Techmeme
February 7, 2024, 10:40 AM

Top News

Wayne Ma / The Information:
Source: Apple is building at least two iPhone prototypes that fold widthwise; the devices are in early development and not set for production in 2024 or 2025  —  Apple is building prototypes of at least two iPhones that fold widthwise like a clamshell, according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation.
Emilia David / The Verge:
OpenAI says DALL-E 3 will embed watermarks to images with C2PA metadata and acknowledges the metadata can easily be removed either accidentally or intentionally  —  OpenAI's image generator DALL-E 3 will add watermarks to image metadata as more companies roll out support for standards …
Mike Isaac / New York Times:
Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat:
Apple partners with University of California researchers to release open-source AI model MGIE, which can edit images based on natural language instructions  —  Apple has released a new open-source AI model, called “MGIE,” that can edit images based on natural language instructions.
Jane Zhang / Bloomberg:
Alibaba reports Q3 revenue up 5% YoY to ~$36.7B, net income down to ~$2B, Taobao and Tmall revenue up 2% YoY to ~$18B, and a $25B share buyback; BABA drops ~5%  —  - The move may appeal to some investors as growth plateaus  — Alibaba is grappling with market and internal uncertainty
Charles Pulliam-Moore / The Verge:
Disney+ begins emailing subscribers about new changes to its TOS that will make sharing accounts harder, days after Hulu sent out similar notices  —  Today, Disney Plus began sending out emails informing subscribers about new changes to its terms of service that will, among other things …
Camilla Hodgson / Financial Times:
Uber reports Q4 revenue up 15% YoY to $9.9B, Gross Bookings up 22% YoY to $37.6B, a $1.9B net income, 150M MAUs, and first full-year operating profit of $1.1B  —  Ride-hailing app beats forecasts and boasts of ‘inflection point’  —  Uber has reported its first full year of operating profits …
Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat:
Smaug-72B, a Qwen-72B-based open-source LLM released by Abacus AI, tops the Hugging Face Open LLM leaderboard and outperforms GPT-3.5 on several benchmarks  —  A new open-source language model has claimed the throne of the best in the world, according to the latest rankings from Hugging Face …
Matt Burgess / Wired:
A look at Meta's plan to build interoperability into WhatsApp and Messenger under the DMA; Meta plans to make third-party chats opt-in and in a separate inbox  —  New EU rules mean WhatsApp and Messenger must be interoperable with other chat apps.  Here's how that will work.
Nelson Wang / Unchained:
MicroStrategy bought 31,775 bitcoin in Q4 2023 for an average cost of $39,411, taking its total holdings to 190K bitcoin acquired for a total cost of $5.93B  —  Software firm MicroStrategy, the largest corporate holder of bitcoin, acquired 31,755 bitcoins in the fourth quarter of 2023 …
Financial Times:
A German court sides with US-based R2 Semiconductor over Intel in a patent infringement suit; a source says the ruling could lead to a ban on HP and Dell sales  —  US chipmaker plans to appeal against decision that could lead to ban on sale of certain HP and Dell products
Wall Street Journal:
Reuters:
The Netherlands says Chinese state-sponsored hackers broke into the Dutch Ministry of Defence's internal network in 2023, using a Fortinet vulnerability  —  Chinese state-backed cyber spies gained access to a Dutch military network last year, Dutch intelligence agencies said on Tuesday …
Ron Miller / TechCrunch:
Apple releases a beta version of visionOS 1.1, which brings enterprise device management to the Vision Pro  —  It's been hard to avoid news about the Apple Vision Pro, the company's entry into the virtual reality market, in recent days.  It was officially released on Friday to much fanfare, but how will it fare in the enterprise?
Kaitlyn Tiffany / The Atlantic:
Inside Zuzalu, a co-living experiment organized by Vitalik Buterin in Montenegro in 2023, as the techno-utopian “Network State” concept inspires more projects  —  Silicon Valley has always dreamed of building its own utopias.  Who's ready to move in?  —  I.

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