đź‘Ą Dazzle plans to develop an intelligent personal assistant, and former Sunshine employees will join the new company. Sunshine raised about $20 million in 2020, but according to Mayer herself, the company mainly relied on its own funds for operations. With this asset sale and team integration, Sunshine will officially exit the market, and the new AI company Dazzle will take over its talent and business, entering a new phase in the smart assistant field.
This update allows users to receive image-based responses and shop more intuitively using natural language queries. As the tech sector continues to grapple with economic uncertainties, such transitions could become more common, allowing seasoned executives like Mayer to adapt and thrive in new ventures. Mayer’s career trajectory has been nothing short of illustrious, from her early days vegas casino app download apk as Google’s 20th employee and first female engineer to her tumultuous tenure at Yahoo, where she oversaw its sale to Verizon in 2017.
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Microsoft layoffs continue into 5th consecutive month
It also means that most of the engineering work for Windows is now under a single division leader, rather than shared with Microsoft’s Azure teams. Microsoft is bringing its key Windows engineering teams under a single organization again, as part of a reorg being announced today. Windows chief Pavan Davuluri, who was just promoted to president of Windows and devices earlier this month, shared the changes to Microsoft’s Windows teams in an internal memo.
- In 2024, the service added event management and photo sharing — with a touch of AI, of course — but with little success.
- While details remain sparse, IT Magazine reports that the sale is seen as a way to preserve value from Sunshine’s assets, which include proprietary AI technologies developed over the years.
- Prior to becoming CEO of Yahoo, Mayer had a storied career at Google, where she was employee number 20.
- With a surge in demand for the Claude series of models, nearly 80% of usage comes from outside the United States, with South Korea being particularly notable.
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Its founder, Liang Wenfeng, established the fund in 2015 and used AI to assist in trading decisions. Mayer’s decision to dissolve Sunshine reflects the challenges faced in the startup’s journey, but it also sets the stage for what is hoped to be a more successful venture in Dazzle. The email did not elaborate on what Dazzle’s purpose will be, but sources tell WIRED that Mayer is eyeing a new kind of AI personal assistant.
Marissa Mayer will close her old AI startup, sell assets to her new AI startup TechCrunch
Compared to its predecessor, this model surpasses top models such as GPT-5, Gemini, and Claude4 in multiple benchmark tests, achieving a technological breakthrough. The Bai Ling team at Ant Group has open-sourced two efficient thinking models, Ring-flash-linear-2.0 and Ring-mini-linear-2.0, designed to enhance deep reasoning efficiency. They also released FP8 fusion operators and linear Attention inference fusion operators, supporting efficient inference with ‘large parameters and low activation’ and ultra-long context. By optimizing the architecture and collaborating with high-performance operators, significant performance improvements have been achieved.
The software maker has also been adding a bunch of AI features to Windows 11 in recent months, including a Copilot Vision tool and an AI-powered Settings agent. This the first major Windows reorg since Davuluri was promoted to Windows and Surface chief more than a year ago. The changes mean the leaders of the Windows teams for Core OS, Data Intelligence and Fundamentals, Security, and Engineering Systems all now report up to Davuluri.
- This decision, revealed through an email to shareholders, marks the end of a seven-year journey for Sunshine, which has faced numerous challenges since its inception in 2018.
- As of Sunday afternoon, 99 percent of shareholders had signed, according to sources close to the situation.
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The small startup is shutting down, and its assets are being sold to a new entity incorporated by Mayer called Dazzle, according to an email viewed by WIRED. Mayer sent the email to Sunshine shareholders on September 17, informing them that Dazzle has officially incorporated and is ready to acquire Sunshine’s holdings. The chatbot application developed by Chinese AI lab DeepSeek has topped the download charts on Apple and Google app stores this week, sparking questions from Wall Street and the tech industry about the sustainability of the U.S. The company is supported by quantitative fund Huanfang Quantitative and uses efficient computing technology to train AI models.
As of Sunday afternoon, 99 percent of shareholders had signed, according to sources close to the situation. Mayer herself is the company’s largest shareholder and investor.The email did not elaborate on what Dazzle’s purpose will be, but sources tell WIRED that Mayer is eyeing a new kind of AI personal assistant. Prior to becoming CEO of Yahoo, Mayer had a storied career at Google, where she was employee number 20. By that point, the startup had raised $20 million in venture capital funding, in addition to Mayer’s personal contributions.Early on, the Sunshine app was plagued by complaints that it potentially violated user privacy. The app, which used AI to identify and merge duplicate people in your phone’s contacts list, was also pulling in information from Whitepages to automatically add home addresses to contacts.In 2024, Sunshine launched a photo sharing app called Shine.
OpenAI is set to launch a standalone app for its Sora 2 AI video generation model, featuring a TikTok-like interface with AI-generated content. The move raises questions about copyright, identity verification, and the future of social media. Ultimately, the closure of Sunshine and birth of Dazzle highlight the relentless evolution required in tech.
Facing an increasingly competitive AI market, Dazzle hopes to achieve breakthroughs in the smart assistant field by integrating existing technologies and teams. With the rapid development of AI technology, Dazzle’s future has attracted widespread attention and expectations. While details remain sparse, IT Magazine reports that the sale is seen as a way to preserve value from Sunshine’s assets, which include proprietary AI technologies developed over the years. Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic plans to significantly expand its international team by 2025, doubling the size of its workforce and increasing its AI applications team fivefold. This move aims to enhance competitiveness in overseas markets and address challenges from OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google. With a surge in demand for the Claude series of models, nearly 80% of usage comes from outside the United States, with South Korea being particularly notable.
As the largest shareholder and investor, Mayer expressed confidence in the decision, stating that the sale to Dazzle is the best path forward. She remains committed to leveraging the momentum generated by Sunshine into new opportunities with Dazzle. Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is closing her consumer software startup Sunshine and selling its assets to her newly incorporated AI company, Dazzle. The asset sale to Dazzle requires shareholder approval, with reports indicating that nearly 99% of investors, including prominent venture capital firms and co-founder Enrique Muñoz Torres, have already consented.
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The company is on a streak of layoffs right now, continuing one of the largest runs in its history. Some waves have been large, with more than 6,000 employees let go in May and an additional 9,000 cut in July. With Monday’s layoffs, disclosed in a state regulatory filing, the number of Washington-based workers affected has passed 3,200.
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