Techmeme
March 16, 2024, 11:45 PM

Top News

Reuters:
Sources: SpaceX's Starshield is building a network of spy satellites under a classified, $1.8B contract with the US spy agency National Reconnaissance Office  —  SpaceX is building a network of hundreds of spy satellites under a classified contract with a U.S. intelligence agency …
Axios:
A look at a potential TikTok US sale, with an estimated valuation of $100B, or $40B without the algorithm, as Steven Mnuchin and others form investor groups  —  - TikTok's U.S. revenue reportedly was between $16 billion and $20 billion in 2023, but CEO Shou Zi Chew has said the company is in the red.
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
LinkedIn confirms it is working on adding puzzle-based games; a researcher says it is testing ranking companies in the games based on the scores of employees  —  LinkedIn, the Microsoft-owned social platform, has made a name for itself primarily as a platform for people looking to network …
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: US prosecutors in Virginia, with FDA's help, are investigating whether Meta's platforms are facilitating and profiting from the illegal sale of drugs  —  Federal prosecutors are looking into whether platforms including Facebook facilitate and profit from illicit sale of drugs
Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat:
Apple researchers detail MM1, a series of multimodal LLMs with up to 30B parameters they say achieve state-of-the-art performance across multiple AI benchmarks  —  Apple researchers have developed new methods for training large language models on both text and images, enabling more powerful …
Tim Higgins / Wall Street Journal:
How Elon Musk courted Don Lemon to show that X isn't a right-wing tool, as the breakup highlights Linda Yaccarino's thankless task of trying to assure brands  —  Unexpected split leaves X CEO Linda Yaccarino with another loss  —  Don Lemon got to see both sides of Elon Musk.
Benjamin Shestakofsky / IEEE Spectrum:
An excerpt from the book Behind the Startup details how an unnamed Silicon Valley-based unicorn's push for rapid growth left little time for actual engineering  —  For 19 months, the sociologist Benjamin Shestakofsky embedded himself in an early-stage tech startup to study its organization and culture.
Miranda Bryant / The Guardian:
Lotte Rubæk, a psychologist who advises Meta on suicide prevention and self-harm, quits, accusing Meta of “turning a blind eye” to harmful content on Instagram  —  Exclusive: Psychologist accuses Meta of ‘turning a blind eye’ to posts she believes represent further danger to vulnerable women
Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:
Researchers detail ArtPrompt, a jailbreak that uses ASCII art to elicit harmful responses from aligned LLMs such as GPT-3.5, GPT-4, Gemini, Claude, and Llama2  —  LLMs are trained to block harmful responses.  Old-school images can override those rules.  —  Researchers have discovered …
Elle Hardy / New Republic:
How evangelicals proselytize using Bless Every Home, an app that lets users create neighborhood maps and data tables based on people's religion and ethnicity  —  The future of proselytizing—and surveillance—has arrived.  An app called Bless Every Home, which has been backed …
Matt Novak / Gizmodo:
Filing: SBF wrote a Google doc in which he floated “bad ideas” to improve his image, including going on Tucker Carlson and coming out “against the woke agenda”  —  SBF's brainstorming notes included lines like “Come out against the woke agenda.”  —  Are you a billionaire in trouble?

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Featured Podcasts

Channels with Peter Kafka:
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Big Technology Podcast:
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Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith speaks with leaders in government, business, and culture to explore the most critical challenges at the intersection of technology and society.
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More News

Bloomberg.com:
James O'Donnell / MIT Technology Review:

Earlier Picks

Amanda Silberling / TechCrunch:
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:
Andrew Hayward / Decrypt:
Dan Primack / Axios:
Chance Miller / 9to5Mac: