Techmeme
September 21, 2023, 11:20 AM

Top News

Bloomberg:
Cisco plans to acquire cybersecurity company Splunk for $157 per share in cash, up 31% on Splunk's September 20 closing price, in a deal valued at ~$28B  —  Cisco will pay $157 a share in cash, the companies said in a statement Thursday, or a 31% premium to Splunk's previous closing price on Wednesday.
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Apple spent billions of dollars developing a modem chip for the new iPhones to cut ties with Qualcomm, but the chip was slow and prone to overheating  —  The company set out to design a silicon chip that would allow it to cut ties with Qualcomm, a longtime supplier and bitter foe
Nathan Edwards / The Verge:
Microsoft announces a unified Copilot built into Windows 11, launching across all of its apps and services, including Office 365, from September 26  —  Microsoft today announced a new, unified Copilot experience launching on September 26th.  The new “AI companion,” just called Copilot …
Ashley Stewart / Insider:
Sources: Panos Panay's abrupt departure came after Microsoft made budget and staff cuts, canceled products, and discussed reorganizing his hardware unit  —  - Microsoft this week announced Chief Product Officer Panos Panay left after nearly 20 years.  — Panay is expected …
Jason Schreier / Bloomberg:
Korean game publisher Krafton says Dead Space developer Striking Distance's CEO Glen Schofield, COO, and CFO are leaving, months after its new game flopped  —  Video-game developer Striking Distance Studios, a subsidiary of Korean publisher Krafton Inc., is appointing new management several months …
Jay Peters / The Verge:
Meta updates Facebook's “identity system”, including a new logo to confidently express the platform's “core blue color”, and refines Facebook's emoji Reactions  —  Meta is updating Facebook's “identity system,” and that includes a dramatically refreshed logo.  —  Just kidding!
Wired:
Documents show that up to a dozen of Neuralink's primate subjects were euthanized after suffering complications; Elon Musk says no primates died due to implants  —  Elon Musk says no primates died as a result of Neuralink's implants.  A WIRED investigation now reveals the grisly specifics …
Allison Johnson / The Verge:
Apple's FineWoven accessories and iPhone cases are really bad: they are expensive, quickly show wear, and scratch very easily, leaving seemingly permanent marks  —  Apple's new FineWoven iPhone cases and accessories are bad.  Like, really bad.  I've been puzzling over them for the past week, looking at them from different angles.
Bloomberg:
The DOJ removes public access to Google's emails, charts, and internal presentations that had come out as evidence in the antitrust lawsuit against the company  —  Trial is already limited in visibility to those who personally attend court … Google had challenged the government's posting …
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
GitHub expands Copilot Chat beta in Visual Studio and VS Code to individual subscribers, after launching the tool for business users in July 2023  —  Three months ago, GitHub launched Copilot Chat, its ChatGPT-like programming-centric chatbot, out of private preview by making it available …
Jonathan Weil / Wall Street Journal:
Tether confirms resuming lending its stablecoins to customers, less than a year after saying it would end such loans; $5.5B of its assets were loans on June 30  —  Cryptocurrency issuer had said it would cut loans to zero in 2023  —  Tether Holdings resumed lending out its own stablecoins to customers …
Wayne Ma / The Information:
Source: Google has extensively discussed dropping Broadcom for AI chips as early as 2027 to design its own TPUs, aiming to save billions of dollars annually  —  Google executives have extensively discussed dropping Broadcom as a supplier of artificial intelligence chips as early as 2027 …
Wes Davis / The Verge:
Amazon's Eero announces the Eero Max 7, its first router to support Wi-Fi 7, offering 2.4GHz, 5GHz, and 6GHz and “up to 4.3 Gbps” wireless throughput, for $600+  —  Eero has announced a powerful new top-of-the-line router called the Eero Max 7.  It's Eero's first router to support …
Keisha Oleaga / nft now:
A look at AI-generated geometric art crafted using Stable Diffusion and ControlNet, a neural network structure that adds extra conditions to diffusion models  —  This past weekend, a new kind of artwork made waves across the Internet: AI-generated spiral art.
Steve Nadis / Quanta Magazine:
A look at Poisson flow generative models, a physics-inspired alternative to diffusion-based AI models that can create the same quality images 10X to 20X faster  —  Some modern image generators rely on the principles of diffusion to create images.  Alternatives based on the process behind …

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More News

Andrew Throuvalas / Decrypt:
Kevin Roose / New York Times:

Earlier Picks

Mary Ann Azevedo / TechCrunch:
Bloomberg:
Andrew J. Hawkins / The Verge:
Dana Mattioli / Wall Street Journal:
Ina Fried / Axios: