The Information’s Creator Economy Newsletter

15 hours ago | theinformation.com | Natasha Mascarenhas

After tech stocks crashed three years ago, the correction in private startup valuations led to a wave of partners leaving their venture firms. Over the past year, a new exodus has emerged as investors depart with plans to set up their own funds. Six early-stage partners from Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue Management, Founders Fund, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Forerunner Ventures have left their firms in the past few months or are in the process of doing so. More are in the works, I hear.

1 day 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.

2 days 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.