Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch: Meta confirms taking “additional steps” to prevent EU-based users from accessing Instagram’s Threads; users report no longer being able to use Threads via a VPN  —  After multiple EU-based users complained about not being able to access Instagram’s Threads app through VPN, Meta confirmed that it is blocking such efforts. Lees verder op Tech Meme

Hayden Field / CNBC: Sensor Tower: from July 8 to July 11 and 12, Threads DAUs fell ~20% and time spent fell 50% to 10 minutes; Similarweb: Android DAUs fell 25%+ from July 7 to 10  —  – Facebook’s Twitter-killer, Threads, has seen drops in daily active users and time spent on app since the weekend, according to SensorTower and SimilarWeb. Lees verder op Tech Meme

Semafor: Sources: Elon Musk claimed xAI was worth $20B, as he was trying to recruit top AI talent and offering equity in his new startup  —  Elon Musk sought to recruit top AI talent to his new artificial intelligence company with equity in the venture he claimed was already worth tens of billions of dollars … Lees verder op Tech Meme

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Meta unveils CM3leon, an image generation transformer model requiring five times less compute and a smaller training dataset than past transformer-based methods  —  Over the past two years, AI-powered image generators have become commodified, more or less, thanks to the widespread availability of … Lees verder op Tech Meme