YouTube officially announced that its in-app video sharing and messaging feature is now rolling out to the US, UK, Brazil, and Singapore, bringing the total number of supported countries to 40.

The feature is available to users aged 18 and older who are logged into a YouTube channel. The rollout is gradual, so it may not appear in your app immediately.

How to DM on YouTube?

Once the feature is enabled for you, a messaging icon appears in the top right corner of the app. You can also share any video or Short directly from the Share button while watching.

The catch is that starting a conversation is not as simple as searching for someone. You have to send an invite link first, and that link must go out through a third-party app like WhatsApp, iMessage, or SMS. The other person then accepts the invite and gets added to your YouTube contacts. This extra step is designed to prevent spam and unwanted messages.

Once connected, you can send text messages freely, react to content in real time, unsend messages by long-pressing them, delete entire conversations, and block or report contacts if needed. The only media you can share inside the chat is YouTube content, including videos, livestreams, and Shorts. No images, GIFs, or files allowed.

Why is YouTube bringing messaging back now?

YouTube had a direct messaging feature in 2017, but it was quietly killed off in 2019. Now, it’s back once again in a much bigger way.

The feature has already been available in over 30 European countries since March 2026. YouTube says the positive response from countries where the feature was already live drove the decision to expand. Recently, the platform also added three new podcast features, but they are only for Premium subscribers.

The UK government will offer to buy AI chips directly from British technology companies in a bid to keep them in the country. Technology Secretary Liz Kendall will outline plans for “strategic purchases” of semiconductor equipment from UK-based firms at London Tech Week this week, the Telegraph reported. The initiative includes access to taxpayer-backed funding and investment in skills to retain workforces in Britain.

The announcement is part of a broader AI hardware plan that targets 5% of the global chip market, which would translate to roughly £37 billion in revenue and tens of thousands of jobs. The government has already committed £100 million through ARIA’s scaling compute programme, including £50 million for a scaling inference lab where British startups can test and demonstrate that their hardware works.

The urgency is clear. Britain keeps losing its best chip companies to foreign buyers. SoftBank acquired Graphcore in 2024. Qualcomm bought Alphawave IP for $2.4 billion last year. Arm, the UK’s most valuable chip designer, chose New York for its main listing in 2023. Each departure weakened the case that Britain can retain a semiconductor industry of its own.

“This is far too important a technology to depend entirely on other countries, especially in areas like defence, financial services and health care,” Kendall said in a speech at Bloomberg in January, when she announced £1 billion in funding to expand the UK’s AI research compute capacity by 20-fold.

The chip purchases would make the government a customer, not just a regulator, giving British firms guaranteed demand. Six UK companies have already gained access to government-funded supercomputers to advance their AI models, with the government retaining a right of first refusal for future investments. Fractile, a British inference chip startup that recently raised $220 million and is reportedly in talks with Anthropic, is among the firms the strategy aims to support.

The plans also respond to concerns about foreign dependency in government procurement. A recent parliamentary report warned that US firm Palantir should not play such a significant role in the UK public sector, and flagged a growing reliance on Microsoft and AWS. The HMRC’s £175 million AI contract with London-based Quantexa was an early signal of the government’s preference for domestic providers.

Whether strategic purchases alone can prevent the next Graphcore from being sold abroad remains an open question. Britain has the engineering talent and the research base. What it has lacked is the domestic demand and patient capital to keep companies scaling at home instead of selling to SoftBank or Qualcomm at the first serious offer.

Former tech executive and VC Sriram Krishnan is leaving the Trump administration at the end of June.

“It is hard to express how big a privilege it has been to serve the American people and how grateful I am to have had the opportunity to do so,” Krishnan said in a post on X. “First and foremost, it has been an honor to serve under President [Donald Trump]. Without his leadership, we would not be leading in the AI race.”

Krishnan, who’s been serving as a senior policy advisor on artificial intelligence at the White House, was one of a number of tech industry figures to take roles in the second Trump administration. Krishnan has led product teams at Microsoft, Twitter, Yahoo, Facebook, and Snap, and he was most recently a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, a firm whose founders threw their support behind Trump during the 2024 election. 

In his post, Krishnan highlighted some “key public accomplishments,” starting with the administration’s AI Action Plan, which prioritized data center construction over regulation and safety. Since then, Trump has signed several executive orders around AI, including one that seeks to challenge state-level AI regulations and another focused on oversight that was delayed and narrowed after industry pushback.

Trump has also endorsed the idea that the government could take an equity stake in major AI companies.

Krishnan noted that the person he “worked [most] closely with over the last 18 months” was David Sacks, the investor and podcaster who stepped down as AI and crypto czar earlier this year and became co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

“[Sacks’] continuing advocacy for America winning on AI has been and continues to be crucial,” Krishnan said.

Next, Krishnan said he will be “building institutions” that tackle big challenges for “America and its allies.” According to The Washington Post, he’s planning to start an outside institution that will still give him a role in influencing Trump’s AI policy.

“Whether it is energy, data centers or a clear path for Americans to experience the benefits of AI, there are many tough issues we all need to navigate together,” Krishnan said.

After a very profitable decade on Microsoft’s board, Reid Hoffman is stepping down, the company announced Thursday. Hoffman joined the board after Microsoft bought his company LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in 2016.

Hoffman was on Microsoft’s board when it invested its first $1 billion into OpenAI in 2019. Hoffman was one of OpenAI’s original investors and served on the model maker’s board until he stepped down in 2023, citing too many potential conflicts of interest to continue. He was also on Microsoft’s board when the tech giant entered into one of those non-acquisition, acqui-hire deals for $650 million with his AI startup Inflection AI. Microsoft hired Inflection co-founder Mustafa Suleyman through that deal.

Hoffman said on a recent episode of his “Possible” podcast, while talking with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, that he’s ready to go “founder mode” with his latest AI startup, Manus. Manus is a drug discovery company that raised over $50 million through a couple of seed rounds last year. Hoffman is an investor, as is General Catalyst.

Hoffman is cited as a co-founder of Manus and chairman of the board, not the CEO, though. That job belongs to Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, a physician, biologist, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the 2011 book “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.”

Still, Hoffman said he’s excited to give Manus more attention.

“One of the things I realized over the last month was that, we’re seeing such progress with Manus. I need to get back to founder mode,” he said. He believes the startup is making progress on “Move 37” AI, meaning AI that supersedes human creativity in chemistry, especially to combat various cancers, he added.