Techmeme
March 20, 2024, 7:55 AM

Top News

Jess Weatherbed / The Verge:
SteamDB: after releasing its massive 1.6 update, Stardew Valley hit 146,159 concurrent players on Steam, a new record and above Palworld's stats this week  —  The cozy farming simulator hit 146,159 concurrent players on Steam according to SteamDB data, smashing the game's previous record …
Dina Bass / Bloomberg:
Microsoft hires DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman to run consumer AI, reporting to Satya Nadella, and brings on most staff from his Inflection AI startup  —  Suleyman and his team will join from OpenAI rival Inflection AI  —  Microsoft Corp. has named Mustafa Suleyman head …
Satya Nadella / The Official Microsoft Blog:
Microsoft announces Microsoft AI, focused on Copilot and other consumer AI products; Mustafa Suleyman will be its CEO and Karén Simonyan its chief scientist  —  Satya Nadella, Chief Executive Officer, shared the below communication today with Microsoft employees.
Inflection:
Inflection AI names Sean White as CEO and plans to host Inflection-2.5 on Azure, after co-founders Karén Simonyan and Mustafa Suleyman depart for Microsoft AI  —  From day one at Inflection, we've been driven by a simple mission: to create a personal intelligence for everyone.
Shirin Ghaffary / Bloomberg:
Financial Times:
The US awards Intel $8.5B in CHIPS Act funding and $11B in loans to expand in Arizona, Ohio, New Mexico, and Oregon; Intel plans to spend $100B over five years  —  Preliminary agreement under US Chips Act also includes $11bn loan as company expands capacity in Arizona and other states
Ashley Belanger / Ars Technica:
Glassdoor users complain after the service added real names to profiles without explicit user consent; Glassdoor cross-populates data between its services  —  Anonymous review site Glassdoor now consults public sources to identify users.  —  Glassdoor, where employees go to leave anonymous reviews …
Emma Roth / The Verge:
In a brief demo, Meta shows how Threads could handle fediverse sharing, including waiting five minutes before sending a Threads post to the fediverse  —  Threads is coming to the fediverse — and we just got our first official look at how that might work from Meta itself.
Bill Toulas / BleepingComputer:
Trend Micro researchers detail Earth Krahang, a China-linked APT campaign that is potentially linked to I-Soon and has breached 70 organizations in 23 countries  —  A sophisticated hacking campaign attributed to a Chinese Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) group known as 'Earth Krahang …
Business Insider:
Sources: OpenAI plans to release GPT-5 in mid-2024, likely during summer, and some enterprise customers have recently received demos of the latest model  —  - OpenAI's main product is the popular generative AI tool ChatGPT.  — Since its last major model upgrade to GPT-4, the tool has run into performance issues.
Kamila Wojciechowska / Android Authority:
Source: Google's Pixel 8a will have a 6.1" 120Hz OLED display, Tensor G3 chip, DisplayPort output support, and the same camera sensor as the Pixel 7a  —  The Pixel 8a's major upgrades will make it even more competitive, but raise further questions over the vanilla Pixel 8.
Ionut Arghire / SecurityWeek:
Researchers say misconfigured Firebase instances exposed 125M+ users' records, including plaintext passwords, email addresses, and messages, across 900 websites  —  A weakness in a Firebase implementation allowed researchers to gain access to names, phone numbers, email addresses, plaintext passwords, confidential messages, and more.
Kate Irwin / PCMag:
Fitbit is working with Google Research to create an LLM based on Gemini to provide Fitbit mobile app users with personalized data and health recommendations  —  Google is training Gemini on health data, and it's creating a new AI model for the Fitbit app that can give advice tailored to your needs.
Ash Parrish / The Verge:
How Sweet Baby, a small video game narrative development company, became the focus of Gamergate 2.0, a harassment campaign against “forced” diversity in gaming  —  A group of gamers has mobilized a harassment campaign against a story consultant company, marginalized developers …
Samuel Stolton / Bloomberg:
France fines Google €250M for failing to broker deals with media outlets over content linking and using press content to train AI, after a €500M fine in 2021  —  - Firm also accused of breaking other commitments in news case  — Watchdog levies €250 million penalty in latest escalation
Mike Rogoway / Oregonian:
PE firm Francisco Partners agrees to acquire Portland, Oregon-based Jama Software, which helps companies develop complex tech products, for $1.2B  —  Jama Software, which helped lead a brief renaissance in Portland technology in the decade after the dot-com bust, sold Monday to a private equity firm for $1.2 billion.
Harry McCracken / Fast Company:
An interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on how the company's early decisions led to its AI boom, why Nvidia's ubiquity will not be easy to replicate, and more  —  Nvidia's chips sparked the AI revolution.  Now it's in the business of putting the technology to work in an array of industries.

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New York Times:
Maxwell Zeff / Gizmodo:
Michael Peel / Financial Times: