 | Jan 08, 2025 | | | | | | Happy hump day! Meta scales back content moderation. U.K. parliament grills Temu and Shein over forced labour. Anthropic is in talks for a funding round with $60 billion valuation.
| | | | Meta Platforms is drastically relaxing its stance on content moderation, moving in the direction of Elon Musk's X, a move that responds to pressure from the incoming Trump administration that will shake up the social media sector. In a post written by Meta's newly promoted Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan, supplemented by an accompanying video posted on Instagram from CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the company said it was ending its fact checking program run by outsiders and would move to a Community Notes model, "just like they do on X." Under that approach people "with a range of perspectives" from the platform weigh in on what's accurate or not. Meta is also moving its Trust and Safety team from California to Texas, where "there is less concern about bias," Zuckerberg said. Kaplan said in his note that the "increasingly complex systems" developed over the past few years "to manage content across our platforms" had "gone too far," echoing statements made over the past few months by Zuckerberg and others. It said that last month Meta "removed millions of pieces of content" daily, less than 1% of the amount of content produced daily, but "we think one to two out of every 10 of these actions may have been mistakes." | | | | U.K. lawmakers grilled bargain sellers Shein and Temu in a hearing Tuesday, pressing for answers about the potential use of forced labor in their supply chains as part of a broader government inquiry into labor rights. Liam Byrne, the lawmaker who chairs the committee, said the committee was particularly dissatisfied with Shein's "reluctance to answer basic questions" about where it sources cotton from and if it sources cotton from Xinjiang, a region in China where the U.S. and other countries have accused the Chinese government of employing forced labor from Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities. China has denied the allegations. Shein has previously said it has zero tolerance for forced labor in its supply chain. The lawmakers also referenced an April report from The Information that found that Temu walked back a short-lived policy requiring suppliers to certify that cotton used in any apparel production wasn't made in Xinjiang. During the hearing, a Temu representative said that he couldn't comment on the report, but said that less than 1% of the products sold on Temu to U.K. shoppers contain cotton. | | | | Artificial intelligence developer Anthropic is in discussions to raise $2 billion in new funding at a $60 billion post-investment valuation, according to a person with direct knowledge of the fundraise. Venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners, which is primarily known for investing in younger startups, is leading the deal, this person said. Lightspeed has also backed AI competitors including Mistral, Stability AI and Cartesia. Meanwhile, Anthropic recently passed $875 million in annualized revenue—a measure of the past month's revenue multiplied by 12, the person said. That reflects significant growth in the past year but is shy of the $1 billion in annualized revenue the company previously told investors it was on track to hit by the end of 2024. By comparison, OpenAI had projected revenue of $4 billion in 2024, meaning it has been generating about 4.5 times more revenue on a monthly basis. The fundraise would more than triple the startup's valuation from around a year ago, which valued it at $18 billion, followed by Amazon committing $4 billion to Anthropic and developing a supercomputing cluster for the startup to develop its technology. That's also a higher valuation than the $40 billion Anthropic floated to investors late last year, The Information previously reported. Anthropic pays Amazon for cloud servers, and Amazon resells Anthropic models to its customers while taking a cut of revenue from such sales. The Wall Street Journal first reported details of Anthropic's fundraise. | | | | President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday said Emirati real estate firm Damac Properties plans to spend at least $20 billion to develop data centers in the U.S. Hussain Sajwana, the chairman of Damac, said the data centers will cater to artificial intelligence and cloud computing businesses of major cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft. Damac is also an investor in AI startups Anthropic, xAI and Mistral, which rely on such data centers. Last week, Microsoft said it is on track to spend $80 billion on AI data centers in the twelve months ending in June—a big increase from the year prior, when it spent $53 billion across all of its capital expenses. Microsoft is optimistic that the Trump administration will help speed up the development of data centers by making it easier to get permitting and encouraging more energy production, The Information has reported. Microsoft and other firms are racing to build data centers so that they can power large supercomputers, which are used to develop advanced AI. Speaking at a press conference in Florida, Trump said the Damac investment will happen over a "short period of time" and could increase to $40 billion. He said the first phase involves projects in Texas and Arizona, as well as several states in the Midwest. | | | | Getty Images is buying rival photo licensing site Shutterstock for around $1.35 billion in cash and stock, a combination that will create a company better able to fend off the threat posed by artificial intelligence-powered image creation. The precise price will depend on the mix of cash and shares that Shutterstock shareholders opt to take. In a statement, the companies said the merger would allow more capacity "for product investment and innovation," including "expanded event coverage" and customer-facing capabilities in areas like search and AI. Both companies make money but are slow growing. The deal is subject to antitrust review, which could be an issue, although the incoming Trump administration is likely to take a more relaxed policy on mergers than the Biden administration. But European regulators, among others, will also have to review the deal. | | | | TikTok's parent company ByteDance released an app called Melolo featuring short dramas, TV and movies on Google's app store. Minidramas have proved to be a huge hit for TikTok's sibling app Douyin in China. The company has also explored bringing such short dramas to the U.S. on TikTok to broaden its audience, even as it faces a potential ban in the U.S., The Information previously reported. The developer of the new app, which quietly launched in November, is Poligon, a Singapore-based subsidiary of ByteDance. | | | | Global investments in startups rose 5% to $368.5 billion last year after falling the prior year, according to PitchBook. Investments are down sharply from a high of $751.5 billion in 2021. At the same time, the number of startup investments fell 18% to 35,686 last year, the lowest since 2017. The number of venture funds raised and the number of startup exits through sales or public offerings also fell last year. U.S. startup investing followed a similar trend. Money invested rose by 29% to $209 billion, representing roughly 57% of global dealmaking. But the number of deals decreased by 6% to 13,776. Artificial intelligence represented 46% of U.S. deal volume—or $97 billion—and nearly 30% of the number of deals. | | | Popular articles
By Cory Weinberg and Michael Roddan
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