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The Discord app is seen on an iPhone in this photo illustration in Warsaw, Poland on April 3, 2021.

Jaap Arriens | NurPhoto | Getty Images

We’ve been here and done this before when it comes to social media: a new, fast-growing app is providing a way for online users to share inspiration and encouragement. At some point in most social media companies’ histories, dating all the way back to Facebook’s role in global “democratization” during Arab Spring, early social media success has been focused on positive effects.

The world has come a long way since Arab Spring and through many reckonings with both the benefits and risks of social media, including the potential health and wellness impacts on teenagers. Seattle Public Schools’ recently filed lawsuit against TikTok, Meta, Snap and others alleging a youth mental health crisis caused by social media.

Social media is also facing one of its greatest legal challenges ever, with the Supreme Court poised to review whether Section 230 statute of the Communications Decency Act should provide these companies with immunity from user content liability claims, as has been the case throughout their rise.

So there is good reason for the next big thing in social media to be all about positivity, and here we are again, with social media company Discord announcing the acquisition of Gas this week, a quickly growing social media company designed to promote positive affirmations.

“Gas is all about uplifting and empowering each other through positive affirmations. Its tremendous success shows the opportunity that exists in creating a playful yet meaningful place for young people,” Discord stated in a blog post about the deal. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Gas allows users to anonymously share compliments with one another via polls, or as TheVerge noted in a report on the deal, “The app is designed for anonymous compliments and positive affirmations or, as kids say, gassing your friends up.”

The app has gained increasing popularity among teenagers. In just two months since its August launch, Gas surpassed TikTok and BeReal in Apple’s App Store free app rankings, reaching 1 million daily active users. It was crowned as “the hottest app right now” by The Wall Street Journal. It boasted 30,000 new users per hour in October.

Gas already has had its early issues — it was caught up, unfairly, in a sex trafficking hoax this fall, which forced its founder to respond after three percent of users deleted their accounts.

But Gas has continued to grow as a place for teens to engage with peers, amassing 7.4 million installs.

Should social media companies be held liable for user content? The consequences of changing section 230

If you have not heard of Gas, it did not come out of nowhere. Its founder Nikita Bier previously sold tbh, another poll-based app, to Facebook in 2017, but the app was shut down in less than a year due to low usage. Nonetheless, Discord said in the blog post that “Gas’ founders have a proven track record of creating exciting apps and experiences.”

Snapchat’s platform has feature multiple anonymous polling apps, including Yolo and LMK, where users can ask questions to their friends who can then answer anonymously — and also turned out to be far from immune to abuse. Last year, Snap banned anonymous messaging apps.

While anonymous features can pose a specific form of risk to user safety and increase harassment, Gas says it avoids these obstacles by polls consisting of Gas-approved compliments. These compliment prompts prevent users from creating their own polls or sending direct messages, which could include harmful content.

Gas itself explains in its app description that, “Gas is where friends tell you what they love about you. And no, they won’t dunk on you like other anonymous apps. How it works: 1) Join your school 2) Add friends 3) Answer polls 4) Get flames when picked.”

Discord has had its own share of safety issues associated with its success among a younger demographic, with increasing harassment reports on the platform in recent years. The company has been investing heavily to combat this problem, acquiring Sentropy, an AI-based software company focused on fighting abuse and harassment online. Its latest transparency report, published in December 2022, the company said it had disabled 42,458 accounts and removed 14,451 servers for child safety violations during the third quarter of 2022, a 92% decrease in the number of accounts disabled when compared to the previous quarter. 

Entering the social app scene in 2015 as a platform for video game players to chat with one another, Discord has been expanding beyond its roots as an alternative to spotty Skype chats for gamers. The two-time CNBC Disruptor 50 company, has moved beyond its predominately gaming-based uses, with a more general use case voice chat platform and live stream capabilities, while also allowing users to monetize their servers.

As social audio boomed, Discord released Stage channels in 2021, giving users a new way to organize and host large audio events. In July, it released Threads, a way to branch a conversation off of a channel’s main feed without removing it from the channel. The company also has premium membership features, allowing creators and community owners to require a subscription to access all or part of their server, tiered perks, and view analytics on member engagement.

Microsoft was reported to have made a bid for the company at one point, though no deal was reached.

Discord, unlike the first generation social media giants, does not make money from advertisements, and that gives it something else in common with Gas beyond a focus on a younger demographic. Gas has gained its almost $7 million in user spending through paid subscription features like “God Mode” which provides users with hints on who gave them compliments.

For the time being, Gas will operate as a standalone app, but this doesn’t rule out the potential for polls to become a new method of communication on Discord.

“We’re always working to create an inclusive world where no one feels like an outsider and we’re excited to welcome Gas to the Discord community as our next step to fulfilling that vision,” Discord said in the blog post.

One of the toughest tasks the companies will find, as many social media apps have before — keeping the story positive.

CNBC is now accepting nominations for the 2023 Disruptor 50 list – our 11th annual look at the most innovative venture-backed companies. Learn more about eligibility and how to submit an application by Friday, Feb. 17.

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AWS’ custom chip strategy is showing results, and cutting into Nvidia’s AI dominance

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AWS' custom chip strategy is showing results, and cutting into Nvidia's AI dominance

AWS announces new CPU chip: Here's what to know

Amazon Web Services is set to announce an update to its Graviton4 chip that includes 600 gigabytes per second of network bandwidth, what the company calls the highest offering in the public cloud.

Ali Saidi, a distinguished engineer at AWS, likened the speed to a machine reading 100 music CDs a second.

Graviton4, a central processing unit, or CPU, is one of many chip products that come from Amazon’s Annapurna Labs in Austin, Texas. The chip is a win for the company’s custom strategy and putting it up against traditional semiconductor players like Intel and AMD.

But the real battle is with Nvidia in the artificial intelligence infrastructure space.

At AWS’s re:Invent 2024 conference last December, the company announced Project Rainier – an AI supercomputer built for startup Anthropic. AWS has put $8 billion into backing Anthropic.

AWS Senior Director for Customer and Project Engineering Gadi Hutt said Amazon is looking to reduce AI training costs and provide an alternative to Nvidia’s expensive graphics processing units, or GPUs.

Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4 AI model is trained on Trainium2 GPUs, according to AWS, and Project Rainier is powered by over half a million of the chips – an order that would have traditionally gone to Nvidia.

Read more CNBC tech news

Hutt said that while Nvidia’s Blackwell is a higher-performing chip than Trainium2, the AWS chip offers better cost performance.

“Trainium3 is coming up this year, and it’s doubling the performance of Trainium2, and it’s going to save energy by an additional 50%,” he said.

The demand for these chips is already outpacing supply, according to Rami Sinno, director of engineering at AWS’ Annapurna Labs.

“Our supply is very, very large, but every single service that we build has a customer attached to it,” he said.

With Graviton4’s upgrade on the horizon and Project Rainier’s Trainium chips, Amazon is demonstrating its broader ambition to control the entire AI infrastructure stack, from networking to training to inference.

And as more major AI models like Claude 4 prove they can train successfully on non-Nvidia hardware, the question isn’t whether AWS can compete with the chip giant — it’s how much market share it can take.

The release schedule for the Graviton4 update will be provided by the end of June, according to an AWS spokesperson.

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JPMorgan moves further into crypto with stablecoin-like token JPMD

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JPMorgan moves further into crypto with stablecoin-like token JPMD

Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., speaks to the Economic Club of New York in Manhattan, New York City, on April 23, 2024.

Mike Segar | Reuters

JPMorgan Chase is taking a step further into the cryptocurrency space with its own stablecoin-like token, called JPMD.

The U.S. banking giant told CNBC on Tuesday that it’s planning to launch a so-called deposit token on Coinbase’s public blockchain Base, which is built on top of the Ethereum network. Each deposit token is meant to serve as a digital representation of a commercial bank deposit.

JPMD will offer clients round-the-clock settlement as well as the ability to pay interest to holders. It is a so-called “permissioned token,” meaning it is only available to JPMorgan’s institutional clients — unlike many stablecoins, which are publicly available.

“We see institutions using JPMD for onchain digital asset settlement solutions as well as for making cross-border business-to-business transactions,” Naveen Mallela, global co-head of Kinexys, J.P. Morgan’s blockchain unit, told CNBC Tuesday.

“Given the fact that deposit tokens would eventually be interest bearing as well, this would provide better fungibility with existing deposit products that institutions currently use,” he added.

Deposit token vs. stablecoin

JPMorgan said the benefit of launching a deposit token over a stablecoin is that it gives institutional clients a way to move money around faster and easier while still having a close connection with traditional banking systems.

A stablecoin is a type of digital token that’s designed to be pegged 1:1 to the value of a fiat currency at all times. The most popular stablecoins are Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC. The entire stablecoin market is worth approximately $262 billion, according to data from CoinGecko.

In the U.S., stablecoins remain broadly unregulated — although this is likely to change soon. The Senate is set to vote Tuesday on the GENIUS Act, legislation that would introduce formal regulation for such tokens.

Elsewhere, the European Union regulates stablecoins under its Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, or MiCA, while the U.K. has also laid out plans to regulate the crypto industry. Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority is currently consulting on proposals to require stablecoin issuers to ensure their tokens maintain their value against a given asset.

Read more CNBC tech news

JPMorgan’s digital asset chief told CNBC that the bank chose Coinbase as its blockchain partner since the crypto exchange is already a long-standing client and a leader in the crypto space.

JPMD has had “preliminary interest from large institutional players who want more native onchain cash solutions from pre-eminent and reputed financial institutions,” Mallela added.

Speculation had been building around JPMorgan’s new crypto offering after a trademark application filed by the bank for “JPMD” was made public Monday.

The trademark outlined a broad range of crypto services under the JPMD name, including trading, exchange, transfer and payment services for digital assets.

Various crypto media outlets had speculated whether the bank was about to launch its own stablecoin. However, JPMorgan says that, while its token may share some similarities with a stablecoin, it’s ultimately a different kind of product.

Watch CNBC’s full interview with JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon

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Canva expands from design into analytics with acquisition of MagicBrief

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Canva expands from design into analytics with acquisition of MagicBrief

From left, Cliff Obrecht, Canva’s co-founder and chief operating officer, and George Howes, co-founder and CEO of MagicBrief, pose for a photo at the Cannes Lions festival in Cannes, France, in June 2025.

Canva

Canva has grown into a $32 billion startup through its popular design tools used for easily creating images, marketing material and presentations.

Now the company, with its 12th acquisition, is buying its way into the analytics market.

Canva said on Tuesday that it’s buying MagicBrief, whose technology is used for analyzing ad performance, for an undisclosed sum. With MagicBrief, companies can track spending and engagement on their ads and see what’s working well for competitors.

Around 240 million people use Canva’s products, which compete with offerings from Adobe’s Creative Cloud. The company has been deepening its capabilities in artificial intelligence, incorporating it into photo editing, coding and by incorporating chatbots.

“We feel like, especially with AI, we can really democratize marketing and allow marketers to do a lot more with less,” Cliff Obrecht, Canva’s co-founder and chief operating officer, said in an interview.

Canva, which ranked fifth on CNBC’s latest Disruptor 50 list, has raised over $560 million, and was valued most recently at $32 billion, though that’s a step down from its peak of $40 billion in 2021, when private markets were at their frothiest. Obrecht said the company has $1 billion in the bank.

Canva plans to incorporate MagicBrief into a broader product that it will announce later this year, Obrecht said. In October, Adobe announced the availability of a tool for creating ads with AI and then tracking performance.

Meanwhile, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Reddit are all pushing generative AI systems to boost the reach of online ads. Some marketers have used Meta’s offerings to tweak the visual appearance of their ads with hopes of gaining traction with certain audiences, CNBC reported in December.

Founded in 2022, MagicBrief has 14 employees and is based in Canva’s hometown of Sydney, Australia. In 2023, the company announced a $2 million funding round, with investments from Archangel and Blackbird, which was Canva’s first investor. The startup has tens of millions of dollars in annualized revenue, Obrecht said.

Canva, which started up in 2013, has 5,500 employees, with over $3 billion in annualized revenue. It’s one of the companies that venture capitalists are most excited about as an IPO candidate, but Obrecht said there won’t be an offering this year.

The focus, he said, is winning “over the next 10 years,” and not just hitting quarterly numbers.

“We feel that’s very short-sighted, and public markets do gravitate you more to quarter-on-quarter performance,” he said.

— CNBC’s Jonathan Vanian contributed to this report.

WATCH: The design space overall has a lot of room to run, says Bessemer Venture Partners’ Elliott Robinson

The design space overall has a lot of room to run, says Bessemer Venture Partners' Elliott Robinson

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