Marissa Mayer’s eternal Sunshine
瑪麗莎·梅耶爾（Marissa Mayer）的永恆陽光

I.

For a brief moment in the tech world last week, it felt like 2012 again: a new photo sharing app had just launched, and everyone was talking about Marissa Mayer.
上周在科技界的短暫時刻，感覺就像是2012年：一個新的照片共用應用程序剛剛推出，每個人都在談論瑪麗莎·梅耶爾。

Mayer, a prominent early Google employee who created its famed associate product manager program before leaving to become CEO of Yahoo, had returned with a new app from the startup studio she co-founded six years ago. Shine, an app designed to let people automatically share photos taken at events they attend together, was announced March 27 — and was immediately mocked by commentators for its bare-bones design and anachronistic feature set.
梅耶爾（Mayer）是谷歌早期的傑出員工，在離開雅虎成為首席執行官之前，她創建了著名的副產品經理計劃，她帶著六年前共同創立的創業工作室的新應用程式回來了。3月27日，一款旨在讓人們自動分享他們一起參加的活動照片的應用程式Shine發佈，並立即因其簡陋的設計和不合時宜的功能集而受到評論員的嘲笑。

“Whenever you feel like you're not good enough, always remember, the creator of the Associate Product Manager program at Google just dropped this,” wrote venture capitalist Deedy Das on X, alongside a screenshot of the app. 
每當你覺得自己不夠好時，永遠記住，谷歌副產品經理專案的建立者剛剛放棄了這個，“風險投資家迪迪·達斯（Deedy Das）在X上寫道，並附上了該應用程式的截圖。

In the office, employees placed bets on how many downloads the app would get on its first day. Mayer set hers high, at 12,000 (12 is her lucky number). But the actual number was closer to 1,000, Platformer has learned.
在辦公室里，員工們打賭應用程式在第一天會獲得多少下載量。梅耶爾將她的高點定為12,000（12是她的幸運數位）。但實際數位接近1000人，Platformer瞭解到。

This week, the company suffered another blow: Mayer’s co-founder, former Google and Yahoo executive Enrique Muñoz Torres, resigned. “Startup life is not easy, but it has been hands down the most rewarding experience in my professional career, which made my decision to leave a very tough one,” he wrote on LinkedIn. Until Wednesday, he was leading the development of an organizing app for families, which has yet to launch. 
本周，該公司再次遭受打擊：梅耶爾的聯合創始人、前谷歌和雅虎高管恩里克·穆尼奧斯·托雷斯（Enrique Muñoz Torres）辭職。“創業生活並不容易，但它無疑是我職業生涯中最有價值的經歷，這讓我決定離開一個非常艱難的決定，”他在LinkedIn上寫道。直到週三，他還在領導開發一款家庭組織應用程式，但尚未推出。

Building a hit app is hugely challenging, and chaos is a common feature of many or even most of the startups that set out to build them. Sunshine, which Mayer founded with Muñoz Torres a year after leaving Yahoo, has been no exception, according to interviews with employees, who all asked for anonymity to speak publicly about the company. 
構建熱門應用程式極具挑戰性，混亂是許多甚至大多數著手構建它們的初創公司的共同特徵。根據對員工的採訪，梅耶爾在離開雅虎一年後與穆尼奧斯·托雷斯（Muñoz Torres）共同創立的陽光公司也不例外，他們都要求匿名公開談論該公司。

Mayer’s original idea had been to create simple utility apps powered by artificial intelligence. (She almost named the company Mundane AI, she told The Information last year.) In 2020, two years after the company launched under the name Lumi Labs, the pair announced the company’s first product: an app that promised to be “the world’s most advanced, intuitive contact manager,” according to The Verge.
梅耶爾最初的想法是創建由人工智慧驅動的簡單實用應用程式。（她差點把這家公司命名為Mundane AI，她去年告訴The Information。據 The Verge 報導，2020 年，在該公司以 Lumi Labs 的名義推出兩年後，兩人宣佈了該公司的第一款產品：一款有望成為“世界上最先進、最直觀的聯繫人管理器”的應用程式。

The company raised a $20 million seed round in 2020 from a small group of investors, including Mayer. At the end of that year, it officially rebranded as Sunshine. 
該公司在 2020 年從包括梅耶爾在內的一小群投資者那裡籌集了 2000 萬美元的種子輪融資。同年年底，它正式更名為Sunshine。

Despite high hopes, the contacts app has yet to take off. It was buggy at launch, duplicating contacts or introducing other errors into data fields. And it rattled some users by filling in contact information using public databases, raising privacy concerns.
儘管被寄予厚望，但聯繫人應用程式尚未起飛。它在發佈時存在錯誤，複製聯繫人或將其他錯誤引入數據欄位。它通過使用公共資料庫填寫聯繫資訊來激怒一些使用者，引發了隱私問題。

Sunshine eventually released an improved version of the app, but it hasn't managed to reach a critical mass of users. Last summer, Mayer laid off 20 percent of the company, leaving it with about 15 employees.
Sunshine 最終發佈了該應用程式的改進版本，但它尚未達到臨界用戶的數量。去年夏天，梅耶爾解僱了公司20%的股份，只剩下約15名員工。

She also went into brainstorming mode. Last summer, she had the idea for the app that would become Shine. Employees have been working on it ever since.
她還進入了頭腦風暴模式。去年夏天，她萌生了開發一款名為 Shine 的應用程式的想法。從那時起，員工們一直在努力。

But its path from concept to execution has been a rocky one. 
但它從概念到執行的道路是崎嶇不平的。

II.

In October, Mayer threw a Halloween party at her house in Palo Alto. 
10月，梅耶爾在她位於帕洛阿爾托的家中舉辦了一場萬聖節派對。

Mayer’s public Halloween bashes are famously lavish: complete with professionally carved pumpkins, jumbo bags of candy, and plush stuffed animals. 
梅耶爾的萬聖節狂歡是出了名的奢華：配有專業雕刻的南瓜、大袋糖果和毛絨毛絨玩具。

The 2023 party was a quieter affair. Guests — a mix of friends and employees — gathered to carve pumpkins and test out a prototype of Shine, according to a former employee.
2023 年的派對是一件比較安靜的事情。據一位前員工說，客人——包括朋友和員工——聚集在一起雕刻南瓜並測試Shine的原型。

Photo sharing became one of the most popular categories of apps in the early 2010s, as rapidly improving smartphone cameras and cellular networks led people to take more photos than ever before. Startups raced to build social networks around the feature, and the tech graveyard is now littered with the ones that didn’t make it: Path, Picplz, DailyBooth, and many more. 
照片共享成為 2010 年代初期最受歡迎的應用程式類別之一，因為快速改進的智慧手機相機和蜂窩網路導致人們拍攝的照片比以往任何時候都多。創業公司競相圍繞這一功能建立社交網路，而科技墓地現在到處都是那些沒有成功的：Path、Picplz、DailyBooth等等。

One of the most famous flameouts in photo sharing was Color, which showed users every photo taken by fellow users in their immediate vicinity. The company raised $41 million — an eye-popping sum at the time — but got next to no traction, and eventually its engineering team was acquired by Apple in 2012 in a fire sale.
照片共用中最著名的熄火之一是 Color，它向使用者展示了附近其他用戶拍攝的每張照片。該公司籌集了4100萬美元——這在當時是一筆令人瞠目結舌的金額——但幾乎沒有獲得任何牽引力，最終其工程團隊在2012年被蘋果收購。

To a degree that surprised employees, Shine sought to borrow ideas from Color. Like that app, it would ask users to share their location and photos with the app and with fellow users. When Shine users were nearby one another and snapping photos, Shine would automatically sort those photos into shared albums.  
在某種程度上，讓員工感到驚訝的是，Shine 試圖借鑒 Color 的想法。與該應用程式一樣，它會要求使用者與應用程式和其他使用者共享他們的位置和照片。當 Shine 使用者彼此靠近並拍攝照片時，Shine 會自動將這些照片分類到共用相冊中。

“We’ll do Color, but we’ll have nudity filters so we’re not Color,” Mayer said, according to notes taken by the same former employee. (Color users used to troll each other by posting nudes, knowing that other people would see them when they opened the app.)
“我們會做顏色，但我們會有裸體濾鏡，所以我們不是顏色，”梅耶爾說，根據同一位前僱員的筆記。（有色人種用戶過去常常通過發佈裸照來互相挑釁，因為他們知道其他人在打開應用程式時會看到他們。

Some staff members were skeptical. First, they worried that few people would be willing to grant the app permanent access to their location and to their photo libraries.
一些工作人員對此持懷疑態度。首先，他們擔心很少有人願意授予該應用程式永久訪問他們的位置和照片庫的許可權。

Second, the team struggled to track users’ locations accurately enough to ensure that photos were shared as intended. Shine uses a Google API to track location, and it wasn’t always precise. Once, an employee found that photos of their daughter had inadvertently appeared in an album shared with colleagues, due to changes Sunshine made to its location parameters. 
其次，該團隊努力足夠準確地跟蹤使用者的位置，以確保照片按預期共用。Shine 使用 Google API 來跟蹤位置，但並不總是精確的。有一次，一名員工發現，由於 Sunshine 對其位置參數進行了更改，他們女兒的照片無意中出現在與同事共用的相冊中。

Third, employees say there was little clarity about how Shine would compete. Apple and Google now have system-level features for sharing photos privately with friends and family. Mayer leads product development for the app — but if there is a product roadmap, she has largely kept it to herself. 
第三，員工們表示，Shine將如何競爭並不明確。Apple 和 Google 現在擁有與朋友和家人私下分享照片的系統級功能。Mayer 負責該應用程式的產品開發，但如果有產品路線圖，她基本上會保密。

Employees say they learn what they are working on each week during Monday morning standup meetings, and that their mandate shifts frequently as Mayer changes priorities. They complain that Mayer often does not heed their advice, and say most product decisions are made based on Mayer’s own experiences using the app.
員工們說，他們每周都會在週一早上的站立會議上瞭解自己在做什麼，而且隨著梅耶爾改變優先事項，他們的任務也會經常發生變化。他們抱怨梅耶爾經常不聽他們的建議，並表示大多數產品決策都是根據梅耶爾自己使用該應用程式的經驗做出的。

While disarray in product development is common to many startups, in other ways Sunshine has been built to resemble a much older company. Employees are required to work in the office five days a week, and have an all-hands meeting that is scheduled for 5PM on Fridays. (During ski season, we’re told that the meeting has started as early as noon). But Mayer is often late to the meeting, employees say, extending their work into the weekend.
雖然產品開發的混亂對許多初創公司來說很常見，但在其他方面，Sunshine 的建立類似於一家更古老的公司。員工必須每周在辦公室工作五天，並定於週五下午 5 點召開全體員工會議。（在滑雪季節，我們被告知會議早在中午就開始了）。但員工們說，梅耶爾經常開會遲到，將他們的工作延長到週末。

When employees ask Mayer questions on Slack, employees say, she often prefers to answer them in person, delaying action. Sunshine manages its projects using Monday.com, but the app is not widely used internally, and in practice many projects are tracked on a white board, which the team calls “analog Monday.” 
員工們說，當員工在 Slack 上向 Mayer 提問時，她通常更喜歡親自回答，從而拖延行動。Sunshine 使用 Monday.com 管理其專案，但該應用程式在內部並未廣泛使用，在實踐中，許多專案都在白板上進行跟蹤，該團隊稱之為“模擬星期一”。

“We honestly wanted to work hard, but the company is just so inefficient,” said the former employee. 
“老實說，我們想努力工作，但公司效率太低了，”這位前員工說。

In any case, employee concerns about Shine proved to be mostly correct. After the party, during which few people gave the necessary permissions, Mayer agreed to try a different approach.
無論如何，事實證明，員工對 Shine 的擔憂大多是正確的。在派對之後，很少有人給予必要的許可，梅耶爾同意嘗試不同的方法。

III. 第三。

After the Halloween party, Sunshine quietly made Shine available in Apple’s App Store. The requirement for users to permanently share their location with the app had been removed. Instead, it asked users to create or join individual events. If one Shine user created an event for a birthday party within the app, and another Shine user joined that event, the photos they took at the event would be shared with one another automatically. 
萬聖節派對結束后，Sunshine 悄悄地在 Apple 的 App Store 上架了 Shine。刪除了使用者與應用程式永久共用其位置的要求。相反，它要求使用者創建或加入單個事件。如果一個 Shine 使用者在應用程式中為生日派對創建了一個活動，而另一個 Shine 使用者加入了該活動，他們在活動中拍攝的照片將自動相互共用。

The app evolved as Mayer tested it out with friends and family on vacation or at parties, employees said. Product changes were “explicitly about her social life,” one employee said. 
員工們說，隨著梅耶爾在度假或聚會上與朋友和家人一起測試它，這款應用程式也在不斷發展。一名員工說，產品的變化「明確地與她的社交生活有關」。

In January, Mayer and her family went on a ski vacation in Wyoming. Mayer’s friend took some selfies on the trip — and was embarrassed when the photos automatically uploaded to a shared album on Shine, which Mayer had presumably created. When Mayer returned to the office, she told employees that photos taken with the front camera that only contained a single face should be excluded from shared albums. 
今年1月，梅耶爾和她的家人去懷俄明州滑雪度假。梅耶爾的朋友在旅途中拍了一些自拍照——當這些照片自動上傳到 Shine 上的共享相冊時，他感到很尷尬，據推測，這是梅耶爾創建的。當梅耶爾回到辦公室時，她告訴員工，用前置攝像頭拍攝的照片，如果只包含一張臉，應該從共享相冊中排除。

Inside the company, frustration was mounting. Mayer wanted to announce Shine in February, but the app was still light on features. Every week, it seemed, she came into the office with new ideas that employees had to rush to implement. And Mayer had laid off the app’s only designer in January, according to former colleagues, leaving it without strong visual direction. At times, Mayer’s design suggestions involved a simple line drawing on a piece of paper that her engineers had to struggle to interpret. 
在公司內部，挫敗感越來越大。梅耶爾想在二月份宣佈 Shine，但該應用程式的功能仍然很輕。似乎每周，她都會帶著員工必須急於實施的新想法來到辦公室。據前同事透露，梅耶爾在一月份解僱了該應用唯一的設計師，使其沒有強大的視覺指導。有時，梅耶爾的設計建議涉及在一張紙上畫一條簡單的線條圖，她的工程師不得不努力解釋。

When Shine finally did launch last week, commentators derided it for brutalist design, which seemed more appropriate to an app for filing expenses or recording timesheets. The most notable feature of its design was arguably its bright purple scheme, which many found reminiscent of Yahoo. (Mayer called the similarity “purely coincidental.”)
當 Shine 終於在上周推出時，評論員嘲笑它為野獸派設計，這似乎更適合用於提交費用或記錄時程表的應用程式。其設計最顯著的特點可以說是其明亮的紫色方案，許多人發現這讓人想起雅虎。（梅耶爾稱這種相似性“純屬巧合”。

The frosty reception to Shine, along with the departure of Muñoz Torres, has clouded Sunshine’s future. While there is undoubtedly some appetite for the utility apps that Mayer envisions, the company’s history of buggy launches and tumultuous product development has left some close to the company with serious doubts. Six years in, the startup has yet to find a large audience. 
對 Shine 的冷遇，以及 Muñoz Torres 的離開，給 Sunshine 的未來蒙上了陰影。雖然毫無疑問，人們對梅耶爾設想的實用應用程式有一些興趣，但該公司的越野車發佈和動蕩的產品開發歷史讓一些與公司關係密切的人產生了嚴重的懷疑。六年過去了，這家初創公司還沒有找到大量的受眾。

Setbacks aside, work on both Sunshine and Shine continues. And earlier this week, in response to the criticism, Sunshine posted a mea culpa on X:
撇開挫折不談，Sunshine 和 Shine 的工作仍在繼續。本周早些時候，為了回應這些批評，Sunshine 在 X 上發佈了一個罪魁禍首：

“We heard you all loud and clear on Shine's design,” the company said. “We're excited to share that later this week, we'll be updating our UI to address the feedback raised by Design Twitter.”
“我們聽到了你們對Shine設計的聲音，”該公司表示。“我們很高興在本周晚些時候與大家分享，我們將更新我們的UI，以解決 Design Twitter 提出的反饋。”

It was April Fool's Day, and the post included some joke screenshots of an even more brutalist-looking app. Later, the company called its own bluff.
那天是愚人節，帖子中有一些笑話截圖，上面有一個看起來更野獸派的應用程式。後來，該公司稱自己的虛張聲勢。

"We did hear your feedback and are currently working hard on a design that will make Shine's interface more modern," it said.
“我們確實聽到了你的反饋，目前正在努力設計一種設計，使Shine的介面更加現代，”它說。

This time, the company said, it was not joking.
該公司表示，這一次，它不是在開玩笑。

More on the Grindr squeeze
有關 Grindr 擠壓的更多資訊

Last week we told you about Grindr’s plans to ramp up its effort to get users to pay for more features. We can now tell you that employees at high levels of the company are currently engaged in discussions about putting some chat features behind the paywall, Platformer has learned. 
上周，我們向您介紹了 Grindr 計劃加大力度讓使用者為更多功能付費。Platformer瞭解到，我們現在可以告訴你，公司高層員工目前正在討論將一些聊天功能放在付費牆後面。

Over the weekend, a bug restricted the number of free chats that users could send to people outside their geographic area through a feature called Explore. That bug has now been fixed, but while active it resulted in a surge of subscriptions — about 2,000 a day, compared to the typical 800. As a result, the company is now running a test to further restrict the number of free chats a user can send to someone outside their close vicinity, from three in a 24-hour period to as few as zero. 
上週末，一個錯誤限制了用戶可以通過名為“探索”的功能發送給其地理區域以外的人的免費聊天次數。該錯誤現已修復，但在啟動時，它導致訂閱量激增——每天約 2,000 個，而通常為 800 個。因此，該公司現在正在進行一項測試，以進一步限制使用者可以發送給附近以外的人的免費聊天次數，從24小時內的三個聊天次數減少到零。

Employees are tracking how these tests impact both subscription sign ups and user sentiment about the app — and will likely try to find a sweet spot between increasing the first without tanking the second. Today, about 19 percent of Grindr’s daily active users use the Explore feature. 
員工正在跟蹤這些測試如何影響訂閱註冊和使用者對應用程式的情緒，並且可能會嘗試在增加第一個測試而不減少第二個測試之間找到一個最佳平衡點。如今，大約 19% 的 Grindr 日活躍使用者使用探索功能。

These tests are separate from Grindr’s discussions about paywalling chats more broadly, we’re told. So far, these discussions haven’t risen to the level of testing. But if the company continues to see sign ups surge after restricting free features, I wouldn’t be surprised to see aspects of the core chat function slip behind the paywall as well. 
我們被告知，這些測試與 Grindr 關於更廣泛付費聊天的討論是分開的。到目前為止，這些討論還沒有上升到測試的水準。但是，如果該公司在限制免費功能後繼續看到註冊人數激增，那麼看到核心聊天功能的某些方面也落後於付費牆，我不會感到驚訝。

— Zoë Schiffer — 佐伊·希弗

On the podcast this week: Kevin and I examine new studies on how AI may already be transforming the economy. Then, filmmaker Paul Trillo joins us to discuss how he used OpenAI's Sora to explore making movies with AI. And finally, Kevin catches me up on the incredible story of the XZ Utils vulnerability.

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Governing

• An inside look at Jia Tan, the persona behind the XZ Utils supply chain vulnerability, who spent years building credibility and community before inserting malicious code. (Andy Greenberg and Mark Burgess / WIRED)
  • A Microsoft engineer, Andres Freund, stumbled upon a backdoor in part of Linux’s software during a routine maintenance, which experts say could have resulted in a lot of damage if a cyberattack was successful. (Kevin Roose / New York Times)
  • How the XZ supply chain and the F-Droid app store serve as case studies for the effects of bullying within the open-source community. (Jason Koebler / 404 Media)
• The FCC plans to vote to reinstate net neutrality rules and resume oversight of broadband internet, which President Trump had rescinded. (David Shepardson / Reuters)
• Meta pushed back on an effort from the Federal Trade Commission to amend its 2020 consent decree with the agency, saying it had voluntarily disclosed two flaws in Messenger Kids app. (Leah Nylen / Bloomberg)
• The Threads account for the president of the United States, @potus, implemented Meta’s ActivityPub integration. That means Joe Biden is now officially part of the Fediverse. (Wes Davis / The Verge)
• The Oversight Board upheld Meta’s decision to let stand a video of a politician giving a speech that called for violence, shared by a news outlet in Pakistan, saying it falls under an exception to Facebook’s community standards for “awareness raising.” (Oversight Board)
• A majority of participants in Meta’s Community Forum on Generative AI thought AI had a positive impact, and that AI chatbots can be human-like if people are informed. These community governance experiments continue to be very cool. (Jennifer Broxmeyer / Meta)
• How Meta employees lost money on real estate investments promoted by a colleague in an internal messaging channel. Big yikes to this story. (Aisha Counts / Bloomberg)
• How a TikTok whistleblower’s improbable claims and allegations may have contributed to lawmakers’ determination to ban the app. (Louise Matsakis / WIRED)
• TikTok has bought at least $3.1 million of ads as part of a marketing blitz to counter a proposal to make ByteDance forcibly divest the app. (Sapna Maheshwari / New York Times)
• TikTok has struggled to moderate ads related to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack in Israel, with ads containing the word “hostage” being a hotly contested topic internally. (Alexandra S. Levine / Forbes)
• YouTube’s CEO Neal Mohan said that OpenAI would be violating the platform’s terms of service if it used YouTube videos to train Sora. Honestly I dare Google to sue OpenAI for training an LLM on other people's stuff. (Davey Alba and Emily Chang / Bloomberg)
• Google is introducing a new prototype feature for Chrome that uses encryption to prevent hackers from using cookies to hijack logins. (Michael Kan / PCMag)
• In an apparent first, a Washington state judge did not allow an AI-enhanced video to be introduced as evidence in a murder case. (Tim Stelloh / NBC News)
• Amazon’s plastic footprint is shrinking globally,ut has continued to grow in the United States, raising concerns. (Justine Calma / The Verge)
• Amazon sellers say they are overwhelmed with “return theft,” where people ship junk back instead of returned purchases. They say Amazon isn’t helping. (Sebastian Herrera / Wall Street Journal)
• Google is suing two app developers, accusing them of using the Play Store to push crypto romance scams. (Lauren Feiner / The Verge)
• Anthropic researchers found a new vulnerability in LLMs where the AI will reply to inappropriate questions after they ask it many harmless questions. (Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch)
• Oren Etzioni, a longtime AI optimist, founded a nonprofit that released free tools to help identify AI-generated disinformation. (Cade Metz and Tiffany Hsu / New York Times)
• A look at alternative iPhone app stores in the European Union, following Apple’s compliance with the Digital Markets Act. (Callum Booth / The Verge) 
• The Israeli military reportedly used an AI-powered database, Lavender, to identify 37,000 potential targets with apparent links to Hamas. (Bethan McKernan and Harry Davies / The Guardian)
• X is rolling out Community Notes in India, ahead of this year’s elections. (Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch)

Industry

• Despite user complaints, TikTok has no plans to dial back e-commerce content on the For You page, said Marni Levine, head of TikTok Shop’s US operations for small and medium businesses. (Erin Woo / The Information)
• X is giving out free Premium memberships to accounts with more than 2,500 verified followers, giving some blue check marks they didn’t ask for. (Amrita Khalid / The Verge)
• Elon Musk said he’s boosting pay for Tesla’s AI engineering team to fend off poaching from OpenAI. (Nick Turner and Craig Trudell / Bloomberg)
• Meta’s AI image generator declines to generate Asian people next to white people and leans into stereotypes, this analysis found. (Mia Sato / The Verge)
• Facebook’s mobile video player is getting a new vertical look, where Reels, Facebook Live, and longform videos will now all look like Reels and TikToks. (Amrita Khalid / The Verge)
• Meta apps, including WhatsApp and Instagram, were briefly down around the world yesterday. (Ben Schoon / 9to5Google)
• Meta’s chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth talks about where Meta is headed with the Quest 3, AI, and smart glasses a decade after the company acquired Oculus. (Scott Stein / CNET)
• Creators on Threads who get a significant amount of engagement on their posts may be eligible for cash payouts. Very curious to see how this gets structured; I do think creators on the app could use this kind of boost (Sydney Bradley and Dan Whateley / Business Insider)
• Google’s AI-powered Search Generative Experience is being tested in the United Kingdom. (Chris Vallance / BBC)
• Google is reportedly considering charging for “premium” AI features in Search. But the story is light on details. (Madhumita Murgia and Richard Waters / Financial Times)
• Google Books is indexing AI-generated books, which could impact Google Ngram viewer, a tool for researchers to track language. (Emanuel Maiberg / 404 Media)
• Google is reportedly considering making an offer for marketing software company HubSpot, which has a value of $35 billion. (Anirban Sen and Milana Vinn / Reuters)
• Apple is reportedly exploring personal robotics and directing teams to look into automated home devices. (Mark Gurman / Bloomberg)
• An Apple outage yesterday hit the App Store, Apple TV and Apple Music. (Richard Lawler / The Verge)
• Microsoft and Quantinuum announced a breakthrough in quantum error correction, an ongoing problem in quantum computing, saying the team was able to run over 14,000 experiments without an error. (Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch)
• OpenAI is expanding its program that lets companies work with OpenAI researchers to train and optimize models. (Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch)
• Paid ChatGPT users can now edit AI images created by DALL-E using text prompts. (Ina Fried / Axios)
• Stability AI’s new audio generation model, Stable Audio 2.0, now lets users generate songs that are up to three minutes long. The songs aren’t necessarily better, though. (Emilia David / The Verge)
• Web browser company Opera said it will allow users to download and use LLMs locally, starting with a rollout to Opera One users with developer stream updates. (Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch)
• AI startup Cohere is releasing a new AI model, which it says performs competitively with OpenAI’s on “business-critical” tasks, but at a lower cost. (Shirin Ghaffary / Bloomberg)
• Business schools are pushing graduate and undergraduate students to use AI as a tool. (Lindsay Ellis / Wall Street Journal)
• Patreon is now letting creators assign community members as moderators, similar to Reddit’s content moderation approach. (Mia Sato / The Verge)
• Spotify is reportedly raising prices in five markets, including the UK, and will raise prices in the US later this year. It’s also working on a slightly cheaper plan that doesn’t include audiobooks. (Lucas Shaw and Ashley Carman / Bloomberg)
• How Substack’s “follow” feature could set writers up to lose their followers in a Twitter-style implosion. (Andrea Grimes / Home with the Armadillo)

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