PCs that can run large AI models may drive an enterprise PC replacement cycle, but some CIOs say they'll wait for the category to mature and prices to come down (Isabelle Bousquette/Wall Street Journal)
A look at Los Angeles' Homelessness Prevention pilot program, which uses AI to identify those at risk of becoming homeless, offering aid to keep them housed (Kate Rogers/CNBC)
An interview with Linus Torvalds at the Open Source Summit North America on the XZ Utils exploit, open source development, RISC-V, AI, and more (David Cassel/The New Stack)
The US Senate reauthorizes FISA's Section 702; some communication service providers had threatened to stop cooperating with the US government in case of a lapse (Gaby Del Valle/The Verge)
Court filing: OpenAI says Elon Musk's claim that the company has abandoned its altruistic principles is "revisionist history" and a bid to boost his AI company (Robert Burnson/Bloomberg)
Google scraps a 2019 policy requiring US suppliers and staffing firms to pay their employees $15 an hour and provide health insurance and other benefits (Daniel Wiessner/Reuters)
National Bureau of Statistics: China's integrated circuit output rose 40% YoY to 98.1B units in Q1, a sign that the country is expanding legacy chip production (Coco Feng/South China Morning Post)
SK Hynix partners with TSMC to develop next-gen HBM4 chips, which are critical for AI and slated for mass production in 2026, and advanced chip packaging tech (Nikkei Asia)
Filing: a group of FTX investors and customers agree to drop their claims against SBF if he cooperates in cases against celebrities and others who pushed FTX (Bloomberg)
China publishes measures to boost foreign investment in its domestic technology sector, including encouraging tech companies to raise money via bond issuance (Reuters)
Bitcoin's fourth halving is now complete, lowering miners' block subsidy rewards from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC; the third halving was in May 2020 (James Hunt/The Block)
Pornhub, Stripchat, and XVideos will have to comply with additional obligations, such as submitting risk assessment reports, under the EU DSA starting next week (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters)
Nvidia closed down 10% on Friday, falling the most since March 2020 and losing more than $200B of its market value, as investors pull back from AI bets (George Steer/Financial Times)
Nothing rolls out ChatGPT integration for Nothing Phone (2) and Nothing earbuds, including voice and text widgets for the phone (Ben Schoon/9to5Google)
Telegram partners with Tether to let the messaging app's ~900M users send USDT to each other through The Open Network blockchain (Ryan Browne/CNBC)
Post.News, the news-focused social platform launched in 2022 that offered micropayments to publishers, is shutting down after failing to grow "fast enough" (Emma Roth/The Verge)
Midas, which lets users in Turkey invest in US and Turkish equities, raised a $45M Series A, after a $11M seed in 2022, and plans crypto trading and more (Mike Butcher/TechCrunch)
Sources: EU may accept Apple's proposal to open its NFC payments tech to rivals, and may close its antitrust probe in May, letting Apple avoid hefty fines (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters)
Hacking group GhostR claims it stole 5.3M records from World-Check screening database used for KYC checks for sanctions and financial crime links (Zack Whittaker/TechCrunch)
Sources describe the detention of Binance officials, including compliance officer Tigran Gambaryan, by Nigeria on charges of tax evasion and money laundering (New York Times)
Web design and hosting platform Webflow acquires Intellimize, which raised $50M and offers AI-powered webpage personalization, a source says for "eight-figures" (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)
Meta is restricting certain election-related keywords for Meta AI in India due to ongoing elections; Meta started testing its AI chatbot in India last week (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
Sources: Mistral plans to raise 500M at an over 5B valuation from multiple VCs and wealth funds, after raising ~400M at a 2B valuation in December 2023 (Financial Times)
A look at Salad, which pays gamers in Fortnite skins and Roblox gift cards to rent their GPUs remotely to AI companies, including those making AI-generated porn (Emanuel Maiberg/404 Media)
Sophos researchers find "crude", cheap ransomware tools being sold on the dark web, enabling inexperienced freelancers to easily launch attacks (James Reddick/The Record)
Internal draft: UK's ICO says Google's Privacy Sandbox falls short and leaves gaps that can be exploited to undermine privacy of users who should be anonymous (Wall Street Journal)
Apple removes WhatsApp and Threads from its App Store in China, saying it was ordered to do so by China's cyberspace officials citing national security concerns (Raffaele Huang/Wall Street Journal)
Washington, DC-based Cape, which is developing a mobile service that doesn't ask for customers' personal data, raised a $40M Series B co-led by A-Star and a16z (Ingrid Lunden/TechCrunch)
Microsoft researchers introduce VASA-1, an AI model that creates a realistic talking face video from a portrait photo and an audio file, in research preview (Ryan Morrison/Tom's Guide)
Q&A with Mark Zuckerberg on Llama 3, buying H100 GPUs for Reels, AGI, energy constraints, dangers of open source, the metaverse, Meta's custom silicon, and more (Dwarkesh Patel/Dwarkesh Podcast)
Digital marketing software company Ibotta closes up 17% at $103.25 per share in its trading debut, after raising ~$577.3M in an IPO priced above marketed range (Bloomberg)
Google says it will consolidate teams that focus on building AI models across Research and DeepMind, and move its Responsible AI teams in Research to DeepMind (Zaheer Kachwala/Reuters)
Meta cuts the price of the base 128GB Quest 2 from $249 to $199, its second permanent price cut in four months, after a drop from $299 to $249 in January (Kris Holt/Engadget)
Netflix won't report subscriber numbers or Average Revenue per Membership starting in Q1 2025, saying time spent is its "best proxy for customer satisfaction" (Todd Spangler/Variety)
Netflix reports Q1 revenue up 15% YoY to $9.37B, vs. $9.28B est., paid users up 16% YoY to 269.6M, vs. 264.2M est., and net income $2.3B, up from $1.3B YoY (Sarah Whitten/CNBC)
Meta claims both Llama 3 models beat similarly sized models like Gemini, Mistral, and Claude 3 on certain benchmarks; humans marked Llama 3 higher than GPT-3.5 (Emilia David/The Verge)
A US jury finds Avraham Eisenberg, a crypto trader who stole $110M on the Mango Markets exchange in 2022, guilty of fraud despite his "code is law" claim (Crystal Kim/Axios)
Short-form video app Triller is merging with Hong Kong financial services company AGBA; Triller shareholders will own 80% of the combined company valued at $4B (Daniel Tencer/Music Business Worldwide)
DARPA reveals that an AI-controlled X-62A jet successfully faced a human pilot in an F-16 during an in-air dogfight test carried out in 2023 (Emma Roth/The Verge)
Meta rolls out real-time AI image generation, which changes the image as the user types a prompt, in beta on WhatsApp and Meta AI on the web in the US (Emma Roth/The Verge)
Sources: cloud security startup Wiz is in advanced talks to acquire competitor Lacework for $150M-$200M; Lacework raised $1.8B and was valued at $8.3B in 2021 (The Information)
Meta details Llama 3: 8B and 70B parameters models and a focus on reducing false refusals; an upcoming large model trained on 15T tokens and has 400B parameters (Alex Heath/The Verge)
Meta plans to add its Meta AI chatbot to Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Facebook in 12+ countries, expanding on the US, powered by its new Llama 3 models (New York Times)
TSMC says the April 3 Taiwan earthquake caused an estimated losses of $92.44M to the company in Q2; there were no power outages or structural damage to its fabs (Reuters)
Google unveils internal reorganizations, including an AI-focused Platforms and Devices group overseeing Pixel, Android, Chrome, and more, led by Rick Osterloh (David Pierce/The Verge)
US House Speaker plans to bundle the TikTok divestiture bill, with a revised proposal, in a Ukraine and Israel aid bill expected to clear the Senate on April 20 (Bloomberg)
Brave Search introduces Answer with AI, which shows answers synthesized from multiple sources for informational queries, appearing above organic search results (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
Intel Foundry completes the assembly of the first commercial High-NA EUV chipmaking tool, a day after ASML set an EUV system record by printing 10nm dense lines (Paul Alcorn/Tom's Hardware)
Spend management startup Ramp raised a $150M Series D extension at a $7.65B valuation, up from $5.8B after raising $300M in 2023 but down from $8.1B in 2022 (Mary Ann Azevedo/TechCrunch)
US court documents, mistakenly made public, reveal ByteDance and TikTok's complex origin story, spawning from GOP donor Jeff Yass' failed real estate venture (New York Times)
Europol, law enforcement in 19 countries, Microsoft, and others disrupt phishing-as-a-service platform LabHost in a year-long operation and make 37 arrests (Bill Toulas/BleepingComputer)
Nothing unveils the $149 Nothing Ear and $99 Nothing Ear (a), offering improved sound, personalization, and battery life; Nothing plans to integrate ChatGPT (Chris Welch/The Verge)
TSMC CEO CC Wei says the company plans to charge customers more for making chips outside of Taiwan, citing a "fragmented globalization environment" (Kathrin Hille/Financial Times)
A look at Apple's iPhone recycling, including shredding robots, and contractor GEEP, which Apple sued in 2020 for $22.6M in a case that has since been inactive (Austin Carr/Bloomberg)
Investigation: Amazon sells ~$1M per year in goods on eBay, Shopify, Walmart, and Amazon via its "Big River" arm, to get data on pricing, logistics, and more (Wall Street Journal)
Twitch plans to roll out its TikTok-style discovery feed later in April, letting users scroll clips and livestreams, after testing the feature for a year (Emma Roth/The Verge)
An interview with Reddit Chief Product Officer Pali Bhat on the company's roadmap: faster load times, new moderator and developer tools, and AI translation (Amanda Silberling/TechCrunch)
French B2B software company Planisware raised 278M in a Paris IPO; its shares jumped up to 33% to ~21 on its debut, giving Planisware a 1.1B valuation (Thyagaraju Adinarayan/Bloomberg)
Apple plans to spend $250M+ on its regional hub in Singapore, including expanding its campus later in 2024, as Tim Cook visits Vietnam and other Asian countries (Amanda Lee/Wall Street Journal)
Huawei releases its Pura 70 series, available for ~$760 to ~$1,380; reviewers show high-end models have a Kirin 9010 chip, an update to the Mate 60 Pro's 9000s (Bloomberg)
Document: Microsoft added 500+ megawatts of data center capacity since July 2023 and topped five gigawatts of total capacity in the H1 of its latest fiscal year (Eugene Kim/Business Insider)
How one author gained a limited copyright for the "selection, coordination, and arrangement of text" from AI, as the US Copyright Office wrestles with AI law (Kate Knibbs/Wired)
Crypto miners are stockpiling bitcoins ahead of April 20 halving; TheMinerMag: Marathon Digital, CleanSpark, and Bitfarms hoarded ~$2B worth of bitcoins (Scott Chipolina/Financial Times)
TSMC reports Q1 revenue up 16.5% YoY to NT$592.64B ($18.87B) vs. NT$582.94B est., profit up 8.9% YoY to NT$225.49B vs. NT$213.59B est., on strong AI chip demand (Sheila Chiang/CNBC)
An experiment with LLMs: the tools are helpful in mundane ways but you can't build a hundred-billion-dollar industry around a technology that's kind of useful (Molly White/Citation Needed)
Research suggests GPT-4 surpassed or achieved the same scores as all but top-scoring specialist medics in assessing ocular problems and suggesting treatments (Michael Peel/Financial Times)
Google fires 28 employees over their participation in a 10-hour sit-in at the company's New York and Sunnyvale offices to protest its business ties with Israel (Thomas Barrabi/New York Post)
AWS discontinues its Snowmobile service, an 18-wheeler truck introduced in 2016 to help customers transport large amounts of on-premises data to AWS facilities (CNBC)
Filing: 23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki is seeking to take the company private after three years in public markets that saw its valuation collapse from a high of $6B (Rolfe Winkler/Wall Street Journal)
Walmart-backed digital marketing software company Ibotta raises ~$577.3M in its IPO at a share price of $88, giving it a market value of $2.67B (Amy Or/Bloomberg)
Sources: Micron could get $6B+ in chip grants from the US Commerce Department for domestic factory projects; the award could be announced as soon as next week (Mackenzie Hawkins/Bloomberg)
Intel unveils Hala Point, a large-scale neuromorphic system deployed at Sandia National Laboratories, with 1,152 Loihi 2 processors simulating 1M neurons each (Ryan Smith/AnandTech)
The US CFPB fines BloomTech, formerly Lambda School, and CEO Austen Allred $164K and bans it from lending for 10 years for deceiving students on loans, and more (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)
The US NIST appoints as head of AI safety former OpenAI researcher Paul Christiano, who has been criticized for "AI doomer" views and ties to effective altruism (Ashley Belanger/Ars Technica)
TikTok starts rolling out TikTok Notes, its Instagram rival for sharing photo and text content, for limited testing in Australia and Canada on Android and iOS (Sheena Vasani/The Verge)
Boston Dynamics debuts an electric version of humanoid robot Atlas for commercial use, a day after retiring the hydraulic Atlas, with a pilot starting in 2025 (Brian Heater/TechCrunch)
Colorado Governor Jared Polis signs a bill that, for the first time in the US, expands the state's personal privacy law to include consumer "neural data" (Jonathan Moens/New York Times)
Worldcoin announces World Chain, a Layer 2 Ethereum blockchain designed to prioritize verified humans over bots, slated for release this summer (Sam Kessler/CoinDesk)
MTAC report: foreign malign influence from Russia, China, and Iran in the US presidential election got off to a slower start this year compared to 2016 and 2020 (Clint Watts/Microsoft On the Issues)
Third-party iOS app store AltStore PAL launches in the EU for 1.50 a year with two apps including game emulator Delta, which is also live on Apple's App Store (The Verge)
Another Black Sunday Night - Leadership
The ruling party and the opposition - Peoples Daily
Wadume's Homecoming And Matters Arising - Leadership
