Techmeme
November 30, 2023, 9:30 AM

Top News

Alex Heath / The Verge:
OpenAI makes Sam Altman's return as CEO official and gives Microsoft a non-voting observer seat on the nonprofit board that controls the for-profit company  —  Sam Altman is officially OpenAI's CEO again.  —  Just before Thanksgiving, the company said it had reached a deal in principle for him to return, and now it's done.
Rachel Metz / Bloomberg:
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says that co-founder Ilya Sutskever won't be a board member, but that the company is “discussing how he can continue his work at OpenAI”  —  - Sam Altman is officially back as CEO of the AI startup  — Mira Murati will retain her post as chief technology officer
Alex Heath / The Verge:
Q&A with Sam Altman on his firing, returning to OpenAI, improving its governance, Q*, lessons from the saga, and more; Altman does not say why he was fired  —  “Clearly our governance structure had a problem,” according to Altman. … When OpenAI's board asked Sam Altman to return …
Lora Kolodny / CNBC:
Elon Musk dismisses fear of advertisers leaving X after his controversial posts: “If somebody's gonna try to blackmail me with advertising ... go fuck yourself”  —  - In recent weeks, Musk has promoted and sometimes verbally endorsed what the White House called “antisemitic and racist hate” …
More: The Hollywood Reporter, New York Times, RTÉ, Engadget, Axios, Financial Times, 9to5Mac, Tech Xplore, NBC 7 San Diego, Livemint, Variety, TweakTown, CoinGape, The Overspill, MacDailyNews, The Verge, Fortune, Social Media Today, CNN, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Cointelegraph, Wired, The Hill, MobileSyrup, Bitcoin Insider, AppleInsider, and The Verge
Forums: r/elonmusk and r/Destiny
Jacob Kastrenakes / The Verge:
Elon Musk calls his November 15 X post a mistake that “handed a loaded gun to those who hate me and arguably to those who are antisemitic”, for which he's sorry  —  I should in retrospect not have replied to that one person and should have written in greater length what i meant.
Kim Masters / The Hollywood Reporter:
Former associates of Linda Yaccarino describe her as difficult and volatile but hardworking, and say high self-regard made her think she could manage Elon Musk  —  The former NBCUniversal ad sales chief thought she could manage the mercurial Elon Musk.  Her former colleagues are baffled at the result …
Foo Yun Chee / Reuters:
The BEUC and 18 others target Meta's €9.99+ Europe subscription in a complaint, two days after a similar noyb complaint, saying the option charges for privacy  —  Meta Platforms' (META.O) advertising-free subscription service, a fee-based offering rolled out in Europe this month …
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Meta plans to launch Threads in Europe in December, the largest expansion since its July debut, offering a choice of using Threads without a profile  —  Expansion is expected in December, a signal of company's commitment to microblogging service  —  Facebook parent Meta Platforms plans …
Alex Ivanovs / Stack Diary:
Researchers develop a “divergence attack” that makes ChatGPT emit sequences copied from its training data, by prompting the LLM to repeat a word numerous times  —  Large language models, like ChatGPT, are trained on vast amounts of text data from books, websites, and other sources.
AJ Vicens / CyberScoop:
Meta officials say the US stopped proactively sharing information on foreign influence operations, as the company releases its Q3 Adversarial Threat Report  —  Russia, Iran and China are likely to conduct influence operations via fake social media accounts ahead of the 2024 election, a new Meta report says.
Emilia David / The Verge:
At re:Invent, AWS unveils Model Evaluation on Bedrock in preview to help companies evaluate AI models before use, with human testers involved in the process  —  Amazon wants users to evaluate AI models better and encourage more humans to be involved in the process.
Justine Calma / The Verge:
Analysis: crypto mining used ~1,600 gigaliters of water in 2021 when bitcoin peaked at $65K, or 16K liters per transaction, around 6.2M times a credit card  —  Bitcoin mines aren't just energy-hungry, it turns out they're thirsty, too.  The water consumption tied to a single Bitcoin transaction …
CBC News:
Google and Canada reach an agreement in their dispute over the country's Online News Act; Google plans to pay news companies around CA$100M, or ~$74M, per year  —  Agreement comes 3 weeks before Online News Act rules come into force  —  Google and the federal government have reached …
Lawrence Abrams / BleepingComputer:
The US sanctions Sinbad, a crypto mixer allegedly used by the North Korean Lazarus hacking group, and the US, the Netherlands, and Poland seize the service  —  The U.S. Department of the Treasury has sanctioned the Sinbad cryptocurrency mixing service for its use as a money-laundering tool by the North Korean Lazarus hacking group.
New York Times:
Spotify Wrapped 2023's new Sound Town, for similar listeners in other cities, leaves users baffled and entertained after many were designated as Burlington, VT  —  The music streaming service released a new feature — Sound Towns — with its yearly summary of listener preferences and linked many people to an unexpected city.
Anna Baydakova / The Block:
A US court says FTX Trading and affiliated debtors can start selling $744M worth of Grayscale and Bitwise shares; GBTC accounts for 22.3M units worth $597M  —  - A Delaware bankruptcy judge said Wednesday that FTX debtors can start selling $744 million worth of Grayscale and Bitwise shares.
Olga Kharif / Bloomberg:
SoFi tells its crypto customers to liquidate their accounts or move holdings to Blockchain.com by December 19, as it exits crypto due to regulatory scrutiny  —  - Customers have to move by Dec. 19 or liquidate their coins … The San Francisco-based company told crypto customers Wednesday …

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More News

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Earlier Picks

Taylor Lorenz / Washington Post:
Ari Levy / CNBC:
Susan Heavey / Reuters:
Jason Koebler / 404 Media:
Todd Spangler / Variety:
Michael Peel / Financial Times: