YouTube is rolling out a series of changes to Shorts, including a new method that lets users shrink the duration of short form videos.

The Google-owned platform announced Thursday that Shorts now comes with a setting that allows users to double their playback speed. The point of making what is an already brief experience even briefer is to let users “absorb information more quickly or find your favorite part faster,” the platform said.

In an apparent bid for a more positive web, YouTube has also nixed the Shorts dislike button. Instead of disliking a video, users will now have to rely on the “Not Interested” and “Don’t recommend this channel” functions to disincentivize certain kinds of content.

Similarly, instead of clicking on a thumb’s up button if they like a video, users will now have access to a heart emoji.

Finally, YouTube is also introducing a new “Clear Screen mode,” which is designed to temporarily hide “all icons and text from your playback view,” giving users a clean view of their content unencumbered by floating distractions.

All of these changes have been made in the service of creating “a more intuitive Shorts experience,” the company said. It’s not exactly clear when the updates will take effect. The company said that the features would be rolling out over time, but didn’t give exact dates.

TechCrunch reached out to Google for more information.

YouTube was late to the short form video space (it launched Shorts in 2024, several years after the launch of TikTok and Instagram Reels), but has managed to attract an audience since then. YouTube Shorts was averaging 200 billion daily views as of June 2025, CEO Neal Mohan said at keynote in Cannes last year. (We may qualify this impressive metric with the context that YouTube counts a “view” as the very first moment that a video is opened).

A report earlier this year showed that Shorts were increasingly being watched on viewers’ TV screens — and that as much as 2 billion hours of such content was being consumed per month.

AI agents are becoming more sophisticated. They are evolving from answering questions to autonomously executing multi-step complex tasks.

But before these agents can be trusted to book trips or conduct financial analysis on behalf of users, model providers and the startups building such agents want to ensure that they perform reliably across a vast range of scenarios.

AI labs often use benchmarks to show off their model’s prowess, but a high score, even on an agent-oriented benchmark, doesn’t actually prove that an AI can accomplish various complex, real-world jobs correctly.

Patronus AI, a startup founded in 2023 by former Meta AI researchers Anand Kannappan and Rebecca Qian, is helping model makers and companies fine-tune models to do just that by building simulated digital environments in which to evaluate the agents’ performance.

The San Francisco-based startup must be solving an important problem. Virtually every frontier AI lab and many emerging startups are now customers, according to Glenn Solomon, a managing director at Notable Capital, who describes demand for the company’s simulated environments as nearly insatiable.

Patronus’ revenue has grown 15-fold over the past year, fueling significant investor interest. On Thursday, the company announced a $50 million Series B round led by Greenfield Partners, with participation from Notable Capital, Lightspeed, Datadog, and Samsung. The funding brings the company’s total funding to $70 million.

Patronus uses what it calls “digital world models” to create replicas of websites and internal systems. In these environments, agents are stress-tested after training using reinforcement learning, which iteratively rewards successful task completion and penalizes errors.

AI labs see great value in these digital simulations because they give agents a chance to try different, sometimes unpredictable, scenarios. The company compares its approach to how Waymo trained autonomous cars by first building synthetic worlds to test vehicles against rare hazards, such as severe weather or a child running after a ball.

The difference with AI agents is that they tend to take shortcuts, which means they fail to complete the task correctly. “Patronus is really good at spotting the hacks and making sure they are holding the models accountable,” Solomon said.

Patronus is currently providing its simulated digital worlds for software engineering and finance, but these are just the start, according to Kannappan.

“Today we’re very focused on the problems that are verifiable, so the problems that you can immediately check and verify, but there are a ton more areas that are very non-verifiable or very hard to verify,” he said.

Just because these processes are verifiable doesn’t mean they are simple. “We want to be able to actually create the environment in which you can operate an agent that can run for 10 hours or 10 days or 10 weeks,” Kannappan said.

As for rivals, Patronus believes it is primarily competing against the internal teams AI labs have already built to evaluate agent behavior. While human-data firms like Mercor and Surge help model makers with reinforcement learning, Patronus operates differently by evaluating how agents behave without any human involvement.

Prediction market giant Polymarket confirmed that hackers stole funds from an unspecified number of users after a third party breach.

In an X post on Thursday, Polymarket said that a compromise at a third party vendor allowed hackers to inject malicious code into its website “for some users.” The company said it has “contained” the incident and is now contacting the affected victims and “refunding them in full.”

As of Thursday afternoon, it’s unclear exactly what happened. 

When reached by TechCrunch, Polymarket spokesperson Connor Brandi confirmed that the breach led to users’ funds being stolen, but declined to provide more information, nor respond to specific questions about the incident.

Around the same time as the Polymarket post, blockchain monitoring firm PeckShield reported on X that a phishing campaign was targeting Polymarket users. According to Peckshield, hackers had stolen around $3 million worth of cryptocurrency. 

A blockchain analyst also reported similar losses and claimed that the funds were stolen from more than 11 victims. 

Polymarket offers users the possibility of being paid in cryptocurrency. 

In the last couple of days, two people on social media claimed to have had their Polymarket funds stolen.

The hack is the latest blow for a company that has been in the headlines for the wrong reasons this week. On Sunday, an investigation revealed that Polymarket had paid online creators to post deceptive videos showing they won lucrative bets that were actually fake. In response, the company said it would audit its promotional content.