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

Tribe AI:
Build AI products that matter  —  Tribe AI helps organizations rapidly deploy AI solutions that have real business impact.  We bring together world class AI talent and tooling to drive differentiated results.
Prospect:
A running list of the best startups to join  —  We've analyzed thousands of startups using the same data VCs use and distilled our list down to the top 2%.  Discover and join the next Stripe, Airbnb, or Coinbase today.
Zoho:
Simplify your billing processes by integrating Zoho Billing with Zoho Cliq  —  Handling billing in a customizable subscription model can quickly become a headache.  If a SaaS company offers three packages for its email client …
Techmeme Leaderboards:
Discover the top reporters on AI, VR, policy, and much more  —  We've analyzed Techmeme's news crawl to identify the most influential and prolific writers on 48 news topics.  Download reports immediately for just $100.
Big Technology Podcast:
Apple's Bad iPad Ad, AI Assistant Hype, Netflix's Big Live Ambitions
The Big Technology Podcast, hosted by journalist Alex Kantrowitz, takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
Techmeme Ride Home:
Mon. 05/13 - The Solar Storm Is Real (Ask Farmers)
The day's tech news, every day at 5pm ET. Fifteen minutes and you're up to date.
Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or RSS.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 12:35 PM ET, March 13, 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

Sean Michael Kerner / VentureBeat:

Earlier Picks

Bloomberg:
Financial Times:
Charlotte Trueman / DatacenterDynamics: