Mastodon’s creator, Eugen Rochko, is stepping down as CEO of the open source, decentralized social network and X rival, as part of the organization’s transition to a non-profit structure, announced at the beginning of the year. The change is Mastodon’s most significant leadership overhaul to date, and one designed to ensure Mastodon’s longevity. As part […]
Mastodon CEO steps down as the social network restructures Read More »
As generative AI content starts to fill our social apps, a project to bring back Vine’s six-second looping videos is launching with Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s backing. On Thursday, a new app called diVine will give access to more than 100,000 archived Vine videos, restored from an older backup that was created before Vine’s shutdown.
Jack Dorsey funds diVine, a Vine reboot that includes Vine’s video archive Read More »
On an earnings call on Tuesday, Pinterest CEO Bill Ready highlighted the promise of open source AI models in helping the company keep its costs down as it expands the use cases for visual AI. The image pinboarding site, which often serves as consumers’ first step in their shopping journey, leverages AI technology to power
Pinterest CEO touts open source AI: ‘tremendous performance’ with reduced costs Read More »
The Federal Trade Commission has removed three blog posts from the Lina Khan-era that addressed open-source AI and risks of AI to consumers, according to a Wired report. One post, titled “On Open-Weights Foundation Models,” was published July 10, 2024. Another, titled “Consumers Are Voicing Concerns About AI,” came out in October 2023. A
FTC removes Lina Khan-era posts about AI risks and open source Read More »
Reflection, a startup founded just last year by two former Google DeepMind researchers, has raised $2 billion at an $8 billion valuation, a whopping 15x leap from its $545 million valuation just seven months ago. The company, which originally focused on autonomous coding agents, is now positioning itself as both an open-source alternative to closed
Reflection raises $2B to be America’s open frontier AI lab, challenging DeepSeek Read More »
Polars, the Amsterdam-based company behind the popular open source project of the same name, has raised €18 million (about $21 million) in a Series A round led by Accel, with participation from Bain Capital Partners and angel investors. But while raising this kind of money is the dream of many developers, its creator Ritchie Vink
The startup behind open source tool Polars raises $21M from Accel Read More »
Open source X and Threads competitor Mastodon will begin experimenting with a new way to raise funds: in-app donations. The organization on Wednesday announced it’s launching a campaign that introduces banners inside its Android and iOS apps, prompting users to make a monetary donation. Initially, the feature will be shown only to those on the
Open source X rival Mastodon begins raising funds with new in-app donation feature Read More »
At its Build 2025 conference, Microsoft open-sourced a number of apps and tools, including a new command-line text editor for Windows called Edit. Open source software may not earn the company direct revenue, but it can serve as a form of market research — and a funnel to paid applications and services. By contributing to
Microsoft open-sources a command-line text editor and more at Build Read More »
Spotify generates the vast bulk of its income from ads and subscriptions, but for the past few years the music-streaming giant has also been quietly building out a developer tooling business. Backstage, a project it open-sourced in 2020, has been adopted by more than 2 million developers across 3,400 organizations, including Airbnb, LinkedIn, Twilio, and
Backstage access: Spotify’s dev tools side-hustle is growing legs Read More »
‘Tis the week for small AI models, it seems. On Thursday, Ai2, the nonprofit AI research institute, released Olmo 2 1B, a 1-billion-parameter model that Ai2 claims beats similarly-sized models from Google, Meta, and Alibaba on several benchmarks. Parameters, sometimes referred to as weights, are the internal components of a model that guide its behavior.
Ai2’s new small AI model outperforms similarly-sized models from Google, Meta Read More »
