🤖 Anthropic's Billion-Dollar Moves; Social Media Slump; Robots Evolve
Today’s pick
OpenAI Rival Anthropic in Talks to Raise $2 Billion From Google, Others Just Days After Amazon Investment. Anthropic, one of the main rivals of OpenAI, is in talks with investors to raise at least $2 billion in new funding, following a commitment from Amazon last week to invest $1.25 billion in the company, according to three people with direct… By Kate Clark via The Information
It wants a valuation between $20B - $30B & projects revenue of $200M by the end of the year. - Kate Clark (@KateClarkTweets)
Social media traffic to top news sites craters Website business models that depended on clicks from social media are now broken. Traffic referrals to the top global news sites from Meta's Facebook and X, formerly Twitter, has collapsed over the past year, according to data from Similarweb.
Social media traffic to top news sites craters - Sara Fischer(@sarafischer)
The best way to reach new readers is through word of mouth. If you click THIS LINK in your inbox, it’ll create an easy-to-send pre-written email you can just fire off to some friends.
Scaling up learning across many different robot types. Robots are great specialists, but poor generalists. Typically, you have to train a model for each task, robot, and environment. Changing a single variable often requires starting from scratch. But what if we could combine the knowledge across robotics and create a way to train a general-purpose robot? Via Deepmind
Introducing 𝗥𝗧-𝗫: a generalist AI model to help advance how robots can learn new skills. - Google DeepMind (@GoogleDeepMind)
Defense Startup Anduril Is in Talks to Raise More Than $400 Million From Investors. The financing is said to be structured as a convertible note Startup is likely to use cash influx to fund more acquisitions Anduril Industries Inc. is in talks to raise $400 million to $500 million in funding from investors in a deal that could… By Lizette Chapman via Bloomberg
The Orange County-based business is backed by Andreessen, Founders Fund and was valued above $8B last year - Katie Roof (@Katie_Roof)
Taylor Lorenz on her extremely online history of the internet. When Taylor Lorenz turned in the draft of her new book, Extremely Online, she found that she had written 60,000 words on the history Vine. “My editor was like, what the hell, ” she says, laughing. Lorenz's incisive commentary on the… By Zoë Schiffer via Platformer
Here's @ZoeSchiffer interviewing @TaylorLorenz about her new book. Loved learning which social channel is driving the most sales - Casey Newton (@CaseyNewton)
Thanks for reading to the bottom and soaking in our Newslit Daily fueled with highlights for your morning.
I hope you found it interesting and, needless to say, if you have any questions or feedback let me know by hitting reply.
Take care and see you tomorrow!
P.S. Want to advertise with us? We’d love to hear from you.