Social network Bluesky is teasing its roadmap for the year ahead, emphasizing a focus on things like improving the app's algorithmic Discover feed, offering its users better recommendations on who to follow, giving the app more of a real-time feel, and more. Launched to the public in early 2024 after an invite-only period, the decentralized X and Threads alternative has since scaled to over 42 million users, according to data sourced directly from the Bluesky API for developers. Though it's differentiated from mainstream social media with its custom feeds and configurable algorithms, Bluesky hasn't caught up to rivals with regard to basic features, like private accounts, drafts, support for longer videos, and more. Bluesky's head of product, Alex Benzer, acknowledged some of these concerns in a new post on the company's website, where he said that the 'basics need to be solid' before Bluesky can expect users to stick around. Those remarks come after a usage slowdown on Bluesky, which saw a 40% year-over-year drop in daily active users as of October 2025, according to data from market intelligence provider Similarweb, as reported by Forbes....

In the wake of TikTok's U.S. ownership change last week, some users are seeking out alternative platforms. One app gaining traction is UpScrolled, a social network that pledges to remain impartial to political agendas. The app currently ranks 12th overall in Apple's App Store and second in the social networking category. The app was founded last year by Issam Hijazi, a Palestinian-Jordanian-Australian technologist, with the aim of giving users a place to 'freely express thoughts, share moments, and connect with others,' according to the app's website. The team behind the app says they're 'building a platform that belongs to the people who use it ' not to hidden algorithms or outside agendas.' 'UpScrolled is the foundation for a digital ecosystem that puts power back into the hands of the people ' not the corporations,' Hijazi said in a statement on UpScrolled's website. 'It's more than just an alternative to Meta, X, or TikTok ' it's a reimagining of what social media should be: a space where creators, communities, and businesses thrive independently, with real control, transparency, and accountability.'...

Last week was all about inference in AI and new players emerging as forces to be reckoned with in the space. For the last few years, the entire industry has been obsessed with training'stacking thousands of H100s to teach a ghost how to speak. But this week, the vibe shifted. We are moving from a world where we spend billions to create intelligence, to one where we spend billions to serve it. Leading the charge is BaseTen, who just announced a monster $300M round at a ~$5B valuation. Interestingly, NVIDIA is writing the check. BaseTen isn't trying to build the model; they are building the plumbing. Their bet is that inference is the new 'cloud computing''a utility that needs to be boring, reliable, and infinitely scalable. They are effectively saying: 'You bring the weights, we'll handle the nightmare of GPU orchestration.' While BaseTen handles the macro-infrastructure, two other players emerged this week to handle the micro-optimization. First up, we have RadixArk. If you've been hacking on SGLang, you know it's magic for complex workflows. The team coming out of Berkeley just spun this out with a $400M valuation. Their secret sauce is RadixAttention. In a standard inference engine, when a user sends a prompt, you compute the Key-Value (KV) cache from scratch. RadixArk changes the game by treating the KV cache like a classic LRU cache. It automatically reuses the KV blocks from previous requests if they share a prefix. This is massive for agentic workflows where you have a long system prompt or few-shot examples that never change. You aren't recomputing the same tokens over and over; you're just mapping to existing memory....

Under the agreement, American and global investors will own 80.1% of TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, while ByteDance will retain a 19.9% stake. Oracle, private equity firm Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi investment group MGX will each hold 15%. The new venture will be responsible for securing US user data, applications, and recommendation algorithms. These will be hosted in Oracle's US cloud under enhanced cybersecurity and data-privacy controls. The deal follows years of political scrutiny over TikTok's Chinese ownership. A US law passed in 2024 required ByteDance to divest its US assets or face a ban, a measure upheld by the Supreme Court. The White House confirmed that both US and Chinese authorities have approved the agreement. Subscribe to our Newsletter to increase your edge. Don't worry about the news anymore, through our newsletter you'll receive weekly access to what is happening. Join 120,000 other PE professionals today....