Business

The company, Embodied, announced this week it had lost funding and will close up shop, reports Aftermath. That will brick Moxie, its cloud-connected $799 educational robot.

The company won’t offer refunds or warranty and repair services. That leaves caregivers with distraught kids and robots that shut down despite otherwise functioning hardware — a situation consumer protection groups have lobbied the FTC to go after.

Henry Farrell, co-author of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy, notices that LLMs do an awful lot of things done by middle management. What if the wrong people are worried that AI will take their jobs?

I don’t know who needs (or wants) to hear this, but Taco Bell announced the start of a “Live Más Drive Thru Cam” tour with big Idiocracy vibes today:

Fans can capture their drive-thru moment with a digital photo takeaway and, if they choose, opt-in for an opportunity to have their photos featured in Taco Bell’s Big Game ad campaign

It’s in Los Angeles now and will move to Taco Bell-listed locations in Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, and Florida.

Matt Levine on some fintech weirdness is pretty sublime. Turns out old-school banks have some advantages, specifically that they are not going to simply lose track of your money.

Thousands of people say they’ve collectively been locked out of more than $30 million due to the bankruptcy of fintech middle-man Synapse.

CNBC reports federal agencies like the FDIC don’t cover nonbanks like Synapse, and “the estate of Andreessen Horowitz-backed Synapse doesn’t have the money to hire an outside firm to perform a full reconciliation of its ledgers.”

After hopping on the live audio bandwagon in 2022, LinkedIn has decided to discontinue the feature in favor of its livestreaming platform, LinkedIn Live.

The controversial head of the SEC was targeted by Donald Trump during Trump’s presidential campaign. It is customary for the SEC chair to resign when a president from the other party is elected. That cheering you hear? It’s the crypto lobby.

During trial, prosecutors pressed Wang for creating code that allowed Alameda to have a negative balance in FTX’s database.

But the prosecution ultimately advocated for Wang during his sentencing on Wednesday, citing his cooperation in deciphering the FTX case, along with his work to create a tool to help the government to detect fraud, CNBC reports.

After previously relying on a third party to handle ad sales on its News app, Apple will now sell ads and sponsorships itself, according to a report from Axios. Apple already sells ads directly to advertisers on the App Store.

Dotdash Meredith, the publisher of People, Better Homes & Gardens, and InStyle, announced a licensing deal with OpenAI in May (as did The Verge's parent company, Vox Media). Now, AdWeek is reporting this $16 million minimum figure based on comments from a recent earnings call:

If you look at Q3 24, licensing revenue was up about $4.1 million year-over-year. The lion’s share of that would be driven by the OpenAI license...the variable components will be calculated and recognized in the future.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the $9.6 billion sale, expected to close in 2026, would see Verizon paying $38.50 a share and absorbing “about $10 billion” of Frontier’s debt. 63 percent of Frontier’s stockholders are for the all-cash transaction, while others are opposed, saying the offer is too low.

Frontier owns more than two million fiber connections across 25 states, including some in Texas, California, and Florida that it bought from Verizon in 2016.