A new AI system can translate a person’s brain activity into a continuous stream of text 👀

Busy day; we may have missed some juicy bits but more tomorrow!

JPMorgan bought beleaguered First Republic today in a government auction, culminating weeks of failed rescue attempts and aborted discussions involving some of the most powerful Wall Street executives and U.S. officials. The deal talks went down to the wire, according to a detailed Reuters accounting of how JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon won the deal.

Lawmakers could reduce the risk of bank runs by significantly raising deposit-insurance protection for accounts used for payroll and other business payments, the FDIC said in a report today. The WSJ has more here.

On Friday, the FDIC ordered Cross River Bank's board of directors to increase its supervision and direction of management, and its oversight and monitoring of the bank's system of internal controls, information systems, credit underwriting practices and internal audit systems related to consumer protection laws and regulations, reports American Banker. Cross River is a banking-as-a-service provider that makes loans through fintech lenders such as Affirm, Upstart, and Rocket Loans. "It's a shot across the bow for every partner bank, especially small ones," Todd Baker, the managing principal of Broadmoor Consulting, tells the outlet. 

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ODAIA, a five-year-old Toronto startup that provides pharmaceutical companies with business insights based on its analysis of data from clinical trials, sales transactions, and patient registries, raised a $25 million Series B round co-led by Threshold Ventures and Monograph Capital, with Wittington Ventures and previous investors Flint Capital, BDC Capital, StandUp Ventures, and Graphite Capital also participating. More here.

Alison, a one-year-old Tel Aviv startup that uses machine learning to identify patterns in creative assets and data to generate insights that can be used to improve the effectiveness of advertising campaigns, raised a $5.1 million pre-seed round from Andreessen Horowitz, Crescendo Venture Partners, and yellowHEAD. TechCrunch has more here.

Centuro Global, a four-year-old London startup that helps companies moving to new geographies comply with local regulations regarding immigration, HR, legal, tax, and accounting, raised a $4.15 million round. Mercia was the lead investor. Tech.eu has more here.

Consensus, a one-year-old Boston startup whose search engine uses machine learning to deliver expert knowledge from 200 million scientific and academic research papers, raised a $3 million seed round. Draper Associates was the deal lead. VentureBeat has more here.

Fare Protocol, a one-year old startup whose decentralized protocol is is built on probability smart contracts, which are triggered by transparent on-chain events based on probability variables, raised a $6.2 million seed round led by Justin Kan's Goat Capital and C Squared Ventures, with 6th Man Ventures, Republic Crypto, Arrington Capital, Eniac Ventures, Spark Digital Capital, Morningstar Ventures, Quantstamp, and DWeb3 also piling on. CoinDesk has more here.

Foundation, a one-year-old startup whose e-commerce platform enables manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers, and retailers to share product, pricing, and inventory information, raised a $3 million seed round from Founders’ Co-op, Ascend VC, Fortson VC, and Upside VC GeekWire has more here.

Where did all the unicorns go? And what are top VCs doing to stay ahead in today's changing market? Affinity's 2023 Investment Benchmark Report: Global Unicorn Edition has the answers. Download your copy today.

Lordstown Motors is at risk of failing — again. The EV startup that went public via a SPAC merger cautioned investors that it may be forced to file for bankruptcy because Foxconn may pull out of a critical funding deal, according to a regulatory filing flagged by TechCrunch. More here.

Poparazzi, the photo-sharing app that hit the top of the App Store in 2021, is shutting down. The company announced the news via a Medium blog late last week, informing users that the app would be discontinued and users had until June 30, 2023 to download their content. Last year, Poparazzi’s founders had said the app had grown to more than five million total installs and confirmed its raise of $15 million in Series A funding led by Benchmark. TechCrunch has more here.

Vice, the digital-media outit that charmed giants like Disney and Fox into investing before a stunning crash-landing, is reportedly preparing to file for bankruptcy. In 2017, after a funding round from the private-equity firm TPG, Vice was worth $5.7 billion; today, it's believed to be worth a tiny fraction of that. The New York Times has more here.

Geoffrey Hinton, the "godfather of AI," has left Google to more openly warn of the danger he sees ahead.

Venture capitalist Ann Lai says she was fired from Bullpen Capital three months after helping the firm to close a $145 million fund. She says had been promoted from principal to general partner ahead of the fundraise. TechCrunch has more here.

Jack Ma, the billionaire co-founder of Alibaba who disappeared from public life in 2020, has taken up a teaching role in Japan.

Congratulations to Serena Williams and Alexis Ohanian. The couple revealed on the Met Gala red carpet that they are expecting baby No. 2. 💗

Morgan Stanley is reportedly preparing a fresh round of job cuts amid a renewed focus on expenses as recession fears delay a rebound in dealmaking. Senior managers are discussing plans to eliminate about 3,000 jobs from the global workforce by the end of this quarter, according to Bloomberg's sources. That would amount to roughly 5% of staff excluding financial advisers and personnel supporting them within the wealth management division, says the outlet. More here.

Andreessen Horowitz is looking to hire a partner to focus on marketing its games investments. The role is "mid-senior level" and is based in San Francisco. More here.

Chegg plummeted as much as 38% after warning that ChatGPT is threatening growth of its homework-help services, one of the most notable market reactions yet to signs that generative AI is upending the world of education. Bloomberg has more here.

Apple's high yield savings account offering a 4.15% annual return brought in nearly $400 million in deposits on launch day and around $990 million over its first four days, reports Forbes.

IBM has halted hiring for 7,800 back-office-function-type jobs that could be replaced by AI, CEO Arvind Krishna tells Bloomberg.

Elon Musk's attempts to steer AI’s development date back more than a decade, reports the WSJ. It says that after Musk made an early investment in DeepMind, founded in 2010, he launched a last-minute bid to purchase DeepMind, the leading AI lab at the time, but lost out to Google, which acquired the company in 2013. More here.

Samsung Electronics is banning employee use of popular generative AI tools like ChatGPT after discovering staff uploaded sensitive code to the platform, dealing a setback to the spread of such technology in the workplace. The company is concerned that data transmitted to such platforms, including Google Bard and Bing, is stored on external servers, making it difficult to retrieve and delete, and could end up being disclosed to other users.

Site-creation platform WordPress has become the latest to drop Twitter over the social media’s sudden, steep price hikes for its API, joining major companies like Microsoft and Intercom. The Toronto Star has more here.

A new AI system called a semantic decoder can translate a person’s brain activity — while listening to a story or silently imagining telling a story — into a continuous stream of text. UT News has more here.

"Star Wars" reimagined as a Wes Anderson film using AI.

The 15 best new movies and TV shows from April.

Wired asks Bob Odenkirk some of the internet's burning questions.

A new Nike collection in honor of San Francisco’s Chinatown.

In Manhattan, a pair of adjoining Gilded-Age townhouses hits the market for $63 million. 💰💰💰