Creators

Zhang Yiming founded ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, but previously served as the CEO of 99Fang, a Chinese home finder startup with “very powerful” tech for search, image processing, and recommendations.

Now, The New York Times reports that former contractors suing Susquehanna, an investor in both companies, claim technology they developed for 99Fang was used to create TikTok without compensating them.

As we saw in the beta release this new version of Adobe Express packs the same creative, editing, and generative AI features that desktop users have into an iOS and Android app.

It’s free to use, but to access Firefly and the full suite of editing tools you’ll need a $10 per month Premium membership.

The proposal, reported by Axios, would give the president discretion to extend the initial six month period for TikTok to find a buyer and separate from its Chinese parent ByteDance. The Senate is already considering a longer timeframe for the forced sale, as many analysts doubt six months is sufficient.

It hopes to recruit more EU users through a new rewards app called TikTok Lite that offers cash incentives.

Le Monde gives us a first look at the app where users earn “coins” for their activities on TikTok. A daily target of 3,600 coins (or €0.36 or $0.38) is reportedly equal to an hour of consuming content. Liking three videos? 150 coins.

Just like its existing partnership with Ticketmaster, TikTok has now teamed up with AXS to allow users to search and purchase the ticket outlet’s offerings directly on the video-sharing platform.

The feature is currently live in the US, UK, Sweden, and Australia. Performers on TikTok can promote their shows by adding AXS event links to their videos.

And so I’m warning you. If you haven’t watched X-Men '97’s fifth episode, take extra care with TikTok’s search function, as today, one of the trending topics’ names might spoil a big development for you (as it just did me).

Instead of tapping TikTok’s search icon, I’d suggest reading Charles’ interview with the show’s sound designers.

Verge alum Ashley Carman, for Bloomberg:

In reality, these clips aren’t coming from podcasts. In fact, Wolfe is being paid $195 for each of these one-minute advertisements designed to look like a podcast. On the freelance service website Fiverr, where he sells his service to brands, Wolfe claims: “I will make a ugc podcast video ad,” or a user-generated content ad, using the client’s own script to talk about the product.

Adobe calls its Firefly model “commercially safe” because it’s trained on Adobe’s stock library. However, Bloomberg reports that around 5 percent of the images in its training database are actually generated by other AI models.

TikTok could get more time to spin off from its Chinese parent company to avoid a ban if the Senate moves forward with updates to a bill that passed the House. The Verge confirmed a Politico report with committee spokespeople that Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell (D-WA) is working with Senate Intelligence Committee leaders on updates, like extending the timeline for a sale from six to 12 months.

Creality and Anycubic have each announced their own takes on Bambu’s AMS — a gadget that lets printers automatically swap between four different colors mid-print. No prices yet, but Creality tells me you won’t strictly need its K2 Plus printer to use that one; it’ll work with K1 and Ender-3 V3, too.

Spotify just announced a new integration with Substack, which will allow Substack creators to distribute free and paywalled podcast episodes on the platform. For listeners, this means they can link their Substack and Spotify accounts. Last year, Spotify made a similar move with Patreon.

ByteDance can attribute some of that increase to how well TikTok Shop has been received in the US and Southeast Asia, according to Bloomberg. TikTok, which has 170 million users in the US, is aiming to increase its e-commerce business in the region tenfold this year... if it survives the US government.

First spotted by 9to5Google, YouTube Music’s Activity feed will appear under the bell icon that most users associate with notifications.

It’s widely rolling out today on both Android and iOS via a server-side update.

Join The Verge at the Chicago Humanities Festival this weekend for a series of panels focused on AI. I’ll be moderating a session on interesting applications of artificial intelligence, with artist X. A. Li and Google software engineer Zaria Howard. Hope to see you there!

A month after Warner Bros. Discovery shut down Rooster Teeth, the company has sold the outlet’s most valuable asset — its podcast network. The Roost, which is home to podcasts like The H3 Podcast and Rooster Teeth Podcast, has been acquired by influencer talent agency Night. The two organization’s have an established connection — Night’s President, Ezra Cooperstein, served as the President of Rooster Teeth from 2018 to 2019.