After seven rocky years, the company's assets will be sold to Dazzle, a new AI firm that Mayer founded. Sunshine cofounder and CEO Marissa Mayer speaks at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco in 2023. Sunshine, the consumer AI startup founded by former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer in 2018, has seen brighter days. The small startup is shutting down, and its assets are being sold to a new entity incorporated by Mayer called Dazzle, according to an email viewed by WIRED. Mayer sent the email to Sunshine shareholders on September 17, informing them that Dazzle has officially incorporated and is ready to acquire Sunshine's holdings.

Marissa Mayer didn't say AI is Death, destroyer of worlds or even AI needs ethical guardrails. Instead, she said it's the sun--life-giving, bright, shiny, endlessly giving. Thus, the former Google engineer and CEO of Yahoo, who has worked on artificial intelligence for 25 years, christened her startup Sunshine. It's devoted to AI-empowering family and social life with photo sharing, contact managing, and event planning. As I spoke with Mayer in Sunshine's candy-colored digs in Palo Alto, I was so stunned by her boosterism that I ended up mirroring it.

Your new app uses the power of artificial intelligence to ensure your contact list is always complete and up-to-date.

When Marissa Mayer decided to start her own company, after nearly five years as Yahoo's CEO and 13 years at Google, she turned to her rolodex of contacts. For a startup in its early stages, success often has less to do with what you're building than who is building it. And Mayer, one of Silicon Valley's marquee names, had a lot of numbers she could call. There are over 14,000 people stored in her iPhone. So it's not surprising that Mayer assembled a fine team at Lumi Labs.

Marissa Mayer vanished from the Silicon Valley landscape two years ago when she resigned from Yahoo Inc. shortly after it was sold to Verizon Communications Inc. for $4.48 billion. Her tumultuous 5-year reign at the eponymous tech media company, on the heels of a historic run at Alphabet Inc.'s GOOGL, -1.03% GOOG, -1.06% Google in the search division, made her one of the industry's most recognizable faces -- to her professional benefit and personal dismay. On Monday, at the Techonomy conference here, she resurfaced with a new startup and some pointed comments on the valley. Mayer was interviewed on stage for about 20 minutes by Techonomy founder and journalist David Kirkpatrick. Like Twitter Inc. TWTR, 0.82% Chief Executive Jack Dorsey, Mayer opposes automated ads from politicians, calling them "very dangerous."

SHANGHAI: Jack Ma believes artificial intelligence poses no threat to humanity, but Elon Musk called that "famous last words" as the billionaire tech tycoons faced off Thursday in an occasionally animated debate on futurism in Shanghai. The Chinese co-founder of Alibaba and the maverick industrialist behind Tesla and SpaceX frequently pulled pained expressions and raised eyebrows as they kicked off an AI conference with a dialogue that challenged attendees to keep up, veering from technology to Mars, death, and jobs. However, the hot topic in the hour-long talk was AI, which has provoked increasing concern among scientists such as late British cosmologist Stephen Hawking who warned that it will eventually turn on and "annihilate" humanity. "Computers may be clever, but human beings are much smarter," Ma said. "We invented the computer -- I've never seen a computer invent a human being."