Less than a week after The Wall St. Journal reported on how a Snapchat feature dubbed “solar system” was adding to teens’ anxiety, the company has responded by adjusting how the feature works.
The ranking system for paid subscribers today shows you how close you are to your Snapchat friends by displaying your position in their solar system.
However, instead of removing the feature, as it did with the dangerous and controversial speed filter, which it was sued over for “negligent design,” Snap is simply turning the Solar System feature off by default.
A more relevant stat would be how many Snapchat+ users have used Solar System or viewed the feature.
The Solar System feature was only one of Snapchat’s friend ranking systems.
Why is AI so bad at spelling?
But put an AI up against some middle schoolers at the spelling bee, and it’ll get knocked out faster than you can say diffusion.
The underlying technology behind image and text generators are different, yet both kinds of models have similar struggles with details like spelling.
But, Guzdial says, if we look close enough, it’s not just fingers and spelling that AI gets wrong.
Though these AI models are improving at an alarming rate, these tools are still bound to encounter issues like this, which limits the capacity of the technology.
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups.
Pornhub has been playing a game of chicken with a bunch of state legislatures for a while now.
That’s right, Texans are now officially barred from the sacred halls of Pornhub, unless they’re crafty enough with a VPN to sneak past the digital bouncers.
In a twist that surprises exactly no one, Pornhub isn’t thrilled about asking its patrons to flash their digital IDs at the door.
Pornhub is not exactly a startup, so why are we featuring this front and center in the Startups Weekly newsletter?
We’ll publish several pieces throughout the year as the AI boom continues, highlighting key work that often goes unrecognized.
Sandra Wachter is a professor and senior researcher in data ethics, AI, robotics, algorithms and regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute.
She’s also a former fellow of The Alan Turing Institute, the U.K.’s national institute for data science and AI.
What are some issues AI users should be aware of?
Bad data, bad algorithms and bad design choices lead to worse products.
If you hurry, you can get $40,000 off a 2023 Toyota Mirai, a fuel-cell vehicle which retails for $52,000.
Toyota’s discount comes on the heels of Shell’s announcement three weeks ago that it’s closing its hydrogen filling stations in California.
Of those that remain, about a quarter are offline, according to the Hydrogen Fuel Cell Partnership.
So why are Toyota and Honda (and Hyundai and others) still so bullish on hydrogen?
If today’s hydrogen startups succeed, and if they’re able to build enough capacity to satiate industrial and shipping demand, then it might make sense to start selling fuel-cell vehicles to the masses.
Last week, my colleague Aria Alamalhodaei wrote an exclusive on defense and space tech venture firm Countdown Capital’s plan to shut down.
But Countdown shutting down is likely more of an isolated event than a sign of what’s to come for micro funds this year.
That’s changed today, and it isn’t surprising given the sheer amount of capital it takes to get defense startups off the ground; the costs are incomparable to a category like SaaS.
This is also why Countdown’s fate doesn’t portend cloudy skies for micro funds in other categories.
So despite the category heating up, a $500,000 check can still net a firm meaningful ownership at the pre-seed stage, they said.
Multiple Threads users on the iOS app reported earlier today that they are seeing a new “Latest” option to sort search results on the new social network.
However, the company told TechCrunch that the feature was just an internal prototype and it was rolled out by mistake.
Threads first started testing the ability to search for posts in Australia and New Zealand in August 2023.
In September last year, Meta rolled out the search to almost all English and Spanish-speaking countries where the social network was available.
In December, the company expanded the search to all languages along with the launch in the EU later in the month.
Even without Adobe, things don’t look too bad for Figma CB Insights estimates that Figma is still worth between $8.3 billion and $9 billionA failed acquisition often spells doom for the target company.
But despite its $20 billion takeover by Adobe not going through, there are reasons to think that Figma will be just fine.
That the online design company will get a $1 billion termination fee from Adobe will help soften the blow.
So, “no, startups, you’re not getting a breakup fee unless it’s a sizable enough deal where there is antitrust risk,” VC Ed Sim wrote on X.
But in the Adobe-Figma deal, where both companies knew that this risk was front and center, even a $1 billion fee seems only fair compared to the uncertainty ahead.
SpaceX has been struggling to coordinate the debris cleanup at state parks near the orbital flight test they are scheduled to conduct tomorrow. Officials responsible for overseeing debris cleanup have…
Since its release in Ubiquity, few films have garnered as much fanfare and praise as “Star Wars: The Bad Batch.” The film follows a group of Resistance fighters who travel…
