Lockheed Martin to buy satellite maker Terran Orbital in $450M deal

Lockheed Martin is sweeping in to save satellite manufacturer Terran Orbital from its dwindling cash reserves and mounting debt, in a $450 million take-private deal that's expected to close before the end of the year.  The defense giant will buy Terran for $0.25 per share and retire its e

AI social media vetting startup Ferretly secures $2.5M, launches election personnel screening tool

AI social media vetting startup Ferretly has raised $2.5 million in seed funding and is launching a new platform designed to screen election personnel. Founded in 2019, Ferretly leverages AI to scan social media and publicly available online data to uncover potential risks and behaviors that tradit

TipRanks, an AI-based stock tip evaluator created after its founder got burned by bad advice, sells for $200M to Prytek

Financial chatter has been a major traffic spinner on social media, but it can be challenging (if not impossible) to separate useful signals from the noise. A company called TipRanks uses AI and other analytics to try to make better sense of all that. And now, on the back of its growing popularity,

Klarna takes on banking with new savings, cash-back offerings

Swedish fintech giant Klarna is rolling out two new products on Thursday that could make its buy now, pay later offerings more enticing to use.  The company is offering consumers in the U.S. and 11 European countries the ability to store money in a Klarna “balance” account, where they can dep

Cockroach Labs shakes up its licensing to force bigger companies to pay

Cockroach Labs, the business and core developer behind the eponymous distributed SQL database known as CockroachDB, is changing its licensing once again — five years after it moved on from an open source model. The company revealed today that it’s consolidating its self-hosted product unde

Binance restarts services in India after seven-month regulatory halt

Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, has resumed operations for users in India after a seven-month hiatus imposed by a local authority for operating “illegally” in the country. The exchange said Thursday it has registered as a reporting entity with India’s

Meet Black Forest Labs, the startup powering Elon Musk’s unhinged AI image generator

Elon Musk’s Grok released a new AI image-generation feature on Tuesday night that, just like the AI chatbot, has very few safeguards. That means you can generate fake images of Donald Trump smoking marijuana on the Joe Rogan show, for example, and upload it straight to the X platform. But it&

Biden tells creators they have something traditional media does not: ‘You're trusted’

At the first ever White House Creator Economy Conference, the most popular man to drop by was not a TikTok superstar or a YouTube sensation. It was President Joe Biden, who emphasized social media creators' role in shaping public opinion. “Until about three, four months ago, I didn't pay

NEA led a $100M round into Fei-Fei Li’s new AI startup, now valued at over $1B

World Labs, a stealthy startup founded by renowned Stanford University AI professor Fei-Fei Li, has raised two rounds of financing two months apart, according to multiple reports. The latest financing was led by NEA and valued the company at over $1 billion, technewss has learned from several

Trump campaign hack-and-leak appears like a rerun of 2016. This time, media outlets are responding differently

This weekend, Politico dropped a news bombshell: A person who only goes by “Robert” had shared with the news organization documents allegedly stolen from the Donald Trump presidential campaign.  Since then, we have learned that The New York Times and The Washington Post have also hear

Sonos CEO Patrick Spence confirms 100-person layoff

Sonos has laid off 100 employees, 14 months after reducing its 1,800 headcount by 7%. The home audio company confirmed the news with technewss, following an initial report by The Verge. “We made the difficult decision to say goodbye to approximately 100 team members representing 6% of the compa

Study suggests that even the best AI models hallucinate a bunch

All generative AI models hallucinate, from Google’s Gemini to Anthropic’s Claude to the latest stealth release of OpenAI’s GPT-4o. The models are unreliable narrators in other words — sometimes to hilarious effect, other times problematically so. But not all models make things

FTC finalizes rule banning fake reviews, including those made with AI 

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced on Wednesday a final rule that will tackle several types of fake reviews and prohibit marketers from using deceptive practices, such as AI-generated reviews, censoring honest negative reviews and compensating third parties for positive reviews. The

Camera app Halide’s latest update adds an option for ‘zero-AI’ image processing

Popular iOS pro photography app Halide launched its new version today with a new feature called Process Zero, which does not use AI in image processing. Lux Optics, the company behind the Halide app, believes that this option can be a creative tool for photographers to take different kinds of snaps