Meta faces dual celebrity AI crises: unauthorized bots impersonating Swift and others while licensed celebrity voices engaged inappropriately with minors. Both expose how engagement incentives override safety guardrails.
Despite massive AI hype, 95% of enterprise projects deliver no real returns. The gap between promises and reality reveals hidden costs, workflow mismatches, and why human oversight remains surprisingly essential.
Meta's $14B AI talent blitz hits turbulence as ChatGPT co-creator Shengjia Zhao threatened to quit days after joining. The company hastily named him Chief Scientist to prevent defection, but at least three other marquee hires have already left.
Swap, a London-based startup founded in 2022, just secured $40 million in Series B funding to streamline e-commerce operations.
The platform consolidates everything from cross-border shipping to inventory forecasting into one system, saving online retailers from juggling multiple service providers.
The company serves brands making between $5M and $100M in revenue, including fashion labels Nadine Merabi and The Frankie Shop. With AI tools powered by Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT, Swap helps predict inventory trends and handles complex tasks like international tax calculations.
ICONIQ Growth led the round, with QED Investors and others joining in. The funding will fuel Swap's international expansion, with new offices planned across Australia, Europe, Canada, and the US.
Why this matters:
While competitors offer piecemeal solutions, Swap is betting that retailers would rather have one Swiss Army knife than a drawer full of single-purpose tools
The e-commerce back-end is finally getting its "there's an app for that" moment – just one app, not twenty
Tech translator with German roots who fled to Silicon Valley chaos. Decodes startup noise from San Francisco. Launched implicator.ai to slice through AI's daily madness—crisp, clear, with Teutonic precision and deadly sarcasm.
Sam Altman's OpenAI is backing a $250M brain-computer startup to directly compete with Elon Musk's Neuralink. The rivalry moves from AI models to neural interfaces—whoever controls how humans connect to AI systems wins the future.
Berlin's n8n just jumped from €300 million to nearly $3 billion valuation in four months. Ten VCs are fighting over the AI automation startup that's building the nervous system for enterprise agents. At 75x revenue, there's no room for error.
OpenAI closes $8.3B funding round months early, led by Dragoneer's record $2.8B single check. Early investors got squeezed as demand hit 5x capacity. Revenue jumped to $13B while Microsoft negotiations loom over IPO future.
Israeli startup Teramount raised $50M to solve AI's hidden bottleneck: connecting processors. While everyone builds faster chips, these physicists found the real problem in the wires between them. Their optical solution promises 100x speed gains.