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How some MBA programs in the US are reorienting their courses around AI by adding AI-related classwork, encouraging using AI to solve lab assignments, and more (Lindsay Ellis/Wall Street Journal)

In-memory computing, which seeks to reduce power consumption by processing data where it's stored, is seeing a boost in interest fueled by the AI energy crisis (Jane Lanhee Lee/Bloomberg)

A Washington state judge barred the use of AI-enhanced video as trial evidence in a ruling that experts say may be the first-of-its-kind in a US criminal court (Tim Stelloh/NBC News)

Oceana: Amazon created 208M lbs of US plastic packaging waste in 2022, up 9.6% YoY: Amazon says it reduced plastic packaging use by 11.6% YoY globally in 2022 (Justine Calma/The Verge)

An interview with Andres Freund, a Microsoft database engineer working on PostgreSQL, on discovering the XZ Utils backdoor, doubting his own findings, and more (Kevin Roose/New York Times)

Google Cloud/Cloud Security Alliance survey of 2,486 IT and security professionals: 63% of security professionals believe AI could help in threat detection (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE)

Singapore-based SingleInterface, which helps offline businesses manage and grow their online presence, raised $30M, its first external raise since 2015 founding (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Meta is testing giving cash bonuses to creators who post engaging content on Threads, as part of an invite-only program (Business Insider)

X rolls out support for posting Community Notes in India ahead of the 2024 general elections and says the program now has contributors in 69 countries (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

Toronto-based Brim, which offers credit card and payment tech infrastructure to financial institutions, raised a $85M Series C led by Export Development Canada (Josh Scott/BetaKit)

X adds blue checks to some large accounts as part of its plan to give free Premium memberships to those with at least 2,500 "verified subscriber followers" (Amrita Khalid/The Verge)

A look at some exciting startups from day one of YC's Winter 2024 Demo Day, including those using AI for creating music and helping lawyers review documents (TechCrunch)

Uber Eats rolls out delivery services with Waymo's self-driving cars in the Phoenix area, Uber's seventh site with autonomous deliveries and first with Waymo (Alex Koller/CNBC)

Apple resolves an outage impacting some of its online services, including the App Store, Apple TV, Podcasts, and Music, that lasted for over an hour on April 3 (Richard Lawler/The Verge)

Self-driving software startup Ghost Autonomy, formerly Ghost Locomotion, shuts down, after raising ~$220M and just five months after partnering with OpenAI (Kirsten Korosec/TechCrunch)

Sources: Israel's bombing campaign in Gaza used Lavender, an AI system that identified 37,000 potential human targets based on their apparent links to Hamas (The Guardian)

SK Hynix says it will invest ~$3.87B in an advanced packaging plant and R&D facility in Indiana to mass-produce high bandwidth memory chips starting in H2 2028 (Joyce Lee/Reuters)

Sources: Google considers adding certain AI-powered search features to its premium subscription services, which already offer access to Gemini in Gmail and Docs (Financial Times)

Sources: Apple is exploring home robotic devices, including a mobile robot that can follow users and a table-top device that uses robotics to move a display (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

EU removes from draft rules a requirement that non-EU cloud providers must set up a joint venture with an EU company to qualify for an EU cybersecurity label (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters)

WhatsApp appears to be experiencing a global outage, preventing users from exchanging messages; Facebook Messenger and Instagram are also experiencing issues (Ben Schoon/9to5Google)

OpenAI says that paid users can now edit DALL-E images in ChatGPT across web, iOS, and Android, using a selection tool and additional text prompts (Ina Fried/Axios)

Microsoft says Windows 10 security updates will cost $61 per device for the first year, doubling for the next two years, after ending support in October 2025 (Tom Warren/The Verge)

Facebook updates its mobile video player with a TikTok-like vertical look and new controls for Reels, Live, and longform videos, starting with the US and Canada (Amrita Khalid/The Verge)

A draft US-EU statement outlines plans to use AI to search for replacements for so-called forever chemicals that are prevalent in chip manufacturing (Alberto Nardelli/Bloomberg)

A look at XZ Utils attacker "Jia Tan", a persona experts say was used by a nation state group and that left little trace after working on the project since 2021 (Wired)

Memo: AWS plans to cut several hundred jobs in its Sales, Marketing, and Global Services organization, and a few hundred in its Physical Stores Technology team (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)

Sources: Spotify plans to raise prices by $1 to $2 per month in the UK, Australia, Pakistan, and two other markets by the end of April, and the US later in 2024 (Bloomberg)

Microsoft and Quantinuum detail a breakthrough in quantum error correction, helping run 14,000+ experiments with no errors, an issue that has vexed the industry (Frederic Lardinois/TechCrunch)

Patreon rolls out a Reddit-like community moderation feature that lets podcasters, artists, writers, and other creators assign community members as moderators (Mia Sato/The Verge)

Stability AI releases Stable Audio 2.0, letting users create three minute sound clips from copyright-free audio samples, available for free via its website (Emilia David/The Verge)

Opera now lets Opera One users download and run 150 LLMs from 50+ families locally, including Llama and Google's Gemma, via the Ollama open source framework (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

Sources: crypto VC firm Paradigm is in talks to raise $750M to $850M for a new fund, which would be the largest since the crash; a16z raised $4.5B in May 2022 (Hannah Miller/Bloomberg)

A rising number of Chinese tech workers face legal action from former employers, including Pinduoduo and Tencent, looking to enforce strict noncompete clauses (Cissy Zhou/Nikkei Asia)

TSMC halts some chipmaking and evacuates plants after a 7.4 magnitude earthquake, Taiwan's biggest in 25 years, and plans to assess the impact; UMC did similar (Debby Wu/Bloomberg)

A profile of Faruk Fatih zer, the convicted CEO of defunct crypto exchange Thodex, as he starts a 11,196-year prison sentence in Turkey for laundering assets (Jenna Scatena/Wired)

A first look at two third-party iOS app stores in the EU, the B2B focused Mobivention and the upcoming AltStore, which take ~12 screen interactions to install (Callum Booth/The Verge)

Boosted by Taiwan's 2024 elections, Threads has revived its popularity in the country, where it's the most downloaded social app according to Sensor Tower (Zeyi Yang/MIT Technology Review)

An interview with Oren Etzioni, the former CEO of Allen Institute for AI, on his nonprofit TrueMedia.org, which offers free tools for identifying deepfakes (New York Times)

PitchBook and NVCA report: US VC investments in Q1 2024 hit $36.6B, lowest since 2017, across 2,882 deals, down YoY from $51.6B across 4,026 deals (Dean Takahashi/VentureBeat)

Newzoo: PC and console game revenues grew 2.6% YoY to $93.5B in 2023, but average quarterly playtime hours fell 26% from Q1 2021 through Q4 2023 (Dean Takahashi/VentureBeat)

PitchBook: VCs raised $30.4B globally in Q1 2024, a marked slowdown from 2023, which itself was the worst year since 2016, suggesting the end of "megafunds" era (George Hammond/Financial Times)

PE firm Clayton Dubilier & Rice agrees to buy a majority ownership of IT services provider Presidio from BC Partners; sources: deal could value Presidio at $4B+ (Granth Vanaik/Reuters)

The FCC plans to vote on April 25 to restore net neutrality rules and assume regulatory oversight of broadband internet that was rescinded under President Trump (David Shepardson/Reuters)

PE firm EQT AB agrees to acquire compliance software provider Avetta from Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe, sources say at a ~$3B valuation, including debt (Ryan Gould/Bloomberg)

Modal, which offers employees personalized technical and AI skills training, raised a $25M Series A co-led by Left Lane Capital and Ensemble VC (Andrew Mendez/Silicon Valley ...)

George Carlin's estate settles with the makers of Dudesy, who agree to remove their YouTube video and podcast they originally claimed used an "AI" George Carlin (Christopher Kuo/New York Times)

Anthropic researchers detail "many-shot jailbreaking", which can evade LLMs' safety guardrails by including a large number of faux dialogues in a single prompt (Devin Coldewey/TechCrunch)

POTUS' official Threads account starts using Meta's ActivityPub integration to post on the decentralized networking protocol (Wes Davis/The Verge)

Replit launches Code Repair, an AI agent to automatically fix coding errors, and Teams, which allows developers to collaborate in real time on software projects (Reed Albergotti/Semafor)

Google details Device Bound Session Credentials, a feature that aims to stop browser cookie theft and uses PCs' TPM chip, testing it in beta versions of Chrome (Michael Kan/PCMag)

Intel says its Foundry division had $18.9B in 2023 revenue, down 31% YoY, and a $7B operating loss, up from $5.2B, and expects 2024 to be the peak of its losses (Ian King/Bloomberg)

The US NIST, which analyzed only 199 of the 3,370 CVEs the agency received in March, blames the backlog on a lack of "interagency support" (Simon Hendery/SC Media)

The US Cyber Safety Review Board faults Microsoft for a "cascade of avoidable errors" that led to the 2023 Chinese hack of top US government officials' emails (Washington Post)

A timeline of the attack on open-source project XZ Utils, which began in late 2021 and led to a backdoor with RCE in Linux distros from Debian, Red Hat, others (research!rsc)

X promotes Kylie McRoberts to Head of Safety, after Ella Irwin left in June 2023, when Musk overruled a decision that limited the spread of an anti-trans video (David Ingram/NBC News)

Billie Eilish, Katy Perry, and 200+ others sign a letter to AI developers and tech companies decrying "predatory" AI that steals voices, replaces artists, more (Sara Fischer/Axios)

Read AI, which uses generative AI to summarize meetings, emails, and other messages, raised a $21M Series A led by Goodwater Capital (Michael Nuez/VentureBeat)

Luminance, which offers generative AI tools for lawyers, raised a $40M Series B led by March Capital and says 600 organizations in 70 countries use its tools (Lucy Adams/Tech.eu)

Apple debuts Spatial Personas in beta, letting up to five Vision Pro users participate together within compatible apps without being in the same physical space (Raymond Wong/Inverse)

As Amazon plans more grocery stores after an 18-month pause, it will use Dash Carts, where shoppers can scan items as they shop, instead of Just Walk Out tech (Theo Wayt/The Information)

Yahoo plans to acquire Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom's Artifact for an undisclosed sum; Yahoo is buying the news app's tech, not the team (David Pierce/The Verge)

Flip, a marketplace with product review videos by shoppers, raised a $144M Series C led by Streamlined at a $1.05B valuation, including $50M from AppLovin (Spencer Soper/Bloomberg)

Sources: Microsoft is testing a new AI-powered Xbox chatbot that can automate support tasks via an "embodied AI character", as part of larger Xbox AI efforts (Tom Warren/The Verge)

Israel-based AI chipmaker Hailo raised a $120M Series C extension from Israeli firms and family offices at a $1.2B valuation, taking its total funding to $340M (Saritha Rai/Bloomberg)

A profile of MIT labor economist David Autor, an unlikely AI optimist who says AI may help restore "the middle-skill, middle-class heart of the US labor market" (Steve Lohr/New York Times)

Sources: the US asks South Korea to add China chip export restrictions similar to Commerce Department rules, including on chips beyond 14nm and DRAM beyond 18nm (Bloomberg)

A profile of hiking app AllTrails, which exploded during the pandemic, has raised $225M+, and now focuses on helping users "find your outdoors", not just trails (Nikita Richardson/New York Times)

An interview with outgoing ASML CTO Martin van den Brink on the company's rise, Moore's Law, competition from Chinese companies, hyper-NA technology, and more (MIT Technology Review)

An interview with Sony Music CEO Rob Stringer on AI's role in the industry, licensing concerns with TikTok, working with Sony for over two decades, and more (Daniel Thomas/Financial Times)

On the Daily Show, Jon Stewart says Apple asked him not to have FTC chair Lina Khan for his Apple podcast by saying "please don't talk to her" (Sara Fischer/Axios)

Q&A with Intuit Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on the core business of email, acquiring Mailchimp in 2021, generative AI, shutting down TinyLetter, and more (Nilay Patel/The Verge)

NYC-based Web3 infrastructure company Xion raised $25M, reportedly a Series A, from Animoca Brands, Laser Digital, Multicoin, Arrington Capital, and others (MK Manoylov/The Block)

TikTok brings its dedicated STEM content feed to Europe, starting in the UK and Ireland, and says 33% of users have enabled the feed since its US launch in 2023 (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

Japan approves up to $3.9B in subsidies to chip venture Rapidus, as the company tries to close the gap with TSMC in cutting-edge fabrication technology (Yuki Hagiwara/Bloomberg)

The US and UK sign an agreement on how to test and assess risks from emerging AI models, marking the first bilateral arrangement on AI safety in the world (Madhumita Murgia/Financial Times)

Trump Media & Technology Group closed down 21% on April 1, wiping out the gains from last week, after it disclosed a $58M+ loss on $4.1M in revenue in 2023 (Reuters)

Sources: Tiger raised ~$2.2B for its latest fund, well short of the $6B target and its smallest fundraising haul in about a decade, after raising a $12.7B fund (Hema Parmar/Bloomberg)

Cloud data management startup Rubrik files for a NYSE IPO under the symbol RBRK, discloses a net loss of $354M on revenue of $628M for the year ended January 31 (Bloomberg)

Telegram now lets Premium users turn their account into a business account, with options like a custom start page, greeting and away messages, and chatbots (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Politics Headlines Today
[Fri-26-Apr-2024]

$1trn Economy: NIPSS, Ex-Minister's Group Chart Course For Mining Sector Reform - Leadership

10,000 Security Agents, 16,000 Ad-hoc Staff Deployed For Oyo LG Poll - Leadership

11 Months After Subsidy Removal: Nigerians Still Face Fuel Scarcity, Long Queues - Leadership

11 workers trapped as building collapses in Kano - The Nation

12 Arrested For Illegal Mining In Niger - Leadership

16-year-old Kano Boy Gets Hajj Seat For Quran Recitation - Leadership

2023 polls reflected will of Nigerians, says U.S. in report - The Nation

2024 Capital Releases to commence in May, says AGF - The Nation

2024 Hajj: FCT Board To Resume Orientation For Intending Pilgrims - Leadership

2024 Hajj: NAHCON chairman lauds Uzodinma for supporting Imo intending pilgrims - Tribune

2027: Lagos Muslims Yearn For Their Own Muric - New Telegraph

4 Months After, FG Yet To Disburse Funds For 2024 Capital Projects - Leadership

98,000 Nigerian women die from use of firewood, charcoal annually - The Nation

A DisCo can be run profitably, efficiently - The Nation

A hard day' - Ashley Judd on quashed Weinstein conviction - BBC

AAC Warns Makinde Against Violence During Saturday's LG Elections - Daily Independent

ACTDA Rescues Awka Residents From Perennial Flooding - Daily Independent

Adamawa Stakeholders Oppose State Police - Daily Independent

Adaora Shines At Coke Studio, Delivers Scintillating Performance - New Telegraph

Additional State: How Far Can South East Go - New Telegraph

Addressing Epidemics In Nigeria Through Improved Water, Hygiene - Daily Independent

Adebutu Responsible For Our Loss In 2023 Ogun PDP Chairman - New Telegraph

Adebutu responsible for PDPs defeat in 2023 Ogun Chairman - Daily Trust

Adeleke to grace final Of National TTennis Championships - The Nation

Agbeyewa Farms Launches Community Development Foundation - Thisday

Agboola wins Ondo PDP primary - The Nation

AI Orchestration Market Expected To Reach $35.2bn By 2031 - Daily Independent

AI Tupac track vanishes from Drake's Instagram - BBC

Aide leads campaign to eradicate malaria - The Nation

Akeredolu ex-deputy gov, Agboola emerges winner of Ondo PDP primaries - Tribune

Akpabio, Abbas, Barau, Dangote, Obi, others attend wedding of Emirs of Kanos, Bichis children - The Nation

Alake markets Mining sector to foreign investors - Nigerian Pilot

Alake woos foreign investors with mining incentives, policies - The Nation

All-share Index Snaps Losing Streak, Up 5bps - New Telegraph

Allegations of illegality at Kano free trade zone false Customs - Blueprint

Alleged 80.2b fraud: CHRICED asks FG to declare State of emergency on Kogi state - Peoples Daily

Alleged fraud: Judges absence stalls Fayoses trial - Nigerian Pilot

Alleged N3bn Fraud: How ex-HoS Oyo-Ita, allies diverted public funds to private companies - Tribune

Alleged N80.2bn fraud: Senator Natasha reacts to Yahaya Bello's probe - Tribune

Alleged Payment Of Children Tuition With State Fund: Yahaya Media Faults EFCC, Bares The Truth - Daily Independent

Alleged procurement fraud: Court adjourns Emefieles case till June 24 - The Nation

American school writes EFCC, seeks to refund $760k of Yahaya Bellos children fees - The Nation

Anambra 2025: Former Political Appointees Can't Stop Soludo From Getting Second Term ' APGA Scribe - Daily Independent

Anambra community flags off 2024 farming season to cushion hunger - Nigerian Pilot

Anglican Church Worldwide Gives Nigerian Bishop, Adeoye, New Appointment - Daily Independent

ANMFIN Tasks Members On Innovation - New Telegraph

Another ex-NASS member passes on - Blueprint

Anyone convicted by court remains an ex-convict ' Police PRO - Tribune

APC accuses Kano govt of masterminding protest against Ganduje in Abuja - The Nation

APC has dashed expectations of Nigerians ' Ex-NWC member, Lukman - Tribune

APC is the answer to Nigeria's problems' ' Ganduje - Peoples Daily

APC on track to cure Nigeria of its ills ' Ganduje - Peoples Daily

APC woos aggrieved Ondo aspirants with all-inclusive govt slots - The Nation

Appeal Court holds valedictory for late Justice Orji-Abadua - Blueprint

Armed Forces, Police and Paramilitar Bball Tourney - The Nation

Army trains 90 personnel on inspection, compliance - Blueprint

Artificial Scarcity of Fuel Hits Kogi - Thisday

ASR Africa Begins Construction Of N250m Sports Complex For Unijos - New Telegraph

At Lagos Jazz Fest, Kanwulia Thrills With Amerikana Whos That Girl!' Lagos Tour - New Telegraph