Charles Rollet / TechCrunch:
A Columbia student suspended over a tool to cheat on job interviews says he has raised a $5.3M seed for Cluely, which offers an AI tool to “cheat on everything”  —  On Sunday, 21-year-old Chungin ‘Roy’ Lee announced he's raised $5.3 million in seed funding from Abstract Ventures …

Julian Mark / Washington Post:
The US v. Google remedies trial opens with the DOJ arguing that Google should be forced to divest Chrome, and Google calling the proposed remedies “extreme”  —  The remedies trial opens in Washington with the government pushing to break up the company through measures that Google lawyers deem “extreme.”

Kalley Huang and Erin Woo, reporting for The Information (via Ed Zitron, who summarized it on Bluesky):

Meta Platforms over the past year asked Microsoft, Amazon and others to help pay the costs of training Meta’s flagship large language model, Llama, according to four people briefed on the discussions. Meta’s overtures reflected worries about the growing costs of its artificial intelligence development, according to two of the people. [...]

Meta in particular has faced questions about the business logic behind its AI development, given that Llama is open-source software, freely available for anyone’s use. That makes it difficult to turn into a business. And Meta makes money primarily from advertising and has little experience in selling business software.

While Meta held its most serious discussions with Amazon and Microsoft, it has also discussed the idea with Databricks, IBM and Oracle, as well as representatives from at least one Middle Eastern investor, according to two of the people briefed on the discussions. Meta was still in discussions with companies about the Llama Consortium as recently as the start of this year, the two people said.

“Would you consider throwing a few sacks full of your cash on this bonfire of our cash that we’ve been burning?” is a hell of a pitch.

In its discussions with other companies, Meta primarily asked for money. It also sought servers or other resources that would offset the cost of training its models, according to two of the people briefed on the discussions. In return for their assistance, Meta discussed offering other companies promotion of their services alongside Llama — for example, a Meta executive might appear at a conference hosted by a consortium partner — or providing more insight into the training process for the model, one of those people said.

Pay a little and a Meta representative will show up at your developer conference. Pay more and a Meta rep won’t show up at your developer conference.

International shipping company DHL is temporarily suspending packages bound for consumers in the US that are valued at over $800 “until further notice.” The BBC reports that DHL was hit with a surge in formal customs clearances due to the Trump Administration’s new tariff changes, which added the need for additional paperwork for more packages. […]

Larry David, in a column for The New York Times:

He loved that story, especially the part where Hitler shot the dog before it got back into the car. Then a beaming Hitler said, “Hey, if I can kill Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals, I can certainly kill a dog!” That perhaps got the biggest laugh of the night — and believe me, there were plenty.

I have been reliably informed that, having linked approvingly to Bill Maher’s “book report” on his dinner with Trump, I must also link to David’s report of dinner with Adolf.