Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, attends a U.S. Senate bipartisan Artificial Intelligence Insight Forum at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., Sept. 13, 2023.
Stefani Reynolds | AFP | Getty Images
Meta has disbanded its Responsible AI division, the team dedicated to regulating the safety of its artificial intelligence ventures as they get developed and deployed, according to a Meta spokesperson.
Most members of the RAI team have been reassigned to the company’s Generative AI product division, while some others will now work on the AI Infrastructure team, the spokesperson said. The news was first reported by The Information.
The Generative AI team, born in February, focuses on developing products that generate language and images to mimic the equivalent human-made version. It came as companies across the tech industry poured money into machine learning development so as not to get left behind in the AI race. Meta is among the Big Tech companies that have been playing catch-up since the AI boom took hold.
The RAI restructuring comes as the Facebook parent nears the end of its “year of efficiency,” as CEO Mark Zuckerberg called it during a February earnings call. So far, that has played out as a flurry of layoffs, team-mergers and redistributions at the company.
Ensuring the safety of AI has become a stated priority of top players in the space, especially as regulators and other officials pay closer attention to the nascent technology’s potential harms. In July, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI formed an industry group focused specifically on setting safety standards as AI advances.
Though RAI employees have now been dispersed throughout the organization, the spokesperson noted that they will continue to support “responsible AI development and use.”
“We continue to prioritize and invest in safe and responsible AI development,” the spokesperson said.
Jeremy Allaire, co-founder and CEO of Circle, speaks at the 2025 TIME100 Summit in New York on April 23, 2025.
Jemal Countess | TIME | Getty Images
Stablecoin issuer Circle stands to be one of the first significant cryptocurrency companies to go public in the U.S. That’s not the only unusual aspect of its IPO.
In Circle’s updated prospectus on Tuesday, the company said it would sell 9.6 million shares in the offering, while existing shareholders would sell 14.4 million shares. It’s exceedingly rare in a tech IPO for more shares to come from investors than the company.
Facebook was one of the few notable exceptions. In the social network’s massive 2012 IPO, which raised a then-record $16 billion, 57% of the shares were sold by existing stakeholders. Circle is even higher at 60%.
Circle, the company behind the popular USDC stablecoin, didn’t provide a reason for its decision, and a spokesperson declined to comment. The company is profitable, having generated $64.8 million in net income in the latest quarter. It had almost $850 million in cash and equivalents, and stands to raise another $240 million in the IPO, based on the midpoint of its expected range of $24 to $26 a share, according to Tuesday’s filing.
One reason for the hefty amount of insider sales is likely the extended stretch of meager returns for venture capital firms. After the market peaked in 2021, soaring inflation led to increased interest rates, pushing investors out of risk and forcing late-stage tech companies to forego IPOs, often slashing their valuations to raise money in the private market. Wall Street was bullish on an IPO boom when President Donald Trump took office in January, but few debuts have taken place.
Add it all up, and Silicon Valley’s tech investors are badly in need of liquidity.
“Private investors are desperate for exists so they can distribute back to their investors,” said Lise Buyer, founder of IPO consultancy Class V Group, though she said she isn’t certain of the company’s motivations. “It probably reflects a multiyear drought in IPOs and a strong desire by early investors to get some liquidity.”
Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire, who co-founded the company in 2013, is offloading about 8% of his stake, selling 1.58 million shares, according to the prospectus. Sean Neville, a co-founder and former co-CEO, is slated to sell 11%, as is finance chief Jeremy Fox-Green.
Venture firms Accel, Breyer Capital, General Catalyst, IDG Capital, and Oak Investment Partners are all scheduled to sell about 10% of their stock. While insider sales could present a troubling signal to Wall Street, Buyer said the investors’ remaining holdings show they’re still expressing belief in the company.
“The big guys are holding enough so they still have skin in the game, so that shouldn’t alarm investors,” Buyer said.
For most tech IPOs over the years, the percentage of float coming from investors has been significantly below half. In Reddit’s IPO, insiders sold 31% of the shares. The percentage was 36% for online grocery delivery company Instacart in 2023.
Sometimes it’s much less than that. CoreWeave, a former cryptocurrency miner that now rents out Nvidia chips, went public in March, with executives and other shareholders making up 2.4% of the shares sold. Back in December 2020, Airbnb investors accounted for about 3% of IPO shares, and in DoorDash’s IPO that same week, existing investors didn’t sell any stock.
During times when IPOs are hot and stocks are flying after their debut, investors are incentivized to hold and pocket the gains after the lockup period expires. That’s not today’s market, which helps explain why half the shares sold in stock brokerage firm eToro’sIPO earlier this month came from existing investors.
Exit activity for U.S. VCs rose almost 35% last year to $98 billion after hitting the lowest in a decade in 2023, according to the National Venture Capital Association and PitchBook. The peak was over $750 billion in 2021.
“This continuation of the post-2021 liquidity drought highlights persistent issues around exit pathways and investor behavior,” the NVCA wrote in its annual yearbook, which was published in March.
In some cases, companies need insiders to sell stock just so there’s enough float for there to be a market for trading. If Circle wasn’t including investors in its share sale, it would be offering less than 5% of outstanding shares to the public. For eToro that number was 7%.
A sign is posted in front of the 23andMe headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, on Feb. 1, 2024.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
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23andMe said it will file a Form 25 Notification of Delisting with the SEC on or around June 6, which would subsequently remove the stock from listing and registering with the Nasdaq.
The company said the Nasdaq had originally informed the company that a Form 25 would be filed in March, but since the exchange has not yet submitted the filing, 23andMe is doing so voluntarily.
23andMe exploded into the mainstream because of its at-home DNA testing kits that allowed customers to examine their genetic profiles. At its peak, the company was valued at around $6 billion.
But after going public via a merger with a special purpose acquisition company in 2021, the company struggled to generate recurring revenue and stand up viable research or therapeutics businesses.
Regeneron’s deal is still subject to approval by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Missouri. Pending approval, it’s expected to close in the third quarter of this year.
Elon Musk listens as reporters ask U.S. President Donald Trump and South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa questions during a press availability in the Oval Office at the White House on May 21, 2025 in Washington, DC.
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Tesla shares gained about 5% on Tuesday after CEO Elon Musk over the weekend reiterated his intent to home in on his businesses ahead of the latest SpaceX rocket launch.
The billionaire wrote in a post to his social media platform X that he needs to be “super focused” on X, artificial intelligence company xAI and Tesla as they launch “critical technologies” on the heels of a temporary outage.
“As evidenced by the uptime issues this week, major operational improvements need to be made,” he wrote, adding that he would return to “spending 24/7” at work. “The failover redundancy should have worked, but did not.”
An outage over the weekend briefly shuttered the social media platform formerly known as Twitter for thousands of users, according to DownDetector. Earlier in the week, the platform suffered a data center outage. X has suffered a series of outages since Musk purchased the platform in 2022.
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Musk has previously indicated plans to step away from his political work and prioritize his businesses.
During Tesla’s April earnings call he said that he would “significantly” reduce his time running President Donald Trump‘s Department of Government Efficiency.
In the last election cycle, Musk devoted time and billions of dollars to political causes and toward electing Trump in 2024. However, a story over the weekend from the Washington Post, citing sources familiar with the matter, said that Musk has grown disillusioned with politics and wants to return to managing his businesses.
Last week, Musk said in an interview at the Qatar Economic Forum that he planned to spend “a lot less” on campaign donations going forward.
The comments from Musk precede SpaceX’s Starship rocket Tuesday evening. Pressure is on for the company after two Starship rockets exploded in January and March.
Ahead of the launch, Musk announced an all hands livestream on X at 1 p.m.
Tesla is still facing fallout from Musk’s political foray, with protests at showrooms and other brand damage.
In April, Tesla sold 7,261 cars in Europe, down 49% from last year, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association.