Apple’s celebrating ten years of Apple Pay today, and it’s clear that the Cupertino-based giant is pretty pleased with its payment offerings. I’ll be the first to admit that Apple Pay is still handy and convenient ten years down the road; most of the time, rather than reaching for a physical card, I simply double-tap the power button on my iPhone and pay.

Plenty more card partners have arrived in the years since the original launch, and more retailers have been adopting the standard. Alongside teasing future updates, Apple is rolling out two fresh ways to pay using Apple Pay.

NASA’s Perseverance rover is in the middle of a months-long journey up the rim of Jezero Crater on Mars, and on Thursday it beamed back a status update.

The vehicle started the climb in August in what’s considered to be the most ambitious and arduous phase of Perseverance’s mission since arriving at the red planet in early 2021.

“My journey to the rim of Jezero Crater has been a challenging one,” the rover said in a post on its social media account overseen by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is conducting the Mars mission. “As you can see in this image from my rear Hazcam, I’m dealing with some steep and slippery terrain. But thanks to my team and autonomous navigation system, I’m avoiding any big hazards as I slowly make my way up.”

The image, below, shows one of the rover’s six wheels and the tracks left by them as Perseverance performs its climb.

My journey to the rim of Jezero Crater has been a challenging one.

As you can see in this image from my rear Hazcam, I’m dealing with some steep and slippery terrain. But thanks to my team and autonomous navigation system, I'm avoiding any big hazards as I slowly make my way up. pic.twitter.com/zlZRqeTPWM

— NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) October 17, 2024

In an earlier post, Perseverance said it has a few spots to explore on its way to the top, adding that the JPL team was most excited about an area over the crest and outside the crater called Witch Hazel Hill, which includes the most ancient martian crust that the rover is likely to encounter on its journey.

To get there, Perseverance is tackling slopes of up to 23 degrees and which rise around 1,000 feet (305 meters).

Perseverance has spent pretty much all of the last three-and-a-half years exploring the floor of Jezero Crater, as well as the site of an ancient river delta. NASA selected this area for the mission as it was once a huge lake that may have contained microbial life. Perseverance has been collecting cores of rock from this location for later analysis that could reveal if life ever existed on the faraway planet.

Social apps can be very useful for staying in touch and sharing moments with your contacts. However, they can also be dangerous, especially for teenagers, as they facilitate direct contact with bad actors. Meta has announced a series of safety features aimed at teens on Instagram. The changes aim to address cases of sextortion.

Sextortion is a form of blackmail under the threat of sharing intimate photos with your contacts or posting them publicly. The perpetrators can demand large sums of money to not publish such content or even other things. Teenagers are currently the most vulnerable to this type of attack due to the nature of social networks.

Instagram’s new safety features against sextortion on teen accounts

Now, Meta has announced some changes that seek to even prevent “potentially scammy” profiles from contacting more potential victims via Instagram. Firstly, users’ main inboxes will hide or even completely block message requests from such accounts. In addition, accounts belonging to teenagers (up to 16 years old) will not be able to exchange messages with anyone they do not already follow.

Instagram will also display a warning to teens when they receive a message from a suspicious account. Accounts tagged as “potentially scammy” by Instagram will not be able to access the list of followers or people tagged in photos of teen accounts. This will prevent them from being able to access a list of new potential victims.

There are no more specific details on how Instagram determines that an account is “potentially scammy.” However, some factors the system considers are the age of the account, contacts in common with a particular profile, or the country of origin of the account.

Security shields integrated into DMs too

If bad actors manage to bypass those safety features, Instagram still has built-in tools on DMs for teen accounts. The temporary messaging feature will prevent screenshots or screen recordings for photos or videos. These types of images will also not be available on Instagram web. There is also a tool that detects photos with nudity in DMs and automatically blurs them.

Meta has recently been making additional efforts to ensure the safety of teenagers on the platform. The company is in the crosshairs of US authorities for potential harm to young people’s mental health. So, it must try to gain the trust of the public and state representatives.

X is updating its privacy policy with new language that allows it to provide users’ data to third-party “collaborators” in order to train AI models. The , which takes effect November 15, 2024, would seem to open the door to Reddit-like arrangements in which outside companies can pay to license data from X.

The updated policy shared by X includes a new section titled “third-party collaborators.”

While the policy mentions the ability to opt out, it’s not clear how users would actually do so. As TechCrunch , the policy points to users’ settings menu, but there’ doesn’t appear to be an control for opting out of data sharing. The policy doesn’t go into effect until next month, though, so there’s still a chance that could change. X didn’t respond to a request for comment.

If X were to begin licensing its data to other companies, it could open up a significant new revenue stream for the social media company, which has seen from major advertisers.

In addition to the privacy policy, X is also updating its with stricter penalties for entities that are caught “scraping” large numbers of tweets. In a section titled “liquidated damages” the company states anyone viewing or accessing more than a million posts a day will be subject to a penalty of $15,000.

X owner Elon Musk has previously railed against “scraping.” Last year, the company temporarily blocked people from viewing tweets while logged out, in a move Musk to fending off scrapers. He also moved X’s API behind , which has drastically hindered researchers’ ability to study what’s happening on the platform. He’s also used allegations of “scraping” to justify against organizations that have attempted to study hate speech and other issues on the platform.

SambaNova Systems and Gradio have unveiled a new integration that allows developers to access one of the fastest AI inference platforms with just a few lines of code. This partnership aims to make high-performance AI models more accessible and speed up the adoption of artificial intelligence among developers and businesses.

“This integration makes it easy for developers to copy code from the SambaNova playground and get a Gradio web app running in minutes with just a few lines of code,” Ahsen Khaliq, ML Growth Lead at Gradio, said in an interview with VentureBeat. “Powered by SambaNova Cloud for super-fast inference, this means a great user experience for developers and end-users alike.”

The SambaNova-Gradio integration enables users to create web applications powered by SambaNova’s high-speed AI models using Gradio’s gr.load() function. Developers can now quickly generate a chat interface connected to SambaNova’s models, making it easier to work with advanced AI systems.

Beyond GPUs: The rise of dataflow architecture in AI processing

SambaNova, a Silicon Valley startup backed by SoftBank and BlackRock, has been making waves in the AI hardware space with its dataflow architecture chips. These chips are designed to outperform traditional GPUs for AI workloads, with the company claiming to offer the “world’s fastest AI inference service.”

SambaNova’s platform can run Meta’s Llama 3.1 405B model at 132 tokens per second at full precision, a speed that is particularly crucial for enterprises looking to deploy AI at scale.

This development comes as the AI infrastructure market heats up, with startups like SambaNova, Groq, and Cerebras challenging Nvidia’s dominance in AI chips. These new entrants are focusing on inference — the production stage of AI where models generate outputs based on their training — which is expected to become a larger market than model training.

From code to cloud: The simplification of AI application development

For developers, the SambaNova-Gradio integration offers a frictionless entry point to experiment with high-performance AI. Users can access SambaNova’s free tier to wrap any supported model into a web app and host it themselves within minutes. This ease of use mirrors recent industry trends aimed at simplifying AI application development.

The integration currently supports Meta’s Llama 3.1 family of models, including the massive 405B parameter version. SambaNova claims to be the only provider running this model at full 16-bit precision at high speeds, a level of fidelity that could be particularly attractive for applications requiring high accuracy, such as in healthcare or financial services.

The hidden costs of AI: Navigating speed, scale, and sustainability

While the integration makes high-performance AI more accessible, questions remain about the long-term effects of the ongoing AI chip competition. As companies race to offer faster processing speeds, concerns about energy use, scalability, and environmental impact grow.

The focus on raw performance metrics like tokens per second, while important, may overshadow other crucial factors in AI deployment. As enterprises integrate AI into their operations, they will need to balance speed with sustainability, considering the total cost of ownership, including energy consumption and cooling requirements.

Additionally, the software ecosystem supporting these new AI chips will significantly influence their adoption. Although SambaNova and others offer powerful hardware, Nvidia’s CUDA ecosystem maintains an edge with its wide range of optimized libraries and tools that many AI developers already know well.

As the AI infrastructure market continues to evolve, collaborations like the SambaNova-Gradio integration may become increasingly common. These partnerships have the potential to foster innovation and competition in a field that promises to transform industries across the board. However, the true test will be in how these technologies translate into real-world applications and whether they can deliver on the promise of more accessible, efficient, and powerful AI for all.

Farewill, a U.K.-based end-of-life services provider that offers online tools for writing wills, organizing probate, and arranging cremation, has been acquired by funeral service provider Dignity in an all-shares deal valuing the startup at £12.9 million ($16.8 million).

The deal is a classic case of an established legacy incumbent chasing growth by buying a younger digital upstart, and is designed to help Dignity gain a larger portion of a death care services market that’s expected to reach $190 billion by the end of the decade.

Founded in 2015, Farewill is one of several startups to emerge in a category dubbed “death tech.” This includes apps to memorialize loved ones and social platforms to support the grieving process. Some have raised significant amounts of venture capital funding, too, such as Empathy, which emerged from stealth back in 2021 with $13 million for its digital assistant for bereaved families — going on to raise a further $47 million just a few months ago.

Farewill, for its part, has raised around $39 million since its inception, from backers including Augmentum Fintech, Highland Europe, Keen Venture Partners, Kindred Capital, and Wise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus. This means that Farewill’s $16.8 million valuation is well below the capital that had been injected — a fire sale by just about any estimation.

Financials

It’s not clear what the exact circumstances were that led to this sale — reports emerged back in February that one its investors, the VC arm for Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT), had cut its stake’s estimated value by two-thirds, suggesting that Farewill’s valuation had dropped from £86 million to £30 million. Today’s news is worse than that.

Farewill’s most recent accounts showed an increase in gross sales (+31.4%), revenue (+36%), and gross profit (+88.9%) for financial year 2023. However, its EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization) figure showed that the company still wasn’t operationally profitable, with losses of £4.2 million — though those losses had fallen by half on the previous year.

Add to all that, the transaction is being financed through a share-for-share exchange. Farewill’s shareholders will now own stock in Castelnau Group — an investment firm and Dignity’s majority shareholder, after a joint venture with serial entrepreneur Sir Peter Woods’ SPWOne took Dignity private in a $349 million deal last year.

“The addition of Farewill to Dignity’s offering embodies Castelnau’s strategic ambitions for Dignity, helping Dignity to drive its digital transformation and serve its customers even better,” Castelnau CEO Richard Brown said in a statement.

Dignity’s origins can be traced back more than 200 years, though its current incarnation is the result of various mergers and acquisitions. However, with a digital-native rival under its wing it will be hoping to be able to combine collective strengths. Dignity operates more than 40 crematoria in the U.K. and has a strong on-the-ground presence, while Farewill’s online-focused services looks like a complement to that — “combining the strength of Dignity’s heritage, with Farewill’s expertise in online journeys and data,” as they put it in a press release.

The Farewill brand will continue as is, and will operate independently.

“At Farewill, our mission has always been to make the end-of-life experience as straightforward and stress-free as possible,” Farewill co-founder and CEO Dan Garrett (pictured above with Dignity CEO Zillah Byng-Thorne) said in a statement. “Joining forces with Dignity allows us to stay true to that mission while benefiting from the experience and resources of a company that has been a trusted name for generations.”

The acquisition is still subject to regulatory approval, and isn’t expected to close before January 1, 2025.