Diarrha N’Diaye-Mbaye, one of the first among the small number of Black women to raise more than $1 million in venture capital, announced on Thursday the closure of her award-winning beauty startup Ami Colé. Ami Colé creates makeup for those with darker skin colors, as those consumers often struggle to find makeup that matches their…
Microsoft is building data centers as fast as it can, and that’s killing its carbon balance sheet. Since 2020, its carbon emissions have grown by nearly a quarter, undermining the pledge it made that year to remove more carbon from the atmosphere than it generates by 2030. So Microsoft has been buying massive amounts of…
Investors are continuing to rally behind the call to reindustrialize American industry, this time by building out a $260 million war chest for automated manufacturing startup Hadrian to scale its factory footprint and make even more machine parts. Hadrian’s aim is to modernize American manufacturing by leveraging advance automation to deliver mass-produced parts for aerospace…
Meta appointed Connor Hayes, Meta’s VP of product for generative AI, to become the head of Threads, per Axios. Until now, Instagram head Adam Mosseri has been in charge of Threads. But the platform has grown into more than a side product of Instagram, necessitating additional leadership. Though Threads only launched in 2023, its mobile…
French AI lab Mistral introduced a range of new features to its Le Chat chatbot on Thursday that bring it closer to the capabilities of rivals like OpenAI and Google. The new update includes a new “deep research” mode, native multilingual reasoning, and advanced image editing. The news comes a couple of days after Mistral…
Uber is investing hundreds of millions of dollars into EV maker Lucid and autonomous vehicle technology startup Nuro in a bid to launch its own premium robotaxi service. Under the deal announced Thursday, Uber will invest $300 million in Lucid and separately buy “at least” 20,000 of the EV maker’s new Gravity SUV over the…
GM is sending new and old EV batteries to recycler Redwood Materials, which then repurposes the packs for stationary energy storage, the two companies announced today. Second-life batteries from GM have already made their way through Redwood’s process and into a 12 megawatt microgrid at the company’s Sparks, Nevada, headquarters. Electricity from that installation then…
AI safety researchers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and other organizations are speaking out publicly against the “reckless” and “completely irresponsible” safety culture at xAI, the billion-dollar AI startup owned by Elon Musk. The criticisms follow weeks of scandals at xAI that have overshadowed the company’s technological advances. Last week, the company’s AI chatbot, Grok, spouted antisemitic…
TikTok is adding new features to its app to let songwriters highlight their works. These features, rolling out in beta, include a “Songwriter” label and a new tab on their profile to show off their musical works. This can help songwriters market themselves better to potential clients. The company said a limited number of publishing…
Apple is introducing a new reason to upgrade to its subscription news offering, Apple News+: more games. On Thursday, the company announced the addition of the Emoji Game, an original title that will join its other games, including its Crossword puzzle, Crossword Mini, Sudoku, and word game Quartiles, in both the U.S. and Canada in…
