Techmeme
March 13, 2024, 12:35 PM

Top News

Washington Post:
The US House passes a bipartisan TikTok bill that forces a sale or ban of the app; the legislation faces an uncertain Senate path without a companion measure  —  The House vote, set for Wednesday, is expected to mark the first time a chamber of Congress has passed legislation that could lead to a ban of a social media platform.
Wall Street Journal:
CNBC:
The EU Parliament approves the AI Act, voting 523 in favor and 46 against, despite competition fears; the Act, born in 2021, puts AI tech into risk categories  —  - The European Union Parliament on Wednesday approved the world's first major set of regulatory ground rules to govern …
Emilia David / The Verge:
Google DeepMind details SIMA, an AI agent training to learn gaming skills to play like a human; SIMA trained on No Man's Sky, Goat Simulator 3, and other games  —  Google DeepMind unveiled SIMA, an AI agent training to learn gaming skills so it plays more like a human instead of an overpowered AI that does its own thing.
Ali Winston / Wired:
An analysis of 3M+ Discord and Telegram chats in 50+ groups finds a global network of thousands of violent predators who target, groom, and extort kids online  —  A global network of violent predators is hiding in plain sight, targeting children on major platforms, grooming them, and extorting them to commit horrific acts of abuse.
Washington Post:
Joanna Stern / Wall Street Journal:
An interview with OpenAI CTO Mira Murati on Sora, set for release later in 2024, its training data, red-teaming Sora, working with the film industry, and more  —  In an exclusive interview with our columnist, CTO Mira Murati explains the company's new Sora AI video tool and how it plans to roll it out
Romain Dillet / TechCrunch:
Spotify rolls out music videos on mobile and desktop in beta in 11 markets, including Brazil, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, and the UK, for Premium subscribers  —  Spotify is adding music videos to its mobile and desktop apps in some markets.  They are tightly integrated with the company's music library …
Olga Kharif / Bloomberg:
Ethereum completes its Dencun upgrade, which lowers expenses on Layer 2 networks by storing data in “blobs”; a transaction that once cost $1 can now cost a cent  —  - Software upgrade reduces costs for so-called Layer 2 chains  — Upgrade expected to spur on development of new apps and chains
Jordan Novet / CNBC:
Microsoft announces Copilot for Security will be generally available on April 1 for $4 per “security compute unit”  —  - The Microsoft Copilot for Security will cost $4 per “security compute unit” when it becomes available in April.  — Microsoft wants the price to be low enough that users can test it.
Chris Eggertsen / Billboard:
Neil Young brings his music back to Spotify after requesting its removal in January 2022, saying “Apple and Amazon have started serving the same disinformation”  —  The singer-songwriter previously had his music removed from the platform over what he deemed the spread of vaccine misinformation on the Joe Rogan Experience.
Bill Toulas / BleepingComputer:
Google paid out $10M to 632 bug bounty researchers in 2023 via its Vulnerability Reward Program, including $3.4M for Android bugs; the highest bounty was $113K  —  Google awarded $10 million to 632 researchers from 68 countries in 2023 for finding and responsibly reporting security flaws in the company's products and services.
Bill Toulas / BleepingComputer:
A US jury convicts Russian-Swedish national Roman Sterlingov for operating crypto “tumbler” Bitcoin Fog between 2011 and 2021, laundering 1.2M+ BTC worth ~$400M  —  Russian-Swedish national Roman Sterlingov was convicted by a federal jury in Washington, D.C., for operating Bitcoin Fog between 2011 and 2021.
Timmy Shen / The Block:
US Copyright Office and USPTO study: existing IP laws are sufficient to address NFT copyright infringement concerns and changes are not currently necessary  —  - The intellectual property authorities in the U.S. noted in an NFT study that the current laws are sufficient to address infringement concerns.
George Hammond / Financial Times:
Memo: John Collison says Stripe is in “no rush” to go public and its payment volume rose 25% YoY to $1T in 2023; source: Stripe hit ~$1B in Q3 2023 net revenue  —  Payments company has become a Silicon Valley bellwether as its valuation has risen and fallen over the past few years
Patricia Hernandez / Polygon:
How MrBeast dominates this ostentatious YouTube era, using a fast, frantic, and omnipresent editing style, as his videos slowly evolve to focus on storytelling  —  Jimmy Donaldson warped YouTube in his image — but YouTube is warping him back  —  In the fall of 2023, a clip ripped from a video …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
RevenueCat survey of nearly 30K mobile subscription apps: only 17.2% will reach $1,000 in monthly revenue and only 3.5% will reach $10,000 in monthly revenue  —  Investors know that most startups fail, but something that may be less understood is how few mobile apps actually make money.
Mayank Parmar / BleepingComputer:
Brave says that daily Brave iOS app installs jumped from ~8K to over 11K after Apple added a default browser choice screen in the EU to comply with the DMA  —  Brave has seen a sharp increase in users installing its privacy-focused Brave Browser on iPhones after Apple introduced changes …
Mike Isaac / New York Times:
How Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, who returned in 2015 during a leadership crisis, grew the website from $12M in annual revenue to $800M+ and from 80 staff to 2,000  —  The site, a throwback to an earlier era of social media, is poised to go public as soon as next week.  It hasn't been easy to reach this point.
Tiernan Ray / ZDNet:
Cerebras announces the WSE-3, a TSMC-made 5nm chip almost the size of a 12-inch wafer with 4T transistors, up from 2.6T in the WSE-2, for training AI models  —  The race for ever-larger generative artificial intelligence models continues to fuel the chip industry.
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:
Bluesky open sources its collaborative moderation tool Ozone and plans to let users run their own independent moderation services later this week  —  Decentralized Twitter/X rival Bluesky announced today that it's open sourcing Ozone, a tool that lets individuals and teams collaboratively review and label content on the network.

Sponsor Posts

Command Line:
What will the next generation of developers do when AI writes the code?  —  Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon are betting that the junior devs we train today will be the senior engineers of tomorrow.
Will Reed:
The best sales leaders aren't job hunting.  Here's how to reach them without months of cold outreach.  —  Our team came from Box, Square, and Brex, so we already know the GTM leaders worth meeting.
Zoho:
UK tax compliance with Zoho Books  —  The evolving tax landscape in the UK has added an additional responsibility to business owners, accountants, and bookkeepers to ensure their choice of accounting software supports compliance …
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

The Upstarts Podcast:
The $7B Startup Mapping Your Health In Just One Hour | Neko's Hjalmar Nilsonne
Veteran tech reporter Alex Konrad sits down with breakout entrepreneurs taking on the status quo to shake up their fields in AI, design, nuclear energy, space, and more.
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Cheeky Pint:
The company building underwater drones for $50,000
Stripe cofounder John Collison interviews founders, builders, and leaders over a pint.
Subscribe to Cheeky Pint.
BG2 Pod:
Jensen Huang | Does AI Revenue Justify Capex, '27 AI Bottlenecks, Singularity, Open vs Closed & more
Open-source podcast on all things tech, markets, investing, and capitalism, hosted by Brad Gerstner.
Subscribe to BG2 Pod.
Big Technology Podcast:
The Bumpy Road To AGI — With Kevin Roose
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
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Channels with Peter Kafka:
How to Run a Political Campaign in the TikTok Era (And How Not To)
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.
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Sources:
Robinhood's CEO on letting AI trade your money
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.
 

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