Arne Schepker, the CEO of the popular Berlin-based language learning platform Babbel, is stepping down, and the company’s co-founder and former CEO Markus Witte is stepping back in to lead the company “into a new phase while searching for Arne’s successor with patience,” the company said. This new phase, unsurprisingly, will involve AI. Witte will not…
❤️ Thanks everyone for your support and love! Last month I got interviewed by police for 4 days after arriving in Paris. I was told I may be personally responsible for other people’s illegal use of Telegram, because the French authorities didn’t receive responses from Telegram. This was surprising for several reasons: 1. Telegram has an…
Harvey Mason Jr., CEO of the Recording Academy, caused a stir a few months ago. He announced that the organization’s prestigious Grammy Awards would finally accept music made with artificial intelligence. At first, people were confused, and then Mason came out to clarify that he meant only humans can submit to the awards, but that…
In a big move, Character.AI co-founder and CEO Noam Shazeer is returning to Google after leaving the company in October 2021 to found the a16z-backed startup. In his previous stint, Shazeer spearheaded the team of researchers that built LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), a language model that was used for conversational AI tools. Character.AI co-founder Daniel De…
After striking deals with Google and OpenAI, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is calling on Microsoft and others to pay if they want to continue scraping the site’s data. “Without these agreements, we don’t have any say or knowledge of how our data is displayed and what it’s used for, which has put us in a…
There comes a time in every startup’s life when the leaders and stakeholders have to seriously start thinking about the endgame: What to do when you’ve raised $150 million in VC cash over 15 years en route to building a 100 million-plus community? And how do you go about executing that next step to ensure…
Ryan Selkis, the cofounder and CEO of the crypto research platform Messari, is stepping down from his position in the aftermath of a social media tirade following the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania. Selkis, an outspoken Trump supporter who attended David Sacks’ sold-out fundraiser for him in June,…
During an internal all-hands meeting led by X CEO Linda Yaccarino on Wednesday, concerned employees tuned in to hear if she would address the pressing issue on their minds: performance reviews. Sources inside the company confirm that a promotions process was recently delayed without explanation and that X’s sales team doesn’t expect to meet its…
Tesla board chair Robyn Denholm is calling on the company’s shareholders to approve Elon Musk’s massive $56 billion pay package or risk driving the billionaire CEO to greener pastures. On June 13th, Tesla shareholders will decide the fate of Musk’s compensation package, which is estimated to be worth as much as $56 billion. It will…