The US OMB releases new guidance on AI, requiring all federal agencies to have a senior leader overseeing all AI systems they use and submit an annual AI report (Emilia David/The Verge)
A profile of Anduril founder Palmer Luckey, as the AI surveillance and defense tech startup, which sells drones to the US, expects $1B in annual revenue by 2026 (Tabby Kinder/Financial Times)
A look at the rise and fall of Emad Mostaque and Stability AI, including how Mostaque's relationship with Coatue and Lightspeed blossomed and fell apart (Fortune)
How in-app browsers silently subvert user choice, stifle innovation, trap users into apps, break websites, and enable apps to severely undermine user privacy (Open Web Advocacy)
Similarweb: GPTs created by subscribers on OpenAI's GPT Store accounted for just 1.5% of desktop visits to ChatGPT's site in February, suggesting limited appeal (Clara Murray/Financial Times)
Leaked images show a white disc-less Xbox Series X console, which Microsoft plans to release in 2024, with the same design as the existing black Xbox Series X (lvaro/eXputer)
Take-Two acquires Borderlands developer Gearbox Entertainment from the Embracer Group for $460M in stock; the deal is expected to close by the end of June 2024 (Rebekah Valentine/IGN)
GLAAD: Meta is failing to curb posts calling for violence against trans people, posts calling trans and gender nonconforming people "satanic", and more (Taylor Lorenz/Washington Post)
Poland's consumer watchdog fines Amazon ~$8M for allegedly misleading consumers, including with dark pattern design tricks, ending a probe opened in Feb. 2023 (Natasha Lomas/TechCrunch)
Celestial AI, which develops optical tech for linking together processors and memory modules, raised a $175M Series C led by US Innovative Technology Fund (Maria Deutscher/SiliconANGLE)
NewRetirement, which offers financial retirement planning tools for consumers and enterprise customers, raised a $20M Series A led by Allegis Capital (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)
Oregon's governor signs the first US right-to-repair law that bans manufacturers from using "parts pairing" to dictate what replacement components can be used (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)
Anthropic's Claude 3 Opus surpassed OpenAI's GPT-4 for the first time on Chatbot Arena, a crowdsourced leaderboard used by AI researchers for LLM evaluations (Benj Edwards/Ars Technica)
MLCommons announces results from its MLPerf 4.0 inference benchmarks, which added Llama 2 70B and Stable Diffusion XL; systems with Nvidia GPUs came out on top (Samuel K. Moore/IEEE Spectrum)
Google says it blocked or removed 5.5B ads and 12.7M advertiser accounts for violating its policies in 2023, up from 5.2B and 6.7M respectively in 2022 (Nicola Agius/Search Engine Land)
Data observability service Observe raised a $115M Series B led by Sutter Hill Ventures with participation from Snowflake, sources say at a $400M-$500M valuation (Ingrid Lunden/TechCrunch)
NY-based Hume, which is building a conversational AI that it claims can interpret emotions based on people's voices, raised a $50M Series B at a $219M valuation (Rashi Shrivastava/Forbes)
Amazon plans to invest $2.75B in Anthropic, the second tranche of Amazon's planned $4B investment in the AI startup, after a $1.25B tranche in September 2023 (CNBC)
Google adds a tool that lets US users swipe left or right to rate apparel and accessories to get style recommendations on mobile browsers and Google app (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)
Google adds AI-generated trip itineraries to Search, translation to Circle to Search, and curated recommendations in Maps in 40+ cities across the US and Canada (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)
Alleged renders of the Google Pixel 9 show a camera module with two cameras, compared to three cameras on the 9 Pro and 9 Pro XL, a compact body, and more (Marcia Sekhose/91mobiles)
A US judge rules an SEC lawsuit against Coinbase can proceed, but dismisses one claim over Coinbase Wallet, a partial win for Coinbase in a lengthy court battle (Reuters)
Canva and Affinity publish a joint pledge promising to keep Affinity's software "fair, transparent, and affordable", including keeping "perpetual licenses" (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)
Amazon loses an EU legal bid to delay complying with DSA rules on making its online ad library publicly available, after a judge rejected Amazon's request (Clothilde Goujard/Politico)
A survey of 10,133 US adults: 43% of those aged 18-29 used ChatGPT in February 2024, up from 33% in July 2023, compared to 27% of 30-49 and 23% of all adults (Colleen McClain/Pew Research Center)
Source: Salesforce paid $20M+ to license Einstein's image in a 2016 deal, hoping to gain an edge in the AI market; proceeds go to Jerusalem's Hebrew University (Brody Ford/Bloomberg)
Google researchers observed 97 zero-day exploits in the wild in 2023, up 50% from 62 in 2022; 48 were used by espionage actors and 10 were financially-motivated (Jonathan Greig/The Record)
Sources: blockchain AI companies SingularityNET, Fetch.ai, and Ocean Protocol are discussing merging their tokens, creating ASI with a ~$7.5B diluted value (Michelle F Davis/Bloomberg)
At Intel's AI Summit in Taipei, executives say Copilot will soon run locally on PCs and that there will be a 40 TOPS requirement for NPUs on next-gen AI PCs (Paul Alcorn/Tom's Hardware)
Disney launches Hulu on Disney+, after testing the integration in beta in 2023; Disney+ users that do not subscribe to Hulu can still search for Hulu shows (Alex Weprin/The Hollywood Reporter)
How tech companies' search for AI experts, hampered by a shortage of candidates, led to million-dollar-a-year pay packages, poaching entire teams, and more (Katherine Bindley/Wall Street Journal)
Chinese state media: President Xi criticized "technological barriers" during Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte's visit to Beijing, as the US curbs ASML exports (Cagan Koc/Bloomberg)
A look at Databricks' new open source model DBRX, which cost ~$10M to develop over several months and, Databricks says, outshines Llama 2, Mixtral, and Grok (Will Knight/Wired)
Elon Musk says X plans to make Grok available to all Premium subscribers "later this week", expanding on Premium+ support; X Premium costs $8 per month (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
Israeli officials detail an expansive and experimental facial recognition program in Gaza to catalog Palestinians without their knowledge, starting in 2023 (Sheera Frenkel/New York Times)
How Phil Schiller, now an Apple Fellow, emerged as Apple's most ardent public defender of its ecosystem, under threat from the US DOJ, the EU, rivals, and more (Wall Street Journal)
Productivity platform Airtable launches Airtable AI, adding AI summaries, categorization, and translation via GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Anthropic's Claude (Emilia David/The Verge)
Google rolls out Gemini to some Google Messages beta users with RCS enabled on select Pixel and Galaxy devices, letting users chat to Gemini over RCS (Abner Li/9to5Google)
Tech industry group Boardwave, representing 1,300 founders, CEOs, and others, urges the UK to provide more support for the software industry in a white paper (Martin Coulter/Reuters)
HSBC releases its HSBC Gold Token, minted on its Orion digital assets platform, via its online banking and app, after testing the service in November 2023 (Ian Allison/CoinDesk)
A profile of Swedish accounting software maker Fortnox, valued at $4.6B after its stock rose 5x since 2020, as some analysts question its growth prospects (Financial Times)
A look at Disney+ Hotstar's and JioCinema's strategy to beat Netflix and Prime Video in India, including by focusing on sports content and affordable pricing (Ananya Bhattacharya/Rest of World)
A look at the international battles to regulate AI, as nations, lobbyists, and tech companies vie for influence over the future of AI policy (Politico)
The DOJ compares Apple's 2023 $77B buyback program with the company's half as much spend on R&D and highlights it as a lack of incentive for Apple to innovate (Financial Times)
A look at SRI's Future Concepts division, a research organization comprised of SRI and PARC researchers, as some argue that basic tech research labs are pass (John Markoff/New York Times)
Blockchain game Munchables, which lets players earn rewards by looking after digital creatures, loses an estimated ~$63M worth of ETH in a hacking incident (Ryan Weeks/Bloomberg)
Hands-on with Journal on iPhone: first suggestions can be jarring but get better with time; experts say the app can do more to help users set goals and reflect (Zoe Denenberg/Wall Street Journal)
Jakarta-based online personal insurance marketplace Qoala raised a $47M Series C co-led by PayPal Ventures and MassMutual Ventures, for $130M+ in total funding (Manish Singh/TechCrunch)
DroneUp unveils an autonomous drone "ecosystem" for last-mile deliveries, with Walmart, 7-Eleven, and Chick-fil-A the first retailers to pilot the system (Joann Muller/Axios)
NYC-based Viam, which offers an automation software platform for robotics, IoT, smart homes, and more, raised a $45M Series B, taking its total raised to $87M (Brian Heater/TechCrunch)
Portugal's data regulator orders Worldcoin to stop collecting biometric data for 90 days, after receiving complaints about unauthorized collection from minors (Elizabeth Howcroft/Reuters)
Robinhood launches Gold Card, a 3% cashback credit card for Robinhood Gold members, eight months after it acquired credit card startup X1 for $95M (Mary Ann Azevedo/TechCrunch)
Intel shares Microsoft's "AI PC" requirements, such as including a Copilot key, and expands its AI PC acceleration program to help devs and hardware vendors (Paul Alcorn/Tom's Hardware)
Despite a crypto rally, VC funds focused on crypto are struggling to raise money, as limited partners prioritize tangible gains after the 2022 wipeout (Ryan Weeks/Bloomberg)
Microsoft adds mouse and keyboard support to select Xbox Cloud Gaming titles for Xbox Insiders, nearly two years after it announced plans to add the feature (Tom Warren/The Verge)
Sources: the SEC is asking tech and telecom companies how they handled the 2020 SolarWinds cyberattack, drawing industry complaints about alleged overreach (Bloomberg)
The EU publishes draft election security guidelines aimed at platforms with 45M+ regional MAUs that are regulated under the DSA, ahead of elections in June (Natasha Lomas/TechCrunch)
How the US is using wire fraud laws to prosecute crypto crimes, such as with SBF, while the debate over whether crypto tokens are securities plays out in court (Bloomberg)
Sources: the US FTC is investigating TikTok over allegedly faulty privacy and data security practices, and could bring a lawsuit or settlement within weeks (Josh Sisco/Politico)
A timeline of EU's DMA investigations into Apple, Google, and Meta: each have 12 months to fix the issues, before risking fines of up to 10% of global revenue (Samuel Stolton/Bloomberg)
Some Apple users report being targeted in an "MFA bombing" attack in which their devices are inundated with alerts to approve a password change or login (Brian Krebs/Krebs on Security)
US investors, like General Atlantic and Sequoia, are facing increased pressure from state and federal lawmakers about their investments in Chinese companies (Lauren Hirsch/New York Times)
A look at MatX, which was founded by ex-Google engineers, has raised $25M, and hopes to design chips that are 10x faster than Nvidia's GPUs at training LLMs (Ashlee Vance/Bloomberg)
Adobe announces Custom Models, to let businesses customize Firefly models, and Firefly Services, a set of 20+ generative and creative APIs, tools, and services (Frederic Lardinois/TechCrunch)
Sources: Stability AI was in a "death spiral" prior to Mostaque's resignation, due to talent departures, mismanagement, legal troubles, and dwindling resources (Bloomberg)
Apple schedules WWDC 2024 for June 10 to June 14 as a virtual event with a June 10 keynote, where Apple is expected to unveil its AI Strategy, iOS 18, and more (Juli Clover/MacRumors)
Kevin Systrom says AI news app Artifact will stay online for now due to taking "a lot less to run it than we had imagined", reversing a February shut down date (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
An interview with Adobe executives about training Firefly on content licensed specifically for AI training, the decision not to scrape the internet, and more (Melissa Heikkil/MIT Technology Review)
Adobe adds a "structure reference" feature to Firefly AI, letting users upload an image to guide the model about the "arrangement" of the image (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat)
Adobe launches GenStudio to let brands create content and measure its performance using generative AI, underpinned by promises of brand safety (Frederic Lardinois/TechCrunch)
Google plans to release a Chrome version optimized for Windows on Arm this week, two months after Canary testing; Arm PCs previously ran an emulated x64 version (Jon Porter/The Verge)
The US DOJ charges crypto exchange KuCoin and two of its founders with violating anti-money laundering laws, failing to register with US government, and more (CoinDesk)
Filing: Dell cut 13,000 employees over the last fiscal year, a steeper reduction than initially announced, and had 120K staffers globally as of February 2, 2024 (Brody Ford/Bloomberg)
Filings detail Meta's Project Ghostbusters to get data analytics about Snapchat, YouTube, and Amazon, using Onavo VPN on iOS and Android between 2016 and 2019 (Maxwell Zeff/Gizmodo)
Filing: Sun Microsystems co-founder Andreas Bechtolsheim settles with the US SEC for alleged insider trading on Cisco's $2.6B offer to buy Acacia in 2019 (Austin Weinstein/Bloomberg)
AI search engines review: they are worse than Google at navigational queries, mixed on information queries, and offer helpful citations in exploration queries (David Pierce/The Verge)
Canada plans to toughen foreign investment rules for sectors like AI and quantum computing, as it takes steps to curb China's influence on key industries (Bloomberg)
0G Labs, or Zero Gravity Labs, which is building a modular blockchain to let developers make decentralized AI apps, raised $35M in pre-seed funding (Jacquelyn Melinek/TechCrunch)
Trump Media & Technology Group shares jumped up to 58% to hit $78.80 on its trading debut before the Nasdaq briefly halted trading, following the DWAC merger (Bailey Lipschultz/Bloomberg)
Source: Tencent agrees to release some of its most important apps on the Apple Vision Pro (Wayne Ma/The Information)
Band A electricity tariff - The Nation
Bank recapitalisation and need for citizens engagement - Punch
Chibok girls and decade of abductions - Punch
Embracing politics of inclusion and fairness - Punch
Palliatives: Lets change the music - Punch
