Techmeme
March 17, 2024, 1:10 AM

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 …
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 …
Joshua Oliver / Financial Times:
FTX's collapse exposed problems with crypto that are just as relevant today, including a lack of decentralization and companies' persistent regulatory battles  —  Jay Gatsby, Albert Einstein, Frodo Baggins, John Pierpont Morgan, Michael Jordan, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg …
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?
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
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
Michael J. de la Merced / New York Times:
A profile of former Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch, whose trial begins on March 18 in SF, where federal prosecutors have accused him of defrauding HP of billions  —  A criminal trial is set to begin for Mr. Lynch, the founder of the software company Autonomy, which was sold to Hewlett-Packard in 2011 and later accused of being a fraud.

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:
Zoho Sign takes a bite of Apple's latest: iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS Golden Gate  —  It's September, and you know the drill.  Apple just handed us a fresh batch of releases, and there's plenty to look forward …
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

Big Technology Podcast:
A Sober Conversation About AI Existential Risk — With Nate Soares
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.
Channels with Peter Kafka:
AI Wants to Shop for You. What Could Go Wrong?
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.
Invest Like the Best:
Michael Moritz - Lessons From 40 Years of Investing and Writing
The leading destination to learn about business and investing. We do this by showcasing exceptional talent and ideas.
Subscribe to Invest Like the Best.
Sources:
Baseten's CEO on why every company will want to own its AI
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.
Training Data:
Box's Aaron Levie: On Reinventing Yourself in the AI Age and Enterprise Diffusion
Sequoia Capital partners host conversations with leading AI builders and researchers to develop a deeper understanding of the evolving technologies and their implications.
Subscribe to Training Data.
Uncapped with Jack Altman:
Andrew Feldman from Cerebras
Conversations with people I admire about things I'm genuinely interested in.
Subscribe to Uncapped with Jack Altman.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 1:10 AM ET, March 17, 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

Bloomberg.com:
Elle Hardy / New Republic:

Earlier Picks

Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:
Dan Primack / Axios:
Chance Miller / 9to5Mac: