Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.
In today's Techpresso:
📈 Facebook Dating is a surprise hit
🌐 Apple brings its App Store to the web
📉 China to cut data center power bills by up to 50%
🚫 Top Japanese studios demand OpenAI stop training on content
🤖 Coca-Cola's new AI holiday ad faces criticism
🛡️ Amazon armors its next underwater cable to stop cuts
🎁 + 17 other news you might like
🔮 + 6 handpicked research papers and tools
📈 Facebook Dating is a surprise hit LINK
Meta revealed for the first time that Facebook Dating has 21.5 million daily active users across 52 countries, a surprisingly high figure for a product many assumed was not widely used.
The platform is also catching on with young people, as daily conversations in the 18-29 demographic jumped 24 percent, with 1.77 million individuals between those ages now active in the U.S.
A major part of its appeal is that it's completely free, unlike apps like Hinge that lock desirable matches behind premium features like “Standouts” or require buying virtual “roses.”
🌐 Apple brings its App Store to the web LINK
Apple has redesigned its App Store with a new web interface, allowing people on non-Apple devices to finally browse the entire catalog instead of just viewing individual pages from search engines.
The new interface lets you browse apps by category and platform like iPhone, iPad, and Watch, although you still cannot download any apps directly from the web store to a device.
This redesign is part of Apple’s larger push to present a more open ecosystem, which is relevant to its ongoing legal battles with governments accusing the company of acting as a monopoly.
📉 China to cut data center power bills by up to 50% LINK
China is now offering to cut power bills by up to half for large data centers from firms like Tencent and Alibaba if they adopt local AI chips made by Huawei and Cambricon.
These subsidies help cover higher energy costs from using less efficient local AI chips, a problem that increased for many companies after Beijing’s ban on some of Nvidia's products.
As a result of the cheaper electricity, major tech companies including ByteDance and Baidu are now expanding their cloud and AI projects by making significant changes to adopt local chips.
🚫 Top Japanese studios demand OpenAI stop training on content LINK
Japan's top IP holders allege that OpenAI's replication of media during the machine learning process could constitute copyright infringement because the resulting AI model spits out protected characters.
The studios argue that an opt-out policy violates Japanese copyright law, which requires getting prior permission for using creative works and does not allow for subsequent objections to avoid liability.
After Sora 2 produced an avalanche of content with Japanese IP, the nation's government formally asked OpenAI to stop using artwork from the country for its machine learning.
🤖 Coca-Cola's new AI holiday ad faces criticism LINK
Coca-Cola's new generative AI holiday commercial is being criticized for its visually jarring style, featuring critters with unnatural movement that look like sloppily animated flat images rather than rigged 3D models.
The campaign involved five “AI specialists” who prompted and refined over 70,000 AI video clips, yet the final result feels dated compared to convincing deepfake videos from tools like Sora 2.
Despite previous blunders and poor reception, Coke's Chief Marketing Officer said the AI-generated ad was cheaper and faster to produce, cutting the project's timeline from a year down to one month.
🛡️ Amazon armors its next underwater cable to stop cuts LINK
Amazon is building a new subsea fiber optic cable called Fastnet to connect Maryland and Ireland, which will be operational in 2028 and is designed to increase network resilience.
To prevent damage, the company is burying the Fastnet cable roughly 1.5 meters deep and adding robust armoring with additional layers of protective steel wires near shores.
The cable adds diversity to Amazon's undisclosed routes, offering over 320 terabits per second of capacity while supporting services like Amazon CloudFront and AWS Global Accelerator.
Other news you might like
- Chrome can now autofill driver’s license, vehicle info, and moreLINK
- DOJ accuses US ransomware negotiators of launching their own ransomware attacksLINK
- Lambda, Microsoft agree to multibillion-dollar AI infrastructure deal with Nvidia chipsLINK
- Norway’s Sovereign Wealth Fund Will Vote Against Tesla’s $1 Trillion Pay Proposal For MuskLINK
- Waymo’s robotaxi expansion accelerates with 3 new citiesLINK
- MIT releases, then quietly removes, nonsense AI cybersecurity paperLINK
- CrowdStrike, AWS, and NVIDIA are betting millions that AI agents will defend the cloudLINK
- Lenovo’s V1 smart glasses skip the camera, but not AILINK
- Anthropic Lands Cognizant as Enterprise AI CustomerLINK
- Altman and Nadella need more power for AI, but they’re not sure how muchLINK
- Student trust in AI coding tools grows briefly, then levels off with experienceLINK
- A commercial space station startup now has a foothold in spaceLINK
- After a decade of frustration, Microsoft finally fixes "Update and shut down" Windows bugLINK
- Real humans don’t stream Drake songs 23 hours a day, rapper suing Spotify saysLINK
- SpaceX Moves to Block Third-Party Starlink Sales in Unauthorized MarketsLINK
- a16z pauses its famed TxO Fund for underserved founders, lays off staffLINK
- LLMs tried to run a robot in the real world – it didn't go wellLINK
Latest research and tools
Apple's App Store Front End Source Code: the complete website source code for the App Store, which was made available due to an apparent configuration error.LINK
FreakWAN: a LoRa-based network for creating an independent, encrypted chat system that works without internet or cellular service.LINK
Reagami: a minimal, zero-dependency library for Squint and ClojureScript that enables developers to build small reactive web applications.LINK
Awesome Cold Showers: a curated list of articles and research that provide critical perspectives and counter-arguments to overhyped technology topics.LINK
Pg_lake: an extension that turns Postgres into a lakehouse, allowing you to query and manage Iceberg tables and data lake files directly in object stores like S3.LINK
Concierge: a framework for building web applications that AI agents can use by following a developer's specific rules to complete complex tasks.LINK
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