Techmeme
April 13, 2023, 11:50 AM

Top News

Joe Eskenazi / Mission Local:
Sources: SFPD arrested tech executive Nima Momeni for Bob Lee's killing; Momeni and Lee purportedly knew each other and were driving together before the killing  —  Mission Local is informed that the San Francisco Police Department early this morning made an arrest in the April 4 killing …
Tom Dotan / Wall Street Journal:
AWS begins offering customers access to LLMs by Anthropic, Stability AI, AI21 Labs, and AWS, aiming to become a neutral platform for generative AI features  —  The world's largest cloud provider wants to become the Switzerland of generative AI and let companies pick their own software and models
Alex Weprin / The Hollywood Reporter:
Filing: Amazon paid Andy Jassy $1.3M in 2022, after awarding him a $200M+ stock grant in 2021; Jassy talks efficiency, ads, LLMs, and more in his annual letter  —  Jassy had earned $212 million in 2021.  —  Amazon CEO Andy Jassy saw his 2022 compensation crater in 2022 …
Sankalp Phartiyal / Bloomberg:
Sources: Apple made $7B+ worth of iPhones in India in the FY ended March 2023, exporting ~$5B worth; India accounts for ~7% of iPhones made, up from ~1% in 2021  —  Apple Inc. assembled more than $7 billion of iPhones in India last fiscal year, tripling production in the world's fastest …
Nikkei Asia:
Sources say Apple is in talks with suppliers to make MacBooks in Thailand and the company has been mass producing the Apple Watch in the country for over a year  —  U.S. tech giant turning out Apple Watch in Southeast Asian country  —  For Apple and other tech companies …
Bloomberg:
Ethereum successfully completes its Shanghai, or Shapella, update, letting users withdraw staked ether; around 1.2M ETH are expected to be withdrawn in a week  —  The Ethereum blockchain, the most important commercial highway in the digital-asset sector, successfully implemented a widely anticipated software upgrade.
Robert McMillan / Wall Street Journal:
How the US is making arrests and seizing crypto funds, like James Zhong's 50K+ bitcoin, using Chainalysis and other tools to identify criminals via transactions  —  Federal authorities are making arrests and seizing funds with the help of new tools to identify criminals through cryptocurrency transactions
Natasha Lomas / TechCrunch:
Italy outlines its compliance demands for lifting ChatGPT's suspension, including requiring OpenAI to publish info about its data processing and age gating  —  Italy's data protection watchdog has laid out what OpenAI needs to do for it to lift an order against ChatGPT issued at the end of last month …
Raphael Satter / Reuters:
Discord says it is cooperating with US law enforcement's investigation into the classified material breach  —  Instant messaging platform Discord said on Wednesday it was cooperating with U.S. law enforcement's investigation into a leak of secret U.S. documents that has grabbed attention around the world.
Cheyenne Ligon / CoinDesk:
FTX's attorneys say the company recovered $7.3B in liquid assets and is considering using creditors' holdings to reopen the exchange; FTX's FTT token jumps 70%+  —  FTT's price more than doubled.  FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange that collapsed spectacularly in November …
Ian Hogarth / Financial Times:
Rohan Goswami / CNBC:
The stocks of Apple suppliers Cirrus Logic and AAC fall 12%+ and 14%+, respectively, after Ming-Chi Kuo said iPhone 15 Pro models won't have solid-state buttons  —  - Shares of Cirrus Logic fell after Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said the next iPhone wouldn't feature expanded use of Cirrus' technology …
Nate Rogers / The Ringer:
A profile of Paul Dochney, the man behind pseudonymous character @dril that emerged from Something Awful to become one of the most influential Twitter accounts  —  Paul Dochney posted his way into the halls of internet lore.  After 15 years of anonymity, can he emerge without compromising his act?
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
A study finds that assigning ChatGPT a persona using its API, like “a bad person” or a certain historical figure, increases the chatbot's toxicity sixfold  —  It's no secret that OpenAI's viral AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT, can be prompted to say sexist, racist and pretty vile things.
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
Google releases Android 14 Beta 1 for Pixel devices, adding sharesheet custom actions, a more prominent back arrow, per-app language preferences, and more  —  Google's Android development cycle runs on a rather predictable cadence these days.  Today, after two developer previews …
Financial Times:
Filings: SoftBank sold ~$7.2B of Alibaba shares in 2023, reducing its stake in the company to just 3.8%, after a record $29B selldown in 2022; BABA drops 5%+  —  Japanese investor makes $7.2bn from forward sales of shares in Chinese ecommerce group as lucrative partnership wanes
New York Times:
NPR decides to “no longer be active on Twitter” after the platform took “actions that undermine our credibility” by implying NPR is not editorially independent  —  The broadcaster said that the label undermined its credibility “by falsely implying that we are not editorially independent.”
Faiz Siddiqui / Washington Post:

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Earlier Picks

David McCabe / New York Times:
Kenrick Cai / Forbes:
Todd Spangler / Variety:
Bart Meijer / Reuters:
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:
Sharon Goldman / VentureBeat: