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Blade Runner 2049's producer sues Musk, Tesla, and WBD for allegedly using AI to create imagery close to the film, despite a denied request, to promote Cybercab (Brooks Barnes/New York Times)

Stripe announces it has finalized a deal to acquire stablecoin infrastructure company Bridge; Michael Arrington says the deal was worth $1.1B (Jamie Crawley/CoinDesk)

Dow Jones and New York Post sue AI startup Perplexity for alleged copyright infringement and say it hasn't replied to a July 2024 letter about copyright issues (Todd Spangler/Variety)

xAI launches an API for "grok-beta" priced at $5 per million input tokens or $15 per million output tokens; it is unclear which AI model "grok-beta" might be (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

UK-based Sophos plans to acquire Atlanta-based cybersecurity company Secureworks for ~$859M, expected to close in early 2025; Dell owns ~79% of Secureworks (Joe Warminsky/The Record)

Sources: Tim Cook helped Nike secure Elliott Hill as CEO in September, and has carved out a role as one of Nike's closest outside advisers during a turnaround (Bloomberg)

AMD unveils Zen 5-based X3D desktop CPUs, arriving November 7, but offers few details and no price, ahead of Intel's Core Ultra 200-series launch on October 24 (Tom Warren/The Verge)

Zip, which uses AI to help businesses manage buying goods and services, raised $190M led by BOND at a $2.2B valuation, up from $1.5B in May 2023 (Paayal Zaveri/Bloomberg)

Q&A with Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi on AI, tax, and more; in a follow-up, an exec said "at the very least the end portion of your interview should be deleted" (Nilay Patel/The Verge)

Seattle-based Carbon Robotics, which offers an AI-powered deweeding robot for farmers, raised a $70M Series D led by BOND, taking its total funding to $157M (Taylor Soper/GeekWire)

Q&A with Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis on his Nobel Prize being "a watershed moment for AI", biology, AlphaFold 3, Isomorphic Labs, drug programs, and more (Madhumita Murgia/Financial Times)

A profile of and interview with Tim Cook on being "perfectly fine with not being first", running Apple, Vision Pro, AI, the Design Studio, group chats, and more (Ben Cohen/Wall Street Journal)

Hands-on with Apple's hearing health features for AirPods Pro 2, set for iOS 18.1: hearing aids work well, hearing protection in all modes, and a hearing test (Chris Welch/The Verge)

ByteDance says it fired an intern in its ad tech team for "maliciously interfering" with AI training, and says operations were unaffected by their actions (Joo da Silva/BBC)

Investigation: a Russian espionage and hacking campaign targeted Georgia for years and breached its Foreign Ministry, Finance Ministry, central bank, and more (Bloomberg)

Microsoft unveils 10 new AI agents for its enterprise-focused Dynamics 365 apps covering sales, finance, and more, ahead of Salesforce's Agentforce availability (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)

IBM launches its open source Granite 3.0 models, including 2B and 8B general purpose versions and Mixture-of-Experts models, aimed at enterprise customers (Sean Michael Kerner/VentureBeat)

ABI expects there to be 8,400 global data centers by 2030, as investors capitalize on the AI boom; Statista projects the industry will be worth $624B by 2029 (Nicholas Fearn/Financial Times)

Tracxn: Indian health tech-related startups raised $3.7B since 2022, about half of the $7.4B raised in the sector across the Asia Pacific region (Bloomberg)

How OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic are using differing approches to improve "model behavior", an emerging field shaping AI systems' responses and characteristics (Cristina Criddle/Financial Times)

A look at the Harris campaign's outreach efforts to the tech sector, as it tries to convince that she will chart her own course but avoids specifics on policies (Washington Post)

At a protest in SF, blind Uber and Lyft users claim the companies aren't doing enough to prevent drivers from turning away passengers with visual impairments (Wired)

Sources: Perplexity is looking to raise ~$500M to double its valuation to $8B or more; Perplexity's annualized revenue is ~$50M, up from ~$10M in March (Wall Street Journal)

After Musk promises to give $1M to one swing state voter a day who signs his PAC's petition, PA's governor says "law enforcement could take a look at" the plan (Alexandra Marquez/NBC News)

About $2B has been bet on predicting the next US president on Polymarket, which has excluded US users since 2022 as part of a settlement with federal regulators (Lisa Bonos/Washington Post)

Sources: some at Apple think it is over two years behind the leaders in generative AI; a closer look at changes in Apple's HR and hardware engineering groups (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

After allegations of poor working conditions on MrBeast's Amazon Studios show Beast Games, industry insiders call for more safety oversight on creator-run sets (Daysia Tolentino/NBC News)

Anthropic evaluates four "sabotage" threat vectors for its Claude 3 Opus and Claude 3.5 Sonnet models and finds that "minimal mitigations are sufficient" (Anthropic)

In a letter, key US lawmakers urged Japan to strengthen restrictions on sales of chipmaking equipment to China or risk facing US curbs on Japanese companies (Mackenzie Hawkins/Bloomberg)

Kazakhstan-based Kaspi.kz agrees to acquire a majority share, or 65.4%, of Turkish e-commerce platform Hepsiburada for ~$1.13B, expected to close in Q1 2025 (Cate Lawrence/Tech.eu)

How Cloudflare CTO John Graham-Cumming cracked an encrypted ZIP file containing the code for a system that helped ANC members communicate safely under apartheid (Steven Levy/Wired)

Students, academics, and developers say AI writing detectors are most likely to falsely flag essays written in a more generic manner as written by AI tools (Bloomberg)

Meta Quest 3S teardown: uses Quest 2's same LCD panel and cheap Fresnel optics, replaces Quest 3's depth sensor with two IR flood illuminators, and more (Shahram Mokhtari/iFixit News)

Six months after bitcoin halving, some miners are keeping the Bitcoin they produce while an increasing number of companies are spending more on AI data centers (David Pan/Bloomberg)

How Waymo is converting locals and attracting tourists in San Francisco to pull ahead in the robotaxi race, with ~300 vehicles in the city and global ambitions (Wall Street Journal)

Q&A with Cloudflare CEO on how internet traffic surge during the pandemic helped it build an AI-ready "connectivity cloud", balkanization of the internet, more (Om Malik/Crazy Stupid Tech)

Inside the inaugural Culver Cup, a generative AI film competition sponsored by AWS and FBRC.ai giving filmmakers AI tools and three weeks to submit a short (Marah Eakin/Wired)

A historical look at Microsoft's work in AI, from research to real-world applications, recent progress, competition, challenges, and the future (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)

01.ai, DeepSeek, and other Chinese companies are reducing costs to create AI models by focusing on smaller training data sets, as they deal with export controls (Eleanor Olcott/Financial Times)

DJI sues the US DOD for adding the drone maker to a list designating it as a Chinese military company, after failing to engage on the issue for over 16 months (K Oanh Ha/Bloomberg)

In a filing, WP Engine asks a court in Northern California to issue a preliminary injunction and restore its access to the WordPress.org open source repository (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

Fuji Soft's board decided to keep backing KKR's ~$4B buyout offer despite Bain's $4.2B bid, in a rare battle between PE titans over a Japanese software company (Financial Times)

Notes on an inexpensive and effective "video scraping" technique in which the user feeds a screen recording into Google AI Studio to extract data with Gemini (Simon Willison's Weblog)

Meta debuts Spirit LM, its first open-source multimodal language model capable of integrating text and speech inputs and outputs, for non-commercial use only (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat)

Sources: former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati is raising funds for her new startup, which aims to build AI products based on proprietary models (Reuters)

Penguin Random House amends its copyright notice globally to prohibit the use of books for training AI; the notice will be included in new titles and reprints (Matilda Battersby/The Bookseller)

Terray Therapeutics, which uses AI to accelerate small-molecule drug development, raised a $120M Series B led by Bedford Ridge Capital and Nvidia's NVentures (Kyt Dotson/SiliconANGLE)

Report: OpenAI sees a clause in its Microsoft contract, which cuts off Microsoft's access to OpenAI tech if OpenAI develops AGI, as a path to a better contract (Connie Loizos/TechCrunch)

A judge grants Google a temporary stay on the Epic ruling while Google appeals, which means Google might not have to change Play Store practices for years (The Verge)

Netherlands unveils new rules requiring an export permit to sell quantum computers, quantum measurement equipment and chipmaking tech, and more outside the EU (Patrick Van Oosterom/Bloomberg)

A look at Greg Brockman's role at OpenAI, as his return from a sabbatical nears; sources: OpenAI CFO thinks Apple pulled out of fundraising due to Murati's exit (The Information)

Bluesky says it added 500K new users in a day this week after X announced plans for controversial changes, including basically getting rid of the block feature (Mia Sato/The Verge)

LinkedIn woos publishers, testing a "News Banner" on its mobile app feed and a video ad program that sources say will earn Bloomberg and WSJ $2M+ each in 2024 (Sahil Patel/The Information)

Verizon will buy some of US Cellular's spectrum licenses for $1B, contingent on closing a deal announced in May to sell some US Cellular assets to T-Mobile (Jake Rudnitsky/Bloomberg)

Nebius Group, previously Yandex NV, says it will resume trading on Nasdaq on October 21, after being halted following Russia's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine (Reuters)

Sources: Microsoft and OpenAI are negotiating how much equity Microsoft gets when OpenAI becomes a for-profit company, for which OpenAI has two years (Wall Street Journal)

NHTSA opens a probe into Tesla's Full Self-Driving, covering 2.4M vehicles, after four reported crashes in low-visibility situations, including one fatal crash (Akash Sriram/Reuters)

Perplexity launches Internal Knowledge Search, to search the web or internal files, and Spaces, a way to organize research, for its Pro and Enterprise customers (Emilia David/VentureBeat)

Government sources say India plans to limit imports of laptops, tablets, and PCs after January 2025 to push companies to increase domestic manufacturing (Shivangi Acharya/Reuters)

Sources: Samsung has postponed taking deliveries of ASML chipmaking equipment for its upcoming factory in Taylor, Texas as it has yet to win any major customers (Reuters)

Byju's founder Byju Raveendran says his edtech startup, valued at $22B in 2022, is effectively "worth zero", and that he made mistakes and mistimed the market (Manish Singh/TechCrunch)

Netflix gained 5.1M new subscribers in Q3, vs. 4M est., and says more than 50% of signups were for its ad-supported tier in countries where it was available (Reuters)

A look at Dippy, an AI companion startup that lets users see the reasoning behind their chatbot's replies, claims to have 50K DAUs, and raised a $2.1M pre-seed (Will Knight/Wired)

The US Treasury says its enhanced detection tools, including AI, helped in the prevention and recovery of $4B+ in fraudulent payments in FY 2024, up over 6x YoY (Todd Feathers/Gizmodo)

Chinese robotaxi firm Pony.ai files for a Nasdaq IPO, says its H1 2024 revenue nearly doubled to $24.7M with a net loss of $51.3M, down from $69.4M in H1 2023 (Reuters)

Sources: Intel is looking to sell at least a minority stake, or possibly a majority stake, worth billions in its Altera subsidiary at a valuation of around $17B (Rohan Goswami/CNBC)

Sources describe OpenAI and Microsoft's fraying relationship, OpenAI renegotiating its deal for more computing power, Microsoft's own LLM efforts, and more (New York Times)

Sources: the US is probing if TSMC has been making AI or smartphone chips for Huawei in breach of US sanctions, including Huawei buying chips via intermediaries (Qianer Liu/The Information)

X updates its ToS to steer any disputes by users to the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas, whose judges often favor conservative litigants (Nate Raymond/Reuters)

X updates its Privacy Policy to allow third-party "collaborators" to train their AI models on X user data, unless the user opts out, effective November 15, 2024 (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

The FCC issues new rules that will require all mobile phones sold in the US to be compatible with hearing aids, "after a transition period" (Will Shanklin/Engadget)

Netflix forecasts 2025 revenue of $43B-$44B, which would be 11%-13% higher than its 2024 guidance, and targets a 2025 operating margin of 28% vs. 27% in 2024 (Todd Spangler/Variety)

Sources: Stripe is in talks to acquire startup Bridge, a provider of infrastructure for crypto stablecoins, for $1B; Bridge raised $58M (Forbes)

Netflix reports Q3 revenue up 15% YoY to $9.83B, vs. $9.76B est., paid memberships up 14% to 282.72M, vs. 282.15M est., and net income of $2.4B (Sarah Whitten/CNBC)

Sources: Meta laid off ~100 people, at least the third such incremental layoff at Meta in 2024, separate from those let go for improper use of Grubhub credits (Kali Hays/Fortune)

Qualcomm cancels the Snapdragon Dev Kit, which was supposed to ship in June, and will offer refunds, as the product failed to meet its "standards of excellence" (Rich Woods/XDA Developers)

Abel, founded by Daniel Francis, or @growing_daniel on X, to build AI that uses body cam footage and other data to fill out police reports, raised a $5M seed (Margaux MacColl/TechCrunch)

Sources: Matt Mullenweg offered another buyout offer to Automattic staff; Mullenweg appears to have redirected staff's Blind sign-up emails to himself (Samantha Cole/404 Media)

Memo: Google will block US election ads after the polls close on November 5 to prevent misinfo about voting, including candidates prematurely claiming victory (Sara Fischer/Axios)

Sam Altman's Worldcoin rebrands as World, unveils a new Orb powered by Nvidia's Jetson chipset, plans to integrate its ID verification into other software, more (Ina Fried/Axios)

Sports Headlines Today
[Mon-21-Oct-2024]

2024 MLB Free Agents: Latest Rumors, Predictions Before World Series Bracket - Bleacher Report

35 clubs jostle for Emir of Ilorin Cup - Daily Trust

4 Fights We Need to See After UFC Fight Night 245 - Bleacher Report

4 Lessons Every WNBA Team Can Learn from the New York Liberty's Title Run - Bleacher Report

49ers' Ricky Pearsall: 'Huge Blessing' to Make NFL Debut vs. Chiefs After Being Shot - Bleacher Report

A Quiet Place The Road Ahead Review: Gameplay Impressions, Videos and Features - Bleacher Report

Aaron Rodgers Takes Blame for 'S--tty INT'; Davante Reacts to Jets' Loss vs. Steelers - Bleacher Report

AJ Dybantsa vs. Cameron Boozer Matchup Excites Fans in Game of Top 2025 CBB Recruits - Bleacher Report

Ajibade Leads 24 Other Falcons Invited for Algerian Friendlies - Thisday

All eyes on CAF as disciplinary committee meets on Libya, Nigeria AFCON fiasco - Guardian

Angel Reese, Cash App Partner Following WNBA All-Star's Comments in Viral Video - Bleacher Report

Antonio Pierce, Raiders Criticized By NFL Fans for Loss vs. Rams After Davante Trade - Bleacher Report

Arokodare scores, Simon renders assist to complete a delightful weekend - Punch

Arokodare scores, Simon renders assist to complete a delightful weekend - Punch

Ashton Jeanty Responds to Travis Hunter's Viral Comments About Heisman Race in Video - Bleacher Report

ASU's Dillingham Apologizes for Ripping 'Atrocious' Kicking Game After 2 Missed FGs - Bleacher Report

B/R Experts Week 8 NFL Power Rankings: Where Does Every Team Stand - Bleacher Report

Bill Belichick: I Feel Bad for Patriots Defensive Players After Mayo's 'Soft' Remarks - Bleacher Report

Bills' Keon Coleman on Viral Amari Cooper TD Video vs. Titans: 'He Knows the Plays - Bleacher Report

Boniface involved in car accident - African Football

Boniface survives car crash in Germany - Punch

Boniface survives car crash in Germany - Punch

Breanna Stewart, Liberty Celebrated By Fans for 1st-Ever WNBA Title Win vs. Lynx - Bleacher Report

Browns Rumors: Deshaun Watson to Explore 'Aaron Rodgers' Surgery on Achilles Injury - Bleacher Report

Car crash: Leverkusen explain Boniface's health condition - Punch

Car crash: Leverkusen explain Bonifaces health condition - Punch

Celtics' Jayson Tatum: 'There Was Doubt in the Toughest Moments' I'd Win NBA Title - Bleacher Report

CFB Week 8 Takeaways: Georgia Wrecks Texas as Playoff Crashers Line Up - Bleacher Report

Chiefs Win Super Bowl Rematch vs. 49ers as Mahomes, Purdy Struggles Baffle NFL Fans - Bleacher Report

College Football Picks Week 9: Top 25 Odds, Box Score Predictions, Rankings, Schedule - Bleacher Report

Colts vs. Vikings Flexed into NFL Week 9 SNF Slot; Replaces Jaguars vs. Eagles - Bleacher Report

Daniel Jones 'Frustrated. Didn't Like' Benching in Giants' Loss vs. Saquon, Eagles - Bleacher Report

Davante Adams Rumors: Some Raiders Felt WR's Attitude Changed When Minshew Signed - Bleacher Report

Dolphins' Tua Tagovailoa Designated to Return from IR; QB in Concussion Protocol - Bleacher Report

Dominican Republic 2024: Flamingos shoot into quarter-finals with 4-0 defeat of Ecuador - Guardian

Drafting the Teams for WWE Survivor Series 2024 WarGames Match - Bleacher Report

Dubois warns Joshua ahead of rematch - Punch

Dubois warns Joshua ahead of rematch - Punch

Duke's Cooper Flagg, UNC's RJ Davis Headline 2024 AP Preseason MCBB All-American Team - Bleacher Report

Eagles stars on rampage across Europe leagues - New Telegraph

Eagles' Saquon Barkley: I Talked More 'S--t' vs. Giants Than I Usually Do in Games - Bleacher Report

EPL: Palmer, Gravenberch to clash in Liverpool-Chelsea battle - Punch

EPL: Three talking points from weekend's premier league showdown - Punch

EPL: Three talking points from weekend's premier league showdown - Punch

Fantasy Basketball 2024: Deep NBA Sleepers After Preseason - Bleacher Report

Fantasy Football Week 8: Waiver-Wire Pickups, Rankings and Box Score Stat Projections - Bleacher Report

Fantasy Trade Market: Buying or Selling Cooper Kupp, NFL Stars Returning from Injury - Bleacher Report

First batch of 100 LSFA grassroots coaches complete training course at NIS - New Telegraph

Flamingos 4-0 spanking of Ecuador thrills Enoh - Guardian

Garrett Wilson Says 'I'm Playing Like S--t'; Rodgers Defends WR amid NFL Trade Rumors - Bleacher Report

Hembadoon Orsar emerges first female Benue SWAN chairman - The Sun

How does professional skiing work - Vanguard

Jets' Xavier Newman Out with Neck Injury After Being Stretchered Off vs. Steelers - Bleacher Report

Jimmy Butler's Agent Dismisses Heat Contract, Trade Rumors as 'Disrespectful - Bleacher Report

Jonquel Jones Wins 2024 WNBA Finals MVP as Liberty Win 1st-Ever Championship vs. Lynx - Bleacher Report

Kayode's hat-trick delights 'anl'urfaspor - Punch

Kayodes hat-trick delights anlurfaspor - Punch

Knicks' Jalen Brunson Talks Celtics, Pacers Rivalries, WWE and More in B/R Interview - Bleacher Report

Kudus set for lengthy ban - African Football