Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

  • Substack rival Ghost connects to the open social web with its latest public release

    Substack rival Ghost connects to the open social web with its latest public release

    After months of beta testing, newsletter platform Ghost has shipped a new version of its software, Ghost 6, that allows its publishers to share their long-form content natively with the broader open social web. That means in addition to publishing their newsletters to the web, RSS, and sending them out via email, Ghost’s users can…

  • Linda Yaccarino joins health tech platform eMed as CEO after leaving X

    Linda Yaccarino joins health tech platform eMed as CEO after leaving X

    Linda Yaccarino’s next role after departing X as CEO will be another chief executive role at eMed Population Health, an AI startup building a tech platform for patients using GLP-1s. Yaccarino was a longtime advertising executive at NBCUniversal but left to join X as CEO for two years, where she managed to have a positive…

  • Clay confirms it closed $100M round at $3.1B valuation

    Clay confirms it closed $100M round at $3.1B valuation

    Sales automation startup Clay has raised a $100 million Series C at a $3.1 billion valuation in a round led by CapitalG, confirming TechCrunch’s report from June. The financing follows a $1.25 billion Series B round from six months ago and a $1.5 billion Sequoia-led tender offer announced a couple of months ago, which allowed…

  • For the first time, OpenAI models are available on AWS

    For the first time, OpenAI models are available on AWS

    Sam Altman’s blow torch to his competitors is so hot, it even includes a new partnership with Amazon Web Services. As OpenAI announced two open-weight reasoning models with capabilities on par with its o-series, Amazon announced that the new models would soon be available as a service on AWS. For the first time, OpenAI models…

  • Uzbekistan’s first unicorn, Uzum, leaps to a $1.5B valuation

    Uzbekistan’s first unicorn, Uzum, leaps to a $1.5B valuation

    At a time when the world feels increasingly divided between East and West, Uzbekistan has emerged as a rare middle ground, as the Central Asian nation’s homegrown unicorn, Uzum, has raised $65.5 million in a new funding round co-led by China’s Tencent and the New York- and London-based VR Capital, with participation from U.S.-based FinSight…

  • AI-powered fintech Alaan raises $48M, one of the largest Series A rounds in MENA

    AI-powered fintech Alaan raises $48M, one of the largest Series A rounds in MENA

    When Parthi Duraisamy was a consultant at McKinsey’s Dubai office, he discovered that the American Express cards his company relied on for corporate expenses were rarely accepted in the Middle East. This forced Duraisamy to cover significant travel expenses out of pocket and file endless expense reports. “It was a constant pain,” Duraisamy explained on…

  • Foxconn sells former GM factory to mystery buyer after failing to make EVs

    Foxconn sells former GM factory to mystery buyer after failing to make EVs

    Foxconn has sold the former GM factory it has owned for three years after failing to stand up any meaningful, large-scale electric vehicle production there. The pivot marks the second major failure of Foxconn to deliver on its promises to help revive U.S. manufacturing. The iPhone-maker once promised to build a giant LCD factory in…

  • Google says its AI-based bug hunter found 20 security vulnerabilities

    Google says its AI-based bug hunter found 20 security vulnerabilities

    Google’s AI-powered bug hunter has just reported its first batch of security vulnerabilities.  Heather Adkins, Google’s vice president of security, announced Monday that its LLM-based vulnerability researcher Big Sleep found and reported 20 flaws in various popular open source software. Adkins said that Big Sleep, which is developed by the company’s AI department DeepMind as…

  • Mastercard denies pressuring game platforms, Valve tells a different story

    Mastercard denies pressuring game platforms, Valve tells a different story

    The outcry after a recent marketplace crackdown on games with adult content, seemingly due to pressure from payment processors, prompted Mastercard to release a brief statement Friday pushing back against recent headlines. “Mastercard has not evaluated any game or required restrictions of any activity on game creator sites and platforms, contrary to media reports and…

  • Apple might be building its own AI ‘answer engine’

    Apple might be building its own AI ‘answer engine’

    Apple has formed a new team to build a ChatGPT-like app, according to according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. This team — reportedly called Answers, Knowledge, and Information — is working to build an “answer engine” that can respond to questions using information from across the web. This could be a standalone app or provide search…

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