let DoorDash use Waymo's robotaxis for delivery, starting with deliveries from Phoenix's DashMart store (Andrew J. Hawkins/The Verge)

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Commonwealth Fusion Systems partners with Google DeepMind to use Google's open-source plasma simulator, Torax, for accelerating fusion energy development (Ina Fried/Axios)

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General Intuition, which trains AI agents in spatial reasoning using game clips from Medal, raised a $133.7M seed led by Khosla Ventures and General Catalyst (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)

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OpenAI hires black hole theoretical physicist Alex Lupsasca, the first person to join the OpenAI for Science initiative led by Kevin Weil, to shape its research (Megan Morrone/Axios)

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Uber plans to launch data labelling tasks in the US for some drivers to earn extra money, appearing under "digital tasks" in the driver app, later this fall (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)

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Microsoft launches Windows features to help weave AI into regular Windows 11 PCs, including rolling out a "Hey, Copilot!" wake word and Copilot Voice and Vision (Tom Warren/The Verge)

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Stockholm-based Encube, which uses AI to automate manufacturability analysis during hardware design, emerges from stealth and raised $23M from Kinnevik and more (Amelia Isaacs/Pathfounders)

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Spotify partners with Sony Music Group, WMG, UMG, Merlin, and Believe to develop "responsible" AI products and says it will build a generative AI research lab (Steven J. Horowitz/Variety)

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Upgrade, which offers financial services like online loans, raised $165M led by Neuberger Berman at a $7.3B valuation and is "12 to 18 months away from an IPO" (Jaures Yip/CNBC)

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The US FCC announces proceedings to potentially bar Hong Kong-based telco HKT and its subsidiaries from accessing domestic US networks, citing its ties to China (Dylan Butts/CNBC)

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Better Payment Network, a BNB Chain-based cross-border stablecoin payment company, raised a $50M seed led by YZi Labs, the VC formerly known as Binance Labs (Timmy Shen/The Block)

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Sources: a ransomware attack is disrupting US state and local borrowers' ability to post debt documents on the $4.3T municipal bond market's MuniOS platform (Bloomberg)

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London-based Jack & Jill, which develops conversational AI agents to streamline hiring, raised a $20M seed led by Creandum to expand into Europe and the US (Martin Coulter/Sifted)

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