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Happy Friday! For those of you excited to see us in your inbox for your daily dose of tech news, alas, you’ll have to wait until Tuesday to hear from us again, as Monday is Labor Day in the U.S. We’ll be grilling outside, dressed in white for the last time this year and napping in hammocks. We wish you a safe and enjoyable weekend wherever you are. — Christine and hi
The ukbusinessupdates.com Top 3
- No chips for you: Nvidia is mired in the new sanctions the US is imposing on China. Rita reports that the company said it will not be able to export two of its AI chips to China, its second-largest market. That will likely cost Nvidia about $400 million in lost sales for this third quarter and interrupt some of its production in China.
- I just got paid: Google is expanding its alternative payment systems, such as third-party in-app purchases, to more countries, Ivan writes. This includes some of Android’s largest markets, including India and Indonesia.
- More cuts: Tage wrote about Nigerian digital bank Kuda, the latest African startup to lay off a number of employees. He notes that Kuda’s 5% reduction affected about two dozen people as the company decided to remove redundant functions and underperforming staff in an effort to cut costs.
Startups and VC
“A red-haired woman stands on the moon, her face obscured. Her naked body looks like it belongs on a poster you’d find on a hormonal teen’s bedroom wall — that is, until you reach her torso, where three arms spew out of her shoulders,” Kylea and Amanda write in a story that has more twists and turns than a mountain pass. AI is getting better at generating porn. We may not be prepared for the consequences, they think.
The rest of our top stories have less nudity, but also fewer arms growing where they shouldn’t. We’ll call it a tie, shall we:
Stop sensationalizing VC’s ‘collapse’: look at the data
Image Credits: perrygenday (Opens in a new window) / Getty Images
For founders looking to raise money, this is a terrible time: it’s taking a lot longer than it used to be, and valuations are so much lower than they were a few months ago.
For investors, though, it’s coming back down to earth, says Brian Walsh of WIND Ventures.
“The reality is that there was an unprecedented hype cycle in 2021, and what we’ve objectively seen since early 2022 is a ‘reversion to the mean’ in line with long-term trends.”
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Big Tech Inc.
To start your weekend right, Bag the 411 about a data breach at Samsung, which is apparently the second such incident this year. The company told Zack that the breach happened in late July and customer data was compromised in early August, though it wouldn’t get specific about how many customers were affected or why customers are just now being told.
