Techmeme
February 18, 2024, 3:00 PM

Top News

Javier Espinoza / Financial Times:
Sources: the EU plans to fine Apple around €500M for allegedly breaking EU law over access to music streaming services, following a 2019 complaint by Spotify  —  Move is culmination of long-running European Commission antitrust probe after a complaint by Spotify
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Apple Store sources: Vision Pro returns are between average and above average compared to other products; in-store demo conversion rate is as high as 10% to 15%  —  The Apple Vision Pro has now been available for two weeks — and some of Apple's most dedicated customers are returning the device to get back their $3,500.
Michael Crider / PCWorld:
SPEC invalidates 2,600 benchmark results for some Intel Xeon CPUs, saying their compiler artificially inflated the results of its benchmark by as much as 9%  —  Benchmarks, while inherently contentious and not always representative of real-world performance, are an important tool in any kind of quantitative evaluation.
Zeke Faux / Bloomberg:
A Florida court filing accuses the Bahamas-based Deltec Bank of giving Alameda Research a short-term line of credit worth billions of dollars to buy Tether  —  - Deltec is alleged to have provided a short-term line of credit  — Court documents suggest a tighter web than previously known
Bloomberg:
Sources: the UK, the US, and other allies are working to provide Ukraine with thousands of new AI-enabled drones that could swarm Russian targets simultaneously  —  - Technology could help Ukraine overwhelm some Russian targets  — Germany's Scholz calls on EU allies to increase Ukraine aid
Connie Loizos / TechCrunch:
Q&A with Laela Sturdy, the head of Alphabet's growth stage venture arm CapitalG, about its decision-making process, AI strategy, Stripe's valuation, and more  —  Almost a year ago, Alphabet's growth stage venture arm, CapitalG, named partner Laela Sturdy as its new head, just as the unit's founder, David Lawee, stepped down.
Jessica Traynor / The Guardian:
A look at the data center economy of Ireland, which had 82 data centers in 2023, amid concerns about rolling blackouts due to pressure on the electrical grid  —  Datacentres are part of Ireland's vision of itself as a tech hub.  There are now more than 80, using vast amounts of electricity.
Amy Or / Bloomberg:
Sources: Reddit signed a deal early in 2024, worth ~$60M on an annualized basis, allowing a large unnamed AI company to train its models on Reddit's content  —  - Social media firm agrees $60 million deal with AI company  — Reddit advised to seek at least $5 billion IPO valuation

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:
Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning  —  SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds.  Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.
Cloudflare:
Cloudflare Connect 2026: The Agentic Conference  —  Stop preparing for agents.  Start running them.  100+ sessions, workshops, and speakers from OpenAI, Arm, and Cloudflare across AI, security, and performance.
Zoho:
Introducing Zoho AgentInbox: Email infrastructure built for AI agents  —  Most AI agents doing real work eventually need to send or receive email.  The default move is to hand them access to someone's existing inbox …
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Featured Podcasts

Channels with Peter Kafka:
Meta's New $1300 Glasses and the Fight to Control AI
Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.
Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.
Great Chat:
Doomers at Dreamforce
A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.
Subscribe to Great Chat.
Big Technology Podcast:
YouTube CEO Neal Mohan: Why We're Betting On AI And Not Afraid Of It
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.
Sources:
Marc Benioff on the AI boom, SaaSpocalypse, and future of Slack
Candid conversations with the leaders shaping what's next in AI and the broader tech industry. Hosted by Alex Heath, who has covered Silicon Valley for more than a decade.
Subscribe to Sources.
Invest Like the Best:
Gabe Stengel - Building Investing Superintelligence
The leading destination to learn about business and investing. We do this by showcasing exceptional talent and ideas.
Subscribe to Invest Like the Best.
Grit:
Inside the AI Startup Making Customer Support 65% Cheaper
Grit explores what it takes to create, build and scale world-class organizations.
Subscribe to Grit.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 3:00 PM ET, February 18, 2024.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

More News

Tim Higgins / Wall Street Journal:
Washington Post:
Alex Heath / The Verge:
Dell Cameron / Wired:

Earlier Picks

John Gruber / Daring Fireball:
Andy Robinson / Video Games Chronicle:
New York Times: