Techmeme
November 30, 2023, 11:00 AM

Top News

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:
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.
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 declines to 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 scoffs at advertisers leaving X because of his controversial posts: “If somebody's going to 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, Forbes, Adweek, Engadget, RTÉ, Financial Times, Fortune, KNSD-TV, 9to5Mac, TechSpot, The Guardian, CNN, New York Times, Disconnect, Tech Xplore, Variety, TweakTown, CoinGape, The Overspill, Metro.co.uk, The Verge, Cointelegraph, 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:
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Meta plans to launch Threads in the EU in December, its largest expansion since its July 2023 debut, but only for consumption, no profiles or posting  —  Expansion is expected in December, a signal of company's commitment to microblogging service  —  Facebook parent Meta Platforms plans …
Foo Yun Chee / Reuters:
The BEUC and its members follow NOYB in filing a complaint against Meta's €9.99+/month subscriptions in the EU, saying the tier amounts to charging for privacy  —  Meta Platforms' (META.O) advertising-free subscription service, a fee-based offering rolled out in Europe this month …
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.
Joe Rossignol / MacRumors:
Apple says Amkor will package some Apple silicon chips in its new Arizona facility; Amkor plans to invest $2B, employ 2,000, and start production in 2-3 years  —  As part of its efforts to expand its U.S. manufacturing, Apple today announced that Amkor will package some Apple silicon chips …
Eddie Makuch / GameSpot:
At an event, Xbox CFO Tim Stuart says Microsoft wants to bring Xbox Game Pass to PlayStation, Nintendo, and “every screen that can play games”  —  “It's a bit of a change of strategy,” Microsoft admits.  —  Microsoft wants to bring Xbox Game Pass to PlayStation and Nintendo.
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 …
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.
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.
Ian King / Bloomberg:
At the NYT's DealBook event, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says the US is 10 years to 20 years from chip independence and reaffirms Nvidia's commitment to China  —  Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang, who runs the semiconductor industry's most valuable company …
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.
Ryan Gallagher / Bloomberg:
Google TAG executive Kate Morgan says Google observed a “massive increase” in Chinese cyberattacks on Taiwan in the last six months from over 100 groups  —  - Company has observed a ‘massive increase’ in China's attacks  — Government-sponsored hackers targeting government and industry
More: DigiTimes.  Forums: Slashdot
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.
Taylor Lorenz / Washington Post:
Substack rolls out video creation and editing tools to enable creators to publish video podcasts, create interactive AI-made transcripts, and customize clips  —  Content creators are launching original shows on Substack as the company introduces a suite of new video tools

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More News

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Earlier Picks

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