☕️ EA will reportedly be acquired for $50B

Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.

In today's Techpresso:

🎮 EA will reportedly be acquired for $50B

👀 Apple made an internal ChatGPT-clone to test Siri

🤖 Meta wants to create the Android for robots

🎵 YouTube Music is testing AI hosts

💰 ByteDance will keep 50% of US TikTok profits

🎁 + 7 other news you might like

🔮 + 5 handpicked research papers and tools

FROM OUR PARTNER

• Video game maker Electronic Arts is reportedly planning to go private through a transaction that could be valued as high as $50 billion, according to information from several news outlets.
• Potential investors for the acquisition include Silver Lake and Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners, along with Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, which already holds a nine percent stake in EA.
• The Wall Street Journal suggests this move might become the largest leveraged buyout ever, a report that immediately caused the corporation’s stock price to jump by roughly 15 percent.

• Apple created an internal ChatGPT-inspired app called "Veritas" for employees, which allows the company to test new Siri skills before the assistant's public release next year.
• The internal application lets Siri practice searching through personal data like emails and messages, or perform tasks within other apps, such as editing your photos for you.
• Apple reportedly expects its full vision for the voice assistant to arrive in 2026, and is now considering a partnership with Google to help power these AI features.

• Meta plans to create a robot software platform that other hardware companies can license, similar to Google’s Android model, rather than focusing on building its own competing consumer robot hardware.
• The project begins by building a "world model," which is software simulation required to help a robot animate complex and precise movements, such as the motions of a "dexterous hand."
• Led by former Cruise CEO Marc Whitten, the robotics team is working with Meta's Superintelligence Labs and has a hardware prototype in the works called the "Metabot" for research purposes.

• YouTube Music is testing AI commentary hosts through its new Labs program, an experimental feature that generates audio snippets with stories and trivia while you listen to different tracks.
• The AI host, named "Beyond the Beat," will appear when you are listening to mixes and radio stations to provide relevant commentary and facts about your musical tastes.
• Unlike Spotify's AI DJ, the new YouTube feature does not create playlists and instead focuses only on generating commentary that plays over your existing music streams.

• ByteDance is poised to keep nearly half the profits from TikTok's US business through a licensing fee for its algorithm and a separate profit share from its equity stake.
• The draft plan requires the American venture to pay a fee equal to about 20 percent of revenue generated through the platform’s valuable recommendation algorithm.
• In addition to that payment, an ownership stake would allow the Chinese parent company to collect approximately 20 percent of profits earned on the remaining income.

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