Tim Cook says Apple will “break new ground” on generative AI this year; Apple shareholders reject a request for report into whether Apple is using AI ethically — - Shareholders approve recommendations for board, executive pay — Longtime directors Al Gore and James Bell officially step down
Memo: SBF's lawyers suggest a short sentence of five to six years in prison, citing medical conditions, including autism, and his philanthropic giving — Lawyers for the FTX founder say he wasn't motivated by greed but by a desire to better the world through philanthropic giving
Sources: Sonos delays its launch of $449 headphones to June, a month later than previously hoped, after hitting software snags, and aims to make up to 1M units — - Company anticipates shipping $449 product in June after delay — Sonos aims to manufacture as many as 1 million units
Q&A with Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi about the Indian market, competition, achieving profitability, regrets about selling UberEats in India, regulations, more — Dara Khosrowshahi took over as the CEO of Uber Technologies in 2017, when the mobility firm was in its most controversial period.
Xiaomi launches Xiaomi 14 Ultra with a 6.73" LTPO 120Hz display, Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, and 50MP camera with a 1-inch-type Sony LYT-900 sensor, starting at €1,499 — Xiaomi is using MWC to launch two of its flagships for a global audience — though not including the US, as usual.
Reddit's S-1 shows how dependent the site is on the unpaid labor of 60K active daily moderators and the whims of its users and subreddits like r/WallStreetBets — The company's IPO prospectus makes clear how dependent it is on unpaid labor and the whims of its community.
How tensions between past and present leaders of Sequoia, which had a reputation for quiet competence, have spilled into the open with the Klarna boardroom spat — Tension between past and present leaders of Silicon Valley's premier venture group have spilled into the open
Many redditors say they are not enthused about Reddit's IPO and expect CEO Steve Huffman to run the site into the ground while trying to make it profitable — There's the mention of r/WallStreetBets. (Five mentions in total, actually.) There's the stockpile it's amassed of Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Google confirms “a small subset of users” have been temporarily unable to access the News tab filter in search results pages as part of ongoing testing — The News filter disappearing from Google search results for some users this week won't help publishers sleep any easier.
Florida's legislature passed one of US' most restrictive bills on minors' use of social media despite 1A concerns; the bill needs approval of Gov. Ron DeSantis — A bill to create one of the nation's most restrictive bans on minors' use of social media is heading to Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis …
Google DeepMind announces AI Safety and Alignment, an organization that includes a new team focused on AGI safety alongside existing teams working on AI safety — If you ask Gemini, Google's flagship GenAI model, to write deceptive content about the upcoming U.S. presidential election, it will, given the right prompt.
Filing: Roblox paid out a record $740.8M to over 12,000 game creators in 2023, up 19% YoY; ~3,500 creators earned over $10,000, and ~750 earned over $100K — - About 12,000 game creators generated money from the site — The majority of Roblox players are 16 years old or younger
Apple Music debuts a monthly version of Replay, with insights like total listening time, top songs, artists, and albums, and makes 2024's Replay Mix available — Apple today updated the Apple Music Replay experience, available at replay.music.apple.com, with visualizations of your favorite music habits …
Microsoft fixes a bug that caused Edge to automatically import Chrome tabs and browsing data without consent, following months of complaints from some users — Microsoft has fixed an issue where its Edge browser was again misbehaving, this time by automatically importing browsing data and tabs from Chrome without consent.
Wyze says ~13,000 customers could briefly see others' camera feeds, after a similar issue in 2023; Wyze blames glitches in rebooting systems after an AWS outage — It's, unfortunately, increasingly common for security cameras to have a glitch that exposes data from one user's system …
Q&A with Laela Sturdy, the head of Alphabet's growth stage venture arm CapitalG, about its decision-making process, AI strategy, Stripe's valuation, and more — Almost a year ago, Alphabet's growth stage venture arm, CapitalG, named partner Laela Sturdy as its new head, just as the unit's founder, David Lawee, stepped down.
Hands-on with Khan Academy's ChatGPT-powered AI tutoring bot Khanmigo, which frequently makes basic arithmetic errors, as Khan Academy works to improve accuracy — Khanmigo, a ChatGPT-powered bot, made frequent calculation errors during a Journal reporter's test
SPEC invalidates 2,600 benchmark results for some Intel Xeon CPUs, saying their compiler artificially inflated the results of its benchmark by as much as 9% — SPEC says Intel's Xeon processors were using a compiler that artificially inflated the results of its industrial benchmark by as much as 9%.
Sources: UK chip designer Graphcore explores a sale to foreign owners in a deal that could be worth $500M+; rumoured buyers include OpenAI, SoftBank, and Arm — Graphcore in talks with major tech companies after struggling to cash in on AI boom — The British microchip champion Graphcore …
How tech workers, spurred by geopolitical threats, are embracing battlefield tech; PitchBook: VCs invested $108B in defense tech companies between 2021 and 2023 — After a decade of building the future, tech's new guard is going back to the American past — spurring a funding frenzy in defense technology
OpenAI, Google, Meta, TikTok, X, and others sign a voluntary accord at the Munich Security Conference to fight AI-generated deepfakes designed to mislead voters — Major technology companies signed a pact Friday to voluntarily adopt “reasonable precautions” to prevent artificial intelligence tools …
OpenAI unveils its first text-to-video model, Sora, which can create up to a minute of 1080p video, as a research product for some creators and security experts — OpenAI's entry into generative AI video is an impressive first step. — We already know that OpenAI's chatbots can pass the bar exam without going to law school.
Filings: Sam Altman is the sole owner of the OpenAI Startup Fund, which reported $175M in total commitments in May 2023; Microsoft is an outside limited partner — - By last May it reported $175 million in total commitments, and a portfolio that included video editor Descript and legal tool Harvey.
Rasa, which provides a framework and a low-code UI to help enterprises build AI chatbots, raised a $30M Series C co-led by StepStone Group and PayPal Ventures — It's no fun as a customer to have an interaction with a bot when it's clearly a bot with which you're engaging.
Zuckerberg makes valid points on the Quest 3 being better overall than the Vision Pro today, but he risks having his own “Ballmer laughs off the iPhone” moment — After trying the Vision Pro, Mark Zuckerberg says Quest 3 ‘is the better product, period’ — Here we go again.
Yoolim Lee / Bloomberg : Sources: Seoul-based AI chip designer FuriosaAI seeks to raise a $300M-$500M Series D to fund mass production of...
