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Techmeme Latest Headlines

Updated: 3 hours ago

The UK CMA raises concerns after finding an "interconnected web" of 90+ AI deals and investments involving Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Nvidia (Bloomberg)

Auto parts maker Magna will pilot Sanctuary AI's humanoid robot in its factory; Figure and Apptronik are piloting their humanoid systems with BMW and Mercedes (Brian Heater/TechCrunch)

Apple says owners of the iPhone 15 or newer will be able to fix broken devices with used parts, including screens, batteries, and cameras, starting in fall 2024 (Chris Velazco/Washington Post)

In his annual shareholder letter, Andy Jassy says GenAI "may be the largest technology transformation since the cloud" and Amazon is committed to cost-cutting (Wall Street Journal)

Sources: Spotify is developing tools to let subscribers speed up, mash up, or edit songs, a type of playback feature; rights holders would be paid for the songs (Anne Steele/Wall Street Journal)

DuckDuckGo launches Privacy Pro, a new $9.99 per month service with a VPN, personal information removal, and identity theft restoration, available in the US (Matt Burgess/Wired)

Humane AI Pin review: well-made, photos look good, and easier to access than a phone, but doesn't work half the time, really slow, and missing basic features (David Pierce/The Verge)

An interview with DocuSign CEO Allan Thygesen on the company's new Intelligent Agreement Management service, now in beta, moving beyond e-signatures, and more (Richard Nieva/Forbes)

Instagram plans to automatically detect and blur nude images sent to teens via DMs, showing a pop-up to sender and recipient, rolling out in the coming months (Julie Jargon/Wall Street Journal)

Documents: Adobe offers its photographer and artist network $120 for videos of people engaged in everyday actions, or ~$2.62 to ~$7.25 per minute, to train AI (Brody Ford/Bloomberg)

Sources: Foxconn is considering a new rotating CEO system, a major and unusual overhaul to nurture talent; a source says the plan is a response to investors (Yimou Lee/Reuters)

As streamers cut spending globally, sources say Netflix remains the only major US platform still commissioning across Southeast Asia, albeit on a smaller scale (Deadline)

Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which are vying to become the regional AI superpower, are rushing to build expensive desert data centers to support the technology (Bloomberg)

Apple sends threat notifications to individuals in 92 countries, warning them that their iPhone may have been targeted by mercenary spyware attacks (Manish Singh/TechCrunch)

The MPA announces plans to work with US Congress to enact a SOPA-like anti-piracy law; SOPA was fiercely opposed by the tech industry and failed to pass in 2012 (Winston Cho/The Hollywood Reporter)

Australian data center operator NextDC is raising AU$1.32B of equity to accelerate development and fit-out of centers in its core Sydney and Melbourne markets (Stuart Condie/Wall Street Journal)

Ola shuts down in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, six years after expanding to international markets, to focus on its India expansion ahead of an IPO (Manish Singh/TechCrunch)

Sources: Huawei is building a vast chip equipment R&D center in Shanghai and has already hired numerous engineers who have worked for ASML, TSMC, and others (Cheng Ting-Fang/Nikkei Asia)

A US jury finds AWS owes Chicago-based Kove $525M for infringing three of its patents in data-storage technology that had become "essential" to AWS (Blake Brittain/Reuters)

The Biden administration announces a $110M US-Japan joint AI research initiative funded by Nvidia, Arm, Amazon, Microsoft, and a group of Japanese companies (Bloomberg)

Hundreds of political and news content creators ask Meta to reverse its default Threads and Instagram setting opting accounts out of seeing "political content" (Taylor Lorenz/Washington Post)

Computer scientist Avi Wigderson wins the 2023 Turing Award for his "foundational contributions to the theory of computation", including his work on randomness (Stephen Ornes/Quanta Magazine)

Google announces a $1B investment to improve digital connectivity between the US, Japan, and multiple Pacific island countries through two new subsea cables (Granth Vanaik/Reuters)

Sources: Sam Altman met with investors and officials in the UAE this week to push for more infrastructure investment to support the development of AI technology (Bloomberg)

Mistral AI launches Mixtral 8x22B, its latest sparse mixture-of-experts model, after releasing Mixtral 8x7B in December 2023 (Shubham Sharma/VentureBeat)

Sources: SpaceX's accounting is more "art than a science", often omitting costs of putting Starlink satellites in orbit to make numbers look better to investors (Bloomberg)

Rep. Adam Schiff introduced a bill that would require companies training generative AI models to disclose all of the copyrighted work they used to do so (Sarah Fortinsky/The Hill)

The US SEC sends decentralized crypto exchange Uniswap a Wells notice warning that the agency intends to bring an enforcement action against the company (Jeff John Roberts/Fortune)

Sources: ByteDance misled the Central Bank of Ireland in early 2023, after HSBC shut down the company's bank accounts following a money laundering probe (Michael Roddan/The Information)

Checkr, a 10-year-old startup that offers employee background checks and was valued at $5B in April 2022, has laid off 382 employees, or 32% of its workforce (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Google plans to make Magic Editor and other AI editing tools, previously limited to Pixel phones and paid users, available to all Google Photos users for free (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Google's Cloud Next keynote was by far its most impressive presentation in the AI era, not least because the company realizes its infrastructure advantages (Ben Thompson/Stratechery)

Developer email: Amazon will no longer pay developers to create Alexa apps, and stops offering free AWS credits; developers can still monetize apps via IAPs (Matt Day/Bloomberg)

Meta announces its next-generation Meta Training and Inference Accelerator chips for AI training, and says MTIA v1 and the new chips are both now in production (Emilia David/The Verge)

Ad buyers on Meta's platforms complain of performance issues on its systems in recent months, and say campaign costs are up significantly while returns are down (Kurt Wagner/Bloomberg)

Israeli cloud security startup Wiz buys cloud detection and response startup Gem Security, sources say for $350M, after buying developer platform Rafft in 2023 (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune)

Madrid-based big data observability startup Onum, which launched in 2023, raised a $28M Series A led by Dawn Capital, with participation from Insight and Kibo (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE)

Collaborative Robotics, which is developing a Cobot to work alongside humans, raised a $100M Series B led by General Catalyst, taking its total funding to $140M (Brian Heater/TechCrunch)

Roblox partners with PubMatic to show video ads on in-game billboards to users aged 13 and over; creators that opt to show the ads will get an ad revenue cut (Wall Street Journal)

How Ukraine found US startups' drones glitchy and pricey, turning instead to cheaper Chinese drones; PitchBook: ~300 US drone startups raised $2.5B since 2022 (Wall Street Journal)

Q&A with Getty Images CEO Craig Peters on the deal with Nvidia to create AI tools trained on Getty's stock images, the need for AI industry standards, and more (Scott Roxborough/The Hollywood Reporter)

Guesty, a platform for accommodation managers to manage Airbnbs and more, raised $130M, sources say at a $900M valuation, after raising a $170M Series E in 2022 (Ingrid Lunden/TechCrunch)

The FCC says all but the smallest ISPs must now publish broadband "nutrition labels" on all of their plans, ending an eight year battle between ISPs and the FCC (Amrita Khalid/The Verge)

The FCC plans to cut its broadband subsidy payout to $14 per month, under half of the current rate; AT&T, Charter, and others are yet to detail their response (Tony Romm/Washington Post)

A US official says SpaceX's Pentagon contract to deploy terminals in Ukraine between June 2023 and May 2024 is worth $23M; the deal may not be renewed (Anthony Capaccio/Bloomberg)

Adobe updates Frame.io, adding new workflow and tagging capabilities for project management, in beta for Free and Pro customers on the web, iOS, and iPadOS (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)

Sources: ByteDance's EBITDA rose 60% YoY in 2023 to $40B and its sales rose from $80B to $120B, the first time ByteDance surpassed Tencent in revenue and profit (Bloomberg)

How TSMC is transforming the Japanese farm town of Kikuyo into a key node in Asia's chip supply chain, backed by billions of dollars from Japan's government (New York Times)

The US is right to target TikTok and prevent a foreign adversary from controlling a platform to deploy "persuasive AI" that can manipulate US citizens and more (Vinod Khosla/Financial Times)

TSMC reports Q1 revenue up 16.5% YoY to $18.5B and expects revenue to grow at least 20% in 2024, reversing 2023's slight decline, and budgets capex of $28B-$32B (Jane Lanhee Lee/Bloomberg)

Aloha Browser says the number of users in the EU jumped 250% in March after DMA came into effect; Vivaldi, Ecosia, Brave, DuckDuckGo, and Opera also see growth (Reuters)

Rakuten Kobo announces its first color e-readers, the $220 Kobo Libra Colour and the $150 Kobo Clara Colour, available for preorder now and shipping on April 30 (Sheena Vasani/The Verge)

Sources: Apple assembled $14B of iPhones in India last fiscal year, doubling production YoY, with the company now making as much as 14% of its iPhones in India (Sankalp Phartiyal/Bloomberg)

Atos, the main cybersecurity provider to the 2024 Olympics, secures 450M in interim financing to stay afloat, including a 50M loan from the French Government (Politico)

Platform Science, which provides connected vehicle tools for enterprise fleets, raised $125M from 8VC, Prologis, and others, taking its total funding to $309M (Grace Sharkey/FreightWaves)

Investment platform Linqto plans to go public via a SPAC merger with Blockchain Coinvestors Acquisition at a ~$700M valuation in a deal expected to close in H2 (Arasu Kannagi Basil/Reuters)

In a lengthy memo on Alibaba's internal forum, Jack Ma voiced his support for a company undergoing a turbulent restructuring, saying it is now on the right path (Bloomberg)

WPP announces a collaboration with Google, integrating Gemini AI tools with WPP data to create scripts, product images, and more for ad clients like Coca-Cola (Nicola Agius/Search Engine Land)

Mumbai-based Neysa, which offers a suite of generative AI tools to help clients manage their AI projects, raised a $20M seed led by Matrix, Nexus, and NTTVC (Jessica Rajan/The Economic Times)

Google introduces two Gemma variants, CodeGemma to help with code completion and RecurrentGemma to provide researchers faster inference at higher batch sizes (Tris Warkentin/Google for Developers Blog)

Copenhagen-based Reshape, whose AI-powered robotic imaging system helps track visual changes in lab experiments, raised a $20M Series A led by Astanor Ventures (Paul Sawers/TechCrunch)

NetEase says it is working with Microsoft to bring World of Warcraft and other Blizzard games back to China after a feud ended the partnership in January 2023 (Josh Ye/Reuters)

Piper Sandler survey of 6,020 US teens: 33% now own a VR device, up from 31% in fall 2023, and weekly usage of VR devices increased to ~13% from ~10% (Filipe Espsito/9to5Mac)

Google partners with Bayer on an AI product that can flag anomalies within images for radiologists and summarize information from a patient's medical history (Ashley Capoot/CNBC)

Alethea, whose ML service monitors online chatter to help companies detect disinformation, raised a $20M Series B led by GV, bringing its total raised to $34M (Sam Sabin/Axios)

OpenAI makes GPT-4 Turbo with Vision generally available in the API, and lets Vision requests use JSON mode and function calling (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat)

Quora-owned AI chatbot platform Poe now allows bot creators to set a per-message price for their bots and rolls out enhanced analytics dashboard for creators (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Intel says its next-gen Lunar Lake laptop chips will have 100+ TOPS of performance in AI tasks and elements of Microsoft's Copilot will soon run locally on PCs (Paul Alcorn/Tom's Hardware)

YouTube adds shopping features, including creator-curated product lists for users to browse called Shopping Collections and a hub with info on commission rates (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

Apple researchers publish a paper on Ferret-UI, a multimodal LLM tailored for enhanced understanding of mobile UI screens (Malcolm Owen/AppleInsider)

Researchers found an exposed Azure server with credentials used by Microsoft staff to access internal systems; Microsoft was told Feb. 6 and secured it March 5 (Zack Whittaker/TechCrunch)

In London, Meta execs downplayed the negative impact of AI on elections, touted open-source AI, and confirmed Llama's next version will arrive by next month (Mark Bergen/Bloomberg)

Cruise resumes manually driving its vehicles without autonomous systems engaged to create maps and gather road information in select cities, starting in Phoenix (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)

eBay adds an AI-powered "shop the look" feature to its iOS app, with personalized recommendations for users that have viewed 10+ fashion items in six months (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Intel debuts its Gaudi 3 AI chips, set for Q3 mass production, saying they offer up to 1.7x the training performance and 40% better efficiency than Nvidia H100s (Paul Alcorn/Tom's Hardware)

Automattic is buying Beeper, a source says for $125M; Beeper co-founder Eric Migicovsky will become Automattic's head of messaging (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

How OpenAI is preparing to fight lawsuits, investigations, and legislation: expanding its staff to 1,000 from 200 in 2022, hiring in-house lawyers, and more (Washington Post)

Symbolica, which develops foundation models offering an alternative to the transformer AI architecture, raised a $31M Series A led by Khosla Ventures (Anna Tong/Reuters)

Monad Labs, which is building a Layer 1 blockchain to rival Ethereum and Solana, raised $225M led by Paradigm and plans to launch its mainnet by the end of 2024 (Leo Schwartz/Fortune)

Google makes its Imagen 2 image generator generally available in Vertex AI, and adds inpainting and outpainting to remove or add elements and expand borders (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

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