☕️ Facebook Dating is a surprise hit

Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.

In today's Techpresso:

📈 Facebook Dating is a surprise hit

🌐 Apple brings its App Store to the web

📉 China to cut data center power bills by up to 50%

🚫 Top Japanese studios demand OpenAI stop training on content

🤖 Coca-Cola's new AI holiday ad faces criticism

🛡️ Amazon armors its next underwater cable to stop cuts

🎁 + 17 other news you might like

🔮 + 6 handpicked research papers and tools

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• Meta revealed for the first time that Facebook Dating has 21.5 million daily active users across 52 countries, a surprisingly high figure for a product many assumed was not widely used.
• The platform is also catching on with young people, as daily conversations in the 18-29 demographic jumped 24 percent, with 1.77 million individuals between those ages now active in the U.S.
• A major part of its appeal is that it's completely free, unlike apps like Hinge that lock desirable matches behind premium features like “Standouts” or require buying virtual “roses.”

• Apple has redesigned its App Store with a new web interface, allowing people on non-Apple devices to finally browse the entire catalog instead of just viewing individual pages from search engines.
• The new interface lets you browse apps by category and platform like iPhone, iPad, and Watch, although you still cannot download any apps directly from the web store to a device.
• This redesign is part of Apple’s larger push to present a more open ecosystem, which is relevant to its ongoing legal battles with governments accusing the company of acting as a monopoly.

• China is now offering to cut power bills by up to half for large data centers from firms like Tencent and Alibaba if they adopt local AI chips made by Huawei and Cambricon.
• These subsidies help cover higher energy costs from using less efficient local AI chips, a problem that increased for many companies after Beijing’s ban on some of Nvidia's products.
• As a result of the cheaper electricity, major tech companies including ByteDance and Baidu are now expanding their cloud and AI projects by making significant changes to adopt local chips.

• Japan's top IP holders allege that OpenAI's replication of media during the machine learning process could constitute copyright infringement because the resulting AI model spits out protected characters.
• The studios argue that an opt-out policy violates Japanese copyright law, which requires getting prior permission for using creative works and does not allow for subsequent objections to avoid liability.
• After Sora 2 produced an avalanche of content with Japanese IP, the nation's government formally asked OpenAI to stop using artwork from the country for its machine learning.

• Coca-Cola's new generative AI holiday commercial is being criticized for its visually jarring style, featuring critters with unnatural movement that look like sloppily animated flat images rather than rigged 3D models.
• The campaign involved five “AI specialists” who prompted and refined over 70,000 AI video clips, yet the final result feels dated compared to convincing deepfake videos from tools like Sora 2.
• Despite previous blunders and poor reception, Coke's Chief Marketing Officer said the AI-generated ad was cheaper and faster to produce, cutting the project's timeline from a year down to one month.

• Amazon is building a new subsea fiber optic cable called Fastnet to connect Maryland and Ireland, which will be operational in 2028 and is designed to increase network resilience.
• To prevent damage, the company is burying the Fastnet cable roughly 1.5 meters deep and adding robust armoring with additional layers of protective steel wires near shores.
• The cable adds diversity to Amazon's undisclosed routes, offering over 320 terabits per second of capacity while supporting services like Amazon CloudFront and AWS Global Accelerator.

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• Student trust in AI coding tools grows briefly, then levels off with experience LINK

• A commercial space station startup now has a foothold in space LINK

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• Real humans don’t stream Drake songs 23 hours a day, rapper suing Spotify says LINK

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• LLMs tried to run a robot in the real world – it didn't go well LINK

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