Episode Details

Stripe was in talks to buy OpenRouter for as much as $10B while still chasing PayPal. Midjourney bought astrology app Co-Star, Meta launched Facebook Verified and a standalone Seller app, and Nvidia and Microsoft defended open-weight AI.

• Sources: Stripe is in talks to acquire OpenRouter, which helps developers use AI models and could fetch ~$10B; PitchBook: OpenRouter was valued at $1.3B in May (WSJ)
• Sources: Stripe and Advent's unsolicited $53B PayPal offer, backed by ~$50B in committed bank financing, would create a payments giant processing ~$3.7T annually; PayPal has not responded (Reuters)
• Midjourney bought astrology app Co-Star, which uses AI to offer personalized advice, in the spring and is building its first standalone image-generation app (Bloomberg)
• Meta launches Facebook Verified, a free program it says will verify that users are real humans by analyzing a facial recognition selfie and assigning badges (Engadget)
• Meta launches Seller, a free standalone app version of Facebook Marketplace; Seller includes AI features that scan photos to fill out listings automatically (NYT)
• Meta, Nvidia, Microsoft, a16z, and others sign a letter defending open-source AI; Jensen Huang, in his first X post, says open models strengthen cybersecurity (The Information)
• Signatories including Palantir avoid naming China or Moonshot in the open-weight letter, framing it instead around US AI leadership being judged by a strong open ecosystem, not one frontier model (Bloomberg)

Longreads

• Meet All The Middle Aged Women Who Don't Exist: AI-generated wellness influencers, all gorgeous and all "57", are selling NMN supplements to women over 40 (Charlotte's Book)
• Big US pizza delivery chains are struggling as DoorDash and Uber Eats give independent pizzerias greater market access, erasing the tech moat chains once had (FT)

Subscribe to the ad-free feed.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices