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Google announces its new Arm-based Axion chips for AI, with up to 30% better performance over Arm-based rivals, set to launch to cloud customers later in 2024 (Wall Street Journal)

An investigation finds a shadowy supply chain for Starlink terminals to US foes in Russia and Sudan via Africa, Asia, and the UAE; SpaceX has not shut them off (Wall Street Journal)

Sources: the US plans to award Samsung $6B+ next week to build four chip facilities in Taylor, Texas, including a $17B plant, as part of the $52B CHIPS Act (Alexandra Alper/Reuters)

Trump Media & Technology Group's stock slumped 36% since March 26, wiping out $2.8B in market value as retail traders sell; Trump's stake is now worth ~$2.9B (Bailey Lipschultz/Bloomberg)

In some US schools, boys have used AI "nudification" apps to create and share deepfakes of clothed female classmates, leading districts to scramble to respond (Natasha Singer/New York Times)

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol says the country plans to invest ~$7B in AI by 2027, and will create a separate ~$1B fund to foster AI chip companies (Reuters)

Q&A with Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince on the company's role in protecting free speech online, operating in war zones, moderation, never doing layoffs, and more (Nilay Patel/The Verge)

Sources: Cruise plans to resume its robotaxi service with safety drivers in Phoenix as early as April 9; Cruise says it "had not set a timeline for deployment" (Bloomberg)

Interviews with 12+ former and current employees: ByteDance faces backlash from its US TikTok staff over large tax bills on stock shares they are unable to sell (Financial Times)

A look at Android 15's Private Space feature, similar to Samsung's Secure Folder, which creates a separate profile for hiding apps and data (Mishaal Rahman/Android Authority)

Grow Therapy, which provides services like patient-provider matching and EHR to help therapists run their own practices, raised an $88M Series C led by Sequoia (Heather Landi/Fierce Healthcare)

Sources: Applied Materials may scale back or cancel plans to open a $4B R&D facility in Silicon Valley due to a lack of government funding (Shira Stein/San Francisco Chronicle)

The Internet Archive is hosting the new Aruba Collection, which contains 100K+ items from Aruba's National Library, National Archives, and other institutions (Kate Knibbs/Wired)

Source: Meta plans to launch two small non-multimodal versions of Llama 3 next week; the biggest Llama 3 model will be multimodal and is expected this summer (Sylvia Varnham O'Regan/The Information)

Filing: Tesla settles a lawsuit over Apple engineer Walter Huang's 2018 fatal Autopilot crash a day before the trial was set to begin; details are not disclosed (Trisha Thadani/Washington Post)

Google rebrands Studio Bot, its AI-powered app development chatbot for Android Studio, to "Gemini in Android Studio", and upgrades its model to Gemini 1.0 Pro (Kyle Bradshaw/9to5Google)

Model N, a public company focusing on helping health companies automate pricing and compliance decisions, is being acquired by Vista Equity Partners for $1.25B (Paul Sawers/TechCrunch)

TikTok expands TikTok Lite, which gives people financial incentives to watch its videos, to Spain and France, amid growth struggles in Europe (Kaya Yurieff/The Information)

IDC: the PC market grew 1.5% YoY in Q1 with 59.8M shipments, despite weaker demand in China, following two years of decline (Jaspreet Singh/Reuters)

A look at the Amazon Labor Union, two years after its victory at an NYC facility, as the group is divided, running out of funds, and faces a leadership election (Haleluya Hadero/Associated Press)

Docs: after months of staffers sniping about the war in Gaza, Google is tweaking its internal message board Memegen, removing "thumbs down", post metrics, more (Nico Grant/New York Times)

Google debuts its Find My Device network in the US and Canada, initially to find Android phones and tablets; support for 3rd-party tracker tags is coming in May (Abner Li/9to5Google)

Sources: Microsoft is confident upcoming Windows laptops using Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite chips will beat an M3-powered MacBook Air in CPU and AI performance (Tom Warren/The Verge)

Nielsen data from 2021 to 2023: nine of the ten most-watched streaming programs are reruns, but a majority of the 100 most popular titles are original series (Bloomberg)

Solana grapples with congestion issues, leading to delays in transaction processing and transactions being dropped, due to spam transactions and memecoins (Vishal Chawla/The Block)

Avraham Eisenberg, a crypto trader the US says stole $110M on the Mango Markets exchange in 2022, begins his trial this week, testing "code is law" claims (Bloomberg)

Tesla faces a trial in San Jose this week over Apple engineer Walter Huang's fatal Autopilot crash in 2018; Tesla prevailed in two previous California trials (Dana Hull/Bloomberg)

Sources and filings: Sam Altman's net worth reaches $1B, driven by startup investments in Reddit, Stripe, YC companies, and others, despite no equity in OpenAI (Forbes)

Montenegro's Supreme Court overturns Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon's extradition to South Korea; Kwon's lawyers had pushed for South Korea over the US (Vincent Lee/Bloomberg)

Filing: Denver-based digital marketing company Ibotta prices its 2.5M IPO shares at $76-$84 each, seeking to raise $472.5M; Ibotta had a $1B valuation in 2019 (Bloomberg)

PitchBook: VC investment in crypto startups rose 32% QoQ to $2.5B in Q1 2024, down from $2.6B in Q1 2023, after a brutal year for crypto and blockchain startups (Hannah Miller/Bloomberg)

Internal Kremlin documents from May 2022 to August 2023 show an ongoing campaign to promote American isolationism via fabricated news articles and social media (Washington Post)

Sources: Pegatron is in advanced talks to hand over its only iPhone plant in India to the Tata Group, which will hold a 65%+ stake; Apple supports the move (Reuters)

Alibaba cuts prices for cloud customers by 23% on average across ~500 cloud product specifications in 13 regions, seeking to fend off rivals and revive growth (Sarah Zheng/Bloomberg)

Microsoft announces Microsoft AI London, a new hub for its consumer AI division led by former Inflection AI and DeepMind engineer Jordan Hoffmann (Paul Sawers/TechCrunch)

Emails: Xbox President Sarah Bond establishes a game preservation team, and reiterates plans for the next Xbox to aim for the "biggest technical leap ever" (Jez Corden/Windows Central)

Lime plans to spend $55M in 2024 to expand its e-bike fleet, adding 30K+ bikes in North America and elsewhere, and reports 2023 gross bookings up 32% to $616M (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)

Web Summit co-founder Paddy Cosgrave confirms returning as Web Summit CEO; Cosgrave resigned in October 2023 over controversial comments on the Israel-Hamas war (TechCrunch)

The US awards TSMC $6.6B in grants and up to $5B in loans to build a third Arizona fab, slated to make 2nm chips by 2030, alongside TSMC's $65B+ investment (Bloomberg)

Cybertech Global and IVC: in 2023, Israeli cybersecurity exit deals grew by 65% YoY to $7.1B; total tech sector exits were ~$11B, down from $13.5B in 2022 (Steven Scheer/Reuters)

How the increasing use of unreliable AI-powered accessibility widgets on company websites to comply with regulations has prompted thousands of lawsuits globally (Joanna S Kao/Financial Times)

Spotify launches AI Playlist in beta for its Premium users in the UK and Australia, letting users generate playlists using a text prompt (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

A look at Towa Corp., which TechInsights says commands two-thirds of the global chip molding equipment market and has seen shares jump ~400% in the past year (Bloomberg)

Maryland's legislature passed two privacy bills, one restricting data collection practices and the other focused on minors' safety on social platforms (Natasha Singer/New York Times)

A Brazilian Supreme Court justice opens inquiry into Elon Musk for obstruction of justice involving X and says X faces ~$20K/day in fines if it does not comply (Anthony Boadle/Reuters)

Lawmakers share a draft of the American Privacy Rights Act, which would create a registry of data brokers, let consumers opt out of some data collection, more (Orion Donovan Smith/Spokesman.com)

How some teachers are using AI tools like ChatGPT, Writable, Grammarly, and EssayGrader to help grade papers, make lesson plans, and create assignments (Samantha Murphy Kelly/CNN)

Elon Musk says X is "lifting all restrictions" it imposed in Brazil after a court ruling to block "certain popular accounts" and is defying the court's ruling (Anthony Boadle/Reuters)

Canada unveils a CA$2.4B package of measures to boost its AI sector and provide access to computing capabilities and technical infrastructure (Mathieu Dion/Bloomberg)

Thoughts on Apple's search for a new growth engine, Spatial Personas, and Kevin Lynch's move to the AI group; sources: new iPads may launch the week of May 6 (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

A look at Huawei's efforts to make HarmonyOS a formidable rival to iOS and Android; Counterpoint: 16% of smartphones sold in China in Q4 2023 used HarmonyOS (Nikkei Asia)

Experts say the US government and tech companies are failing to mount a clear response to the theft of trade secrets by Chinese corporate and government spies (NBC News)

Dune Analytics: decentralized exchange Uniswap tops $2T in all-time trading volume after breaching $1T in May 2022 and remains the largest DEX by trading volume (Brayden Lindrea/Cointelegraph)

Mahbod Moghadam, the controversial co-founder of Genius and Everipedia, passed away in March at age 41, according to a post on Genius attributed to his family (Connie Loizos/TechCrunch)

X says it has been "forced by court decisions to block certain popular accounts in Brazil" and is barred from giving details of the order (Reuters)

A profile of former Tinder CEO Renate Nyborg and her new startup Meeno, which provides an AI-powered chatbot for relationship advice on iOS and has raised $4.9M (Madhumita Murgia/Financial Times)

Email: Galaxy Digital's venture arm, which has long invested its own money, is raising a $100M fund with outside capital, focused on early-stage crypto startups (Danny Nelson/CoinDesk)

Report: Google changed its privacy policy in June 2022 to more broadly cover its use of publicly available content, including Google Docs, to train AI models (Cheyenne MacDonald/Engadget)

A look at OnlyFans AI chatbot startups, which are replacing some low-wage workers with bots trained on creators' chats to mimic their dirty talk and upselling (Alexandra Sternlicht/Fortune)

Source: Y Combinator is inviting some alumni entrepreneurs to invest a minimum of $250,000, which will be split among the three funds it is currently raising (Kia Kokalitcheva/Axios)

Sources: Meta debated buying a publisher like Simon & Schuster for AI training data and weighed using copyrighted online data even if that meant facing lawsuits (New York Times)

Sources: OpenAI transcribed 1M+ hours of YouTube videos through Whisper and used the text to train GPT-4; Google also transcribed YouTube videos to harvest text (New York Times)

A look at Monument Valley, a puzzle game developed by ustwo that won Apple's design award in 2014 and stood out in a market dominated by free-to-play titles (Lewis Gordon/The Ringer)

TSMC's swift response to the earthquake highlights the readiness of Taiwan's chip sector, and experts say Japan's chip industry is similarly well-prepared (Nikkei Asia)

Wiz details two now-fixed security issues on the Hugging Face AI platform that put customer data at risk, as Hugging Face partners with Wiz to improve security (Kevin Poireault/Infosecurity)

Belgium-based Robovision, which offers AI-based no-code computer vision tools to businesses, raised a $42M Series A co-led by Astanor Ventures and Target Global (Anna Heim/TechCrunch)

Sources: ByteDance, which was directly involved in countering US efforts to ban TikTok in 2020, has let the US TikTok team lead the response this time around (South China Morning Post)

Court filings from FTC lawsuit against Meta show Instagram made $32.4B in ad revenue in 2021, which is more than YouTube's $28.8B in ad revenue that year (Peter Kafka/Business Insider)

Researchers detail how hackers use hijacked Facebook pages to push ads promoting fake AI services to spread malware; a fake Midjourney page had 1.2M followers (Bill Toulas/BleepingComputer)

Snapchat turns off Solar System, which lets users see their position in their friends' orbits, by default, after a report said it was adding to teens' anxiety (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

X promoted a fake headline about Iran attacking Israel on its Explore page, after Elon Musk promised "real-time customized news for you created by Grok AI" (Matt Binder/Mashable)

Apple urges a US appeals court to overturn the US ITC's decision to ban imports of some Apple Watch models in a patent dispute with medical tech company Masimo (Blake Brittain/Reuters)

Google, Yahoo, Perplexity, and other search companies are working on understanding user intent to decide whether to show generative AI answers or just links (Alex Kantrowitz/Big Technology)

Source: Jony Ive and Sam Altman's AI device startup is in funding talks with Emerson Collective and Thrive Capital; Ive wants to raise up to $1B in funding (The Information)

Apple updates App Store guidelines, allowing game emulators for the first time globally, and letting music streaming apps in the EU link to external websites (Filipe Espsito/9to5Mac)

A US jury finds Terraform Labs and Do Kwon liable for fraud in a US SEC lawsuit, boosting SEC's efforts to assert greater control over the crypto industry (Bloomberg)

Amazon adds a store called Bazaar to its Android app in India, featuring affordable fashion and lifestyle products, to compete with Flipkart and Reliance's Ajio (Manish Singh/TechCrunch)

FTC lawsuit filings: Instagram had ad revenues of $22B in 2020, or 26% of Meta's total revenue, $32.4B in 2021, or 27% of Meta's revenue, and $16.5B in H1 2022 (Bloomberg)

Sources say Sundar Pichai is more involved in decisions about Google's AI products, but some worry this involvement can be a distraction from his duties as CEO (Financial Times)

Q&A with Marissa Mayer about her app development startup Sunshine, its new photo-sharing app Shine, the AI landscape, internet business models, and more (Reed Albergotti/Semafor)

Features Headlines Today
[Tue-07-May-2024]

"If I'm collecting N250,000 from anybody I won't be in that place again" - Lagos underbridge landlord - Punch

1 dead, another injured in Las Vegas high-rise fire - Yahoo

2 die, 1 hospitalised after taking local herbs in Ondo - Daily Trust

31 suspected robbers arrested in Lagos - Daily Trust

4 arrested over cultism, robbery in Edo - Daily Trust

A high society wedding in Aba (1931),By Tayo Agunbiade - Premium Times

Abducted pastors wife escapes as kidnappers doze off - Daily Trust

Adenaiye becomes ACREDA's chairman, seeks members' cooperation - Tribune

AfDB to partner Ogun govt on special agro industrial processing zone - Tribune

After Tuesday, iPads will give laptops more competition than ever before - Yahoo

AHCN elects officers for next two years - Tribune

Al Jazeera airs footage of Palestinians in Gaza reportedly celebrating news that Hamas agrees to a ceasefire proposal. - Yahoo

Alia Donates SUV Vehicles To Benue Judiciary - New Telegraph

American soldier was arrested in Russia and accused of stealing from a girlfriend, US officials say - Yahoo

Anambra woman arrested for torturing maid over N25,000 - Daily Trust

APC Tackles INEC Over Ondo Guber Primary - New Telegraph

Appeal to governors over pensions - Tribune

Army conducts conversion exercise for 528 officers - Premium Times

At least a dozen vehicles involved in I-64 crash with injuries - Yahoo

Auditors can't locate former St. Louis circuit attorney to complete state audit - Yahoo

Banditry: Sokoto To Prosecute Terrorists - New Telegraph

BCPG seeks extension of Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway to Badagry - Tribune

Benue warns 2 communities to stay off land - Daily Trust

Boeing forced to scrub first crewed Starliner launch to the space station - Yahoo

Boeing Starliner capsule's first crewed test flight postponed over Atlas rocket glitch - Yahoo

Businessman restrained from selling, leasing property - Guardian

California reports the first increase in groundwater supplies in 4 years - Yahoo

Call it Cognac diplomacy. France offered China's Xi a special drink, in a wink at their trade spat - Yahoo

Cashless: Cheque Transactions Sustain Decline By 27.5% To N262.4bn - New Telegraph

CBN directs banks to charge 0.5% cybersecurity levy on transactions - Premium Times

Cedar Park man assaults officer during traffic stop: police - Yahoo

Central Banks Must Remain Vigilant Along The Last Mile Of Disinflation - Daily Independent

Chinese motor show reveals the next-gen EVs ' with a few surprises - Yahoo

Coastal highway: Seyi Tinubu has right to pursue business interests, Presidency tells Atiku - Punch

Cryptocurrency: FG Mulls Delisting Naira From P2P Platforms - New Telegraph

Cybersecurity levy: All you need to know about CBN's new directive - Tribune

Dangote donates 6,000 bags of rice to vulnerable groups in Osun - Daily Trust

Despite flooded streets, FCTA says it is prepared - Daily Trust

Divers spot weird, blobby creature for first time off Morocco. See the 'alien species - Yahoo

Edo Assembly Speaker Suspends 3 Lawmakers Over Alleged Impeachment Plot - New Telegraph

Edo: FRSC arraigned 175 offenders in April - Daily Trust

Enugu Transport Interchange: Govt Begins Payment Of Compensation - New Telegraph

Evacuation: Lagos taskforce threatened to kill us in Osun forest, victims allege - Punch

Ex-DOJ Official Stunned By Trump Hand Gesture In Court: 'Can't Begin To Fathom - Yahoo

Experts task FG on tech policies, legislations - Guardian

False Facts About Canola Oil You Thought Were True - Yahoo

Faulty presidential aircraft forces VP Shettima to cancel US trip - Premium Times

FCT chief dies in kidnappers den - Daily Trust

FG orders registration of 1.9 million PoS operators - Punch

FG Seeks New Legislations To Address Examination Challenges, Others - New Telegraph

FG set to confer NPOM award to meritorious Nigerians, others - Tribune

Ford Model A Hit By Hyundai, Takes It Like A Champ - Yahoo

Foundation distributes yam seedlings to farmers in Anambra - Tribune

France backs Tinubu, rules out foreign military base in Nigeria - Punch

Fuel scarcity, worsening hardship recipe for industrial unrest, ASCSN president warns - Tribune

FULL LIST: 16 banking transactions exempted from CBNs new cybersecurity levy - Punch

Greene 'going to lose' Johnson ouster effort, Mace says - Yahoo

Gunmen Kill One, Abduct Seven Others In Ogun - New Telegraph

House Republicans are ready to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt over Biden audio - Yahoo