Technology

➚ MOVE FAST: IPO. After a $20 billion acquisition by Adobe was blocked by antitrust regulators in 2023, design platform Figma confidentially filed for an initial public offering in the US on Tuesday. The attempt stirs a sluggish IPO market, weighed down by tech stock volatility and tumultuous US policies.

➘ BREAK THINGS: M&A. Meta’s antitrust trial over its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp began this week, after the company failed to settle for $450 million, falling short of the Federal Trade Commission’s $30 billion demand, The Wall Street Journal reported. The proceedings test Mark Zuckerberg’s loyalty to President Donald Trump after Meta’s lobbying failed to resolve the case before trial.

Phone-a-friend. Or let AI do it for you. AI software developed by inTouch can call loved ones, like aging parents or family members with dementia, and send a report of the conversation to users who don’t have the time for regular check-ins.

404 Media reporter Joseph Cox tested the tool with his mother, and she wasn’t a fan — it would feel like being blown off by your own child, she said. While it feels a bit dystopian, there’s a case to be made for how AI could improve care for patients with memory-related diseases. inTouch supplements its conversation summary with an analysis of how the call recipient is feeling — whether they are in a good or bad mood, for example. It can also alert a user if several calls are missed. These features, rather than replacing human interaction, could notify family members of when an additional in-person visit is needed by themselves or a medical professional.

New technology like inTouch also raises questions within families of how they want AI to be used, reflecting similar conversations in schools, workplaces, and churches. In the coming years, it’s going to be difficult to find many places that haven’t been touched by AI — including, in what’s now clear, interpersonal relationships with loved ones. Enjoy that dinnertime conversation, and let us know what the kids think.

— Rachyl Jones

The legendary technologist known as “Darpa Dan” has joined an obscure cybersecurity startup with an ambitious goal: A biometric security product that functions without storing users’ credentials anywhere.

Dan Kaufman, whose career has spanned Dreamworks, Google, and a 10-year tour at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration, told Semafor he believes the new project may be his most consequential endeavor yet, with the potential to render a huge category of malicious hacks useless while making life easier for consumers.

“The world is catching on that the old way of doing things is a terrible way of doing things,” he told Semafor.

The company, Badge Inc., was founded in 2019 by Dr. Tina P. Srivastava, a former NASA rocket scientist and head of electronic warfare programs for Raytheon. Her thesis was that the cybersecurity paradigm is fundamentally broken because of one, fatal flaw: Security credentials need to be stored somewhere, but nowhere is safe from hackers.

Srivastava figured out a way to authenticate internet users without the need to store security credentials at all with a new method of encryption that uses a concept often called “fuzzy logic,” which enables biometric data like fingerprints and face scans to be used for authentication without exposing any sensitive information.

It also means that biometric authentication can be used from anywhere, not just a phone or a specific piece of hardware.

“We need to live in a world where you’re not tied to a device anymore. It works on anything,” Srivastava said.

She set out to create the method after her information was stolen by Chinese hackers in 2015 in a data breach that targeted the Office of Personnel Management. The breach exposed 22.1 million records, including government employees and others who had been subject to background checks.

Srivastava says that hack and others like it shouldn’t even be possible, because storing sensitive information is unnecessary with the new method of encryption that Badge employs.

The minimum annual amount that the Trump administration’s tariffs could cost the largest US semiconductor equipment makers combined, per calculations discussed with lawmakers, Reuters reported. The figure adds to the billions in lost revenue for the industry following export restrictions imposed by former President Biden. Nvidia warned Tuesday of a $5.5 billion quarterly charge related to chips exports due to the new curbs.

YeetGPT? OpenAI has a prototype of a new social media product that looks a lot like Twitter, The Verge reports. Employees are calling their posts “Yeets.”

If you were looking to launch a social media company, now would be the time. Meta, which owns Instagram is distracted in litigation, TikTok is in limbo, and X is … X.

On the other hand: Social media is now an old concept, and it’s tired. Most people use it to mindlessly pass the time, the equivalent of sitting in front of the couch and changing channels while complaining that nothing is on. OpenAI is the top consumer brand in AI, a technology that promises to move us past the drab social media era. It would be like Google, in 2001, saying it wanted to start selling physical encyclopedias.

OpenAI can Yeet if it wants to, but there are much better distractions than creating a competitor for an era it is leaving behind.

TikTok’s hot-and-cold relationship with the US is, once again, simmering as the White House seeks to strike a deal to avoid a third ban of the app, using tariff threats against China as faster leverage, Semafor’s Shelby Talcott and Morgan Chalfant report.

In the days leading up to his new levies, Trump suggested he could reduce them if Beijing approves the scuttled TikTok deal, in which parent ByteDance would divest its US operations, now set to expire in June. Asked Tuesday whether that remains the case, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Semafor that Trump remains open to a deal, but “the ball is in China’s court.”

The newly imposed tariffs on China, coupled with President Xi Jinping’s pushback, further complicate already complex talks. “There’s no reason to believe the Chinese government wouldn’t use the TikTok sale as leverage” on tariffs, one expert said.

It remains unclear exactly what the administration is willing to do to get negotiations back on track, especially given Trump’s latest comments, Shelby and Morgan note. A key point of contention is the ownership of the app’s powerful algorithm, which some reports suggested might stay with ByteDance. “I can’t imagine the Chinese government being okay” with the company losing control over the algorithm, the expert added.

Alex Chriss, President and CEO, PayPal; Jenny Johnson, President and CEO, Franklin Templeton; Rich Lesser, Global Chair, BCG; Nandan Nilekani, Co-Founder and Chairman, Infosys; Penny Pritzker, Founder, PSP Partners, former US Commerce Secretary; Harvey Schwartz, CEO, Carlyle Group, and more will join The Next Era of Global Growth session at the 2025 World Economy Summit. Amid tectonic shifts to longtime regional trending blocks and friend-shoring, this session will explore how businesses and policymakers are recalibrating their visions of growth.

April 24, 2025 | Washington, DC | Learn More

Google wants to talk to dolphins. And yes, it’s using AI to do that. Google DeepMind has launched DolphinGemma, a new AI model aimed at learning what all those clicks and whistles actually mean.

Dolphins are highly intelligent animals and very communicative, and there are databases of dolphin languages going back decades. That’s a perfect problem for AI to solve, and particularly suited for Google’s multimodal approach to AI — from the beginning, it’s incorporated video and audio into the training sets for its products.

DolphinGemma isn’t the only effort to use AI to understand animals. There’s the Earth Species Project, aimed at allowing humans and animals to communicate, and Project Cetacean, a machine learning translator for sperm whales.

We probably shouldn’t get our hopes up too much. There’s no ground truth, or Rosetta Stone for animals. While large language models can pick up on patterns and learn without being taught anything, it requires a lot of data, and animals (unlike humans) haven’t jotted down their every thought on internet databases for 30 years.

But even understanding a few “tokens” of animal language could have a profound impact on the global ecosystem and economy. What would happen to the ranching industry if we could ask cows whether they mind being milked or turned into burgers?

Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawiris launched financial news platform Moniify at a lavish party in November. Meant to speak to a new generation of investors in emerging markets, the UAE-based outlet hired aggressively, spent prolifically, and made the competition take notice, Semafor’s Kelsey Warner reports.

But it quickly ran into the harsh realities of the news business, current and former staffers said. Costs spiraled, with $50 million spent pre-launch and another $50 million projected annually, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. The outlet struggled to find a voice, debating whether content was “Gen Z enough” with terms like “earnings seazn” and “slay,” and revenue-generating plans faltered.