Months after first testing ads in select markets, including the U.S., Meta on Wednesday announced that its Instagram Threads app would now expand ads to all advertisers worldwide. The expansion will allow eligible advertisers to reach Threads’s over 320 million monthly active users, and it will include access to an inventory filter to control the sensitivity level of content next to which the ads run. The company says that the new ad placement within the Threads feed will be switched on by default for all new ad campaigns that use...

Amazon’s Project Kuiper, the company’s initiative to launch a fleet of satellites into low-Earth orbit and beam internet connection to users, is struggling to ramp up production, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday. The competitor to Elon Musk’s Starlink has completed only a few dozen satellites, according to the report. The venture reportedly needs to quadruple its rate of production in order to meet a government deadline, which requires the company to launch 1600 satellites into space by next summer. Project Kuiper seems to be a long way off from catching up...

Khosla Ventures-backed Fireflies.ai, an AI-powered note-taking app, on Wednesday released a set of domain-specific “mini apps” to extract insights from meeting transcripts automatically. With the widespread availability of automatic speech recognition models and generative AI, meeting intelligence startups like Otter, Read AI, Circleback, Krisp, and Granola have registered impressive growth. Fireflies, similarly, has seen 8x expansion in terms of users and has achieved profitability, according to co-founder and CEO Krish Ramineni.

WhatsApp announced on Wednesday it’s launching a new feature that will allow users to add an extra layer of privacy to chats. The new “Advanced Chat Privacy” setting prevents you and the people you’re chatting with from exporting chats and auto-downloading media to their phone. The setting also prevents users from mentioning Meta AI in messages or asking Meta AI questions. The idea behind the feature is to give everyone in a group reassurance that no one can take what is being shared and said outside the chat. It’s worth...

Cliff Asness , Wall Street’s standard bearer of traditional quant finance, was once skeptical that machine learning would ever make a big splash at AQR Capital Management.

Yet seven years after the AQR co-founder issued his words of caution on the technology’s potential, it’s a very different story. The firm is raising external capital for two machine-learning strategies, and this subset of artificial intelligence now powers about a fifth of the trading signals in its flagship multi-strategy fund.

WhatsApp defends 'optional' AI tool that cannot be turned off WhatsApp says its new AI feature embedded in the messaging service is "entirely optional" - despite the fact it cannot be removed from the app. The Meta AI logo is an ever-present blue circle with pink and green splashes in the bottom right of your Chats screen. Interacting with it opens a chatbot designed to answer your questions, but it has drawn attention and frustration from users who cannot turn it off. It follows Microsoft's Recall feature, which was also...

If there’s one item we all have that we need by our side at all times, it’s a phone. Yeah, we spend a lot of time scrolling on Instagram or binging on TikTok videos, but when it comes right down to it, a phone is a lifeline. You need it to make calls, keep in touch with friends and family, and to handle work when it needs your attention. So a good charger, especially one from Anker, is super important to have. Thanks to a price cut at Amazon, you...

Finding new sources of critical minerals is a costly business. Worldwide, companies spent $12 to $13 billion on exploration in 2023. The upshot: mining is the definition of a hit-or-miss business. Companies today use advanced models of the Earth’s crust to pinpoint the best prospects, but even then only about three out of 1,000 attempts to find a deposit are successful. Prospectors still have to drill deep into the Earth, pulling up cores of rock to prove if their hunch was correct. “About 70% of the the capital that exploration...