The Briefing

20 hours ago | theinformation.com | Ann Gehan

I checked out LTK’s splashy event for advertisers in New York this week. The gathering, planned to coincide with upfronts held by big media companies, highlighted the creator marketing startup’s ambitions to command serious ad dollars. LTK, founded in 2011 and last valued at $2 billion, is one of the more established creator marketing companies.

1 day ago | theinformation.com | Ann Gehan

Source: The InformationPerplexity is adding PayPal and Venmo checkout buttons in its subscription AI chatbot, the companies said on Wednesday, adding a new way for Perplexity users to pay for goods and services they find using AI tools. Perplexity has already struck a deal with Shopify to add checkouts in Perplexity’s chats for merchants that use Shopify’s e-commerce software.

1 day ago | theinformation.com | Stephanie Palazzolo

The race to develop reasoning models that “think” harder is at full force. At Anthropic, which arrived later than OpenAI and Google to the reasoning race, two upcoming models are taking the concept of “thinking” to the extreme. Anthropic has new versions of its two largest models—Claude Sonnet and Claude Opus—set to come out in the upcoming weeks, according to two people who have used them.

1 day ago | theinformation.com | Kaya Yurieff

Source: The InformationTikTok has been working on a new feature that will allow U.S. users aged 16 and over to share photos through direct messages inside the app, The Information reported. Under TikTok’s current policy, users can share TikTok videos as well as send and receive text messages with friends over direct message, but they can’t send photos or videos that weren’t created on TikTok. The company previously highlighted the restriction as a safety feature.

1 day ago | theinformation.com | Kaya Yurieff

TikTok has been working on a new feature that will allow users in the U.S. to share photos over direct messages inside the app, according to three people with knowledge of the situation. The move could be a way to encourage more people to use direct messaging on TikTok, a feature that hasn’t taken off as it has on Instagram and Snapchat. But the plans have sparked debate inside TikTok.