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Tech News
DeepSeek, the AI lab founded by Liang Wenfeng, has relied on his hedge fund High-Flyer Quant for early funding and computing power, but is now courting outside investors as its needs expand. Meanwhile, High-Flyer's affiliates have taken sizable pre-IPO stakes in Chinese hard-tech firms like memory chipmaker CXMT and robotics company Unitree, even as volatility in AI and chip stocks has hit the fund's returns.
A Nature briefing discusses how singer Dolly Parton has become an unlikely fixture in scientific culture, with researchers naming newly discovered species and phenomena after her. The piece highlights the crossover between pop culture and taxonomy, noting several examples where scientists have honored Parton in their published work.
Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Seth Moulton are clashing over artificial intelligence ahead of Tuesday's Massachusetts Democratic Senate primary. Moulton has seized on Markey's admission during a debate that he didn't know if he used AI on his devices, using it to argue for generational change, while Anthropic-backed nonprofit Public First Action has funneled $500,000 to a pro-Markey PAC citing his record on AI regulation.
Michele Spagnuolo, the Google engineer charged with insider trading over Polymarket wagers, has filed a motion to dismiss the case. His attorneys don't dispute he profited using internal Google information, but argue his bets—including one on singer D4vd becoming Google's most-searched person of 2025—were unregulated gambling, not financial instruments covered by the Commodities Exchange Act.
Meta has rolled out a software update that disables the camera on its AI smart glasses if the capture LED is covered while recording is already in progress, closing a gap some users exploited to record secretly. The company also launched a billboard and video campaign in markets where the glasses sell well, explaining that the blinking light indicates active recording.
Fashion startup Atorie has closed a $9.5 million seed round backed by a16z speedrun, Night Capital, and Lightspeed's Jeremy Liew. The company sells handbags and apparel made from the same materials and in the same factories as luxury brands like Prada, but at a fraction of the retail price. Founder Redouane Ramdani, previously of Snipfeed, says the products aren't dupes but genuine goods sourced directly from luxury manufacturers who now have excess capacity.
Fashion startup Atoire has closed a $9.5 million seed round backed by a16z Speedrun, Night Capital, and Lightspeed's Jeremy Liew. The company sells handbags and apparel made from the same materials and in the same factories as high-end luxury brands, but at a fraction of the price by working directly with manufacturers rather than through traditional brand markups. Founder Redouane Ramdani, previously behind Snipfeed, says the goods are not dupes but genuine products from the same supply chains as names like Prada and Louis Vuitton.
An entrepreneur who runs a company selling farmer-invented products describes reviewing dozens of pitches a year and finding that a product's cleverness rarely predicts commercial success. Instead, the deciding factor is whether the inventor is personally committed enough to invest their own money and time into building and fulfilling demand once it arrives.
A new Entrepreneur commentary argues that most companies underinvest in training as a strategic tool, focusing instead on sales, tech and operations while overlooking the staff who directly shape customer experience. The author says businesses that link training to standards, coaching and culture—not just task completion—build stronger consistency and retention over time.
A new analysis revisits the 2006-2007 subprime mortgage crisis, showing how millions of borrowers held two-year adjustable-rate mortgages with teaser rates that were contractually set to reset 30-50% higher. Credit Suisse and the IMF had already charted this trillion-dollar 'reset wall' months before the crisis hit, yet markets kept buying because everyone assumed they could exit in time. The piece uses this history as a lens to question whether today's AI investment boom is similarly built on temporary, favorable conditions that are due to expire.
Meta has settled a lawsuit brought by attorneys general from 29 US states over allegations it built systems exploiting minors' data while downplaying known harms to young users. The company will pay roughly $18 billion over ten years and adopt new restrictions including a two-hour daily usage cap for minors, nighttime access blocks, school-hours limits, tougher age verification, and curbs on social comparison features.
The newly released Emacs 31 includes a tree-sitter-based mode for editing Markdown files, called markdown-ts-mode, though it is not enabled by default and is labeled experimental. Despite that label, the mode already supports the full CommonMark spec and most of GitHub Flavored Markdown, plus extras like code block editing, table-of-contents tools, and integration with converters such as pandoc. Users must manually load the library, for example via use-package or autoload, since Emacs won't switch to it automatically when opening .md files.