Techmeme
April 18, 2024, 2:30 PM

Top News

Alex Heath / The Verge:
Meta details Llama 3: 8B- and 70B-parameter models, a focus on reducing false refusals, and an upcoming model trained on 15T+ tokens that has 400B+ parameters  —  Meta's AI assistant is being put everywhere across Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook.  Meanwhile, the company's next major AI model, Llama 3, has arrived.
New York Times:
Meta plans to add its Meta AI chatbot to Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Facebook in 12+ countries, expanding on the US, powered by its new Llama 3 models  —  Users of Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and Messenger will be able to turn to the new technology, powered by Meta's latest artificial …
Emma Roth / The Verge:
Meta rolls out real-time AI image generation, which changes the image as the user types a prompt, in beta on WhatsApp and Meta AI on the web in the US  —  As soon as you start typing a text-to-image prompt in a chat with Meta AI, you'll see how the image changes as you add more detail about what you want to create.
Threads: @zuck and @chriscox
David Pierce / The Verge:
Google announces internal reorganizations, including an AI-focused Platforms and Devices group overseeing Pixel, Android, Chrome, and more, led by Rick Osterloh  —  AI is taking over at Google, and the company is changing in big ways to try to make it happen even faster.
Bill Toulas / BleepingComputer:
Europol and 19 countries make 37 arrests and disrupt phishing-as-a-service platform LabHost in a year-long operation with help from Microsoft, Intel, and others  —  The LabHost phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) platform has been disrupted in a year-long global law enforcement operation …
Thomas Barrabi / New York Post:
Google fires 28 employees over their participation in a 10-hour sit-in at the company's New York and Sunnyvale offices to protest its business ties with Israel  —  Google has fired 28 employees over their participation in a 10-hour sit-in at the search giant's offices in New York and Sunnyvale …
More: The Verge, CNBC, Associated Press, No Tech For Apartheid Campaign, Silicon Valley Business …, DatacenterDynamics, Reuters, Gizmodo, Business Insider, Latest - Truthout, Washington Post, New York Times, The Daily Signal, Los Angeles Times, Blaze Media, CBS News, The Independent, PhoneArena, Forbes, Interesting Engineering, UPI, The Times of Israel, The New Arab, The Forward, Newser, Axios, Just The News, Gizmodo, Wall Street Journal, and Wired
Bloomberg:
Huawei releases its Pura 70 series, available for ~$760 to ~$1,380; reviewers show high-end models have a Kirin 9010 chip, an update to the Mate 60 Pro's 9000s  —  - Huawei building out portfolio with fresh upgrades and design  — New phones likely to add further pressure on iPhone in China
Sheila Chiang / CNBC:
TSMC reports Q1 revenue up 16.5% YoY to ~$18.87B, vs. ~$18B est., net income up 8.9% YoY to ~$6.97B, vs. ~$6.6B est., and expects strong AI chip demand in Q2  —  Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company on Thursday beat revenue and profit expectations in the first quarter …
Wall Street Journal:
Investigation: Amazon sells ~$1M per year in goods on eBay, Shopify, Walmart, and Amazon via its “Big River” arm, to get data on pricing, logistics, and more  —  Staff went undercover on Walmart, eBay and other marketplaces as a third-party seller called ‘Big River.’ The mission …
Amanda Lee / Wall Street Journal:
Apple plans to spend $250M+ on its regional hub in Singapore, including expanding its campus later in 2024, as Tim Cook visits Vietnam and other Asian countries  —  Apple seeks to diversify its supply chain amid rising U.S.-China tensions and global concerns of decoupling trade
Molly White / Citation Needed:
An experiment with LLMs: the tools are helpful in mundane ways but users can't build a hundred-billion-dollar industry around a technology that's kind of useful  —  AI can be kind of useful, but I'm not sure that a “kind of useful” tool justifies the harm.  —  /1311.164082  —  1×
Chris Welch / The Verge:
Nothing unveils the $149 Nothing Ear and $99 Nothing Ear (a), offering improved sound, personalization, and battery life; Nothing plans to integrate ChatGPT  —  Nothing is churning out new earbuds at a faster clip than smartphones.  The company just introduced the Nothing Ear and Nothing Ear (a), priced at $149 and $99, respectively.
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
The US CFPB fines BloomTech, formerly Lambda School, and CEO Austen Allred $164K+ and bans BloomTech from lending for 10 years over deceiving students on loans  —  In an order today, the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) said that BloomTech, the for-profit coding bootcamp previously known …
New York Times:
US court documents, mistakenly made public, reveal ByteDance and TikTok's complex origin story, spawning from GOP donor Jeff Yass' failed real estate venture  —  Court records, mistakenly made public, tell a story about the birth of ByteDance, its bumpy road to success and the role of the Republican megadonor Jeff Yass's firm.
CNBC:
Amazon discontinues its Snowmobile service, an 18-wheeler truck introduced in 2016 to help customers move large amounts of on-premises data to AWS facilities  —  Amazon Web Services Snowmobile Truck  —  At Amazon's annual cloud conference in 2016, the company captured the crowd's attention by driving an 18-wheeler onstage.
Bloomberg:
The US House Speaker plans to bundle the TikTok divestiture bill, with a longer sale deadline, in a Ukraine/Israel aid bill set to clear the House on April 20  —  - Johnson to include measure in aid package for Ukraine, Israel  — Biden has said he would sign bill forcing ByteDance to divest

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Earlier Picks

Mackenzie Hawkins / Bloomberg:
Ryan Smith / AnandTech:
Ashley Belanger / Ars Technica:
Sheena Vasani / The Verge:
Brian Heater / TechCrunch: