Techmeme
April 23, 2024, 7:05 PM

Top News

Wall Street Journal:
The FTC bans noncompete clauses that restrict job switching, the first time in 50+ years that the FTC has issued a regulation mandating an economy-wide change  —  Move sets up high-stakes legal clash with business groups over the agency's power  —  WASHINGTON—The Federal Trade Commission …
Victoria Song / The Verge:
Meta rolls out multimodal AI in early access for the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, mainly to help identify objects, translate signs, and write Instagram captions  —  When the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses launched last fall, they were a pretty neat content capture tool and a surprisingly solid pair of headphones.
Victoria Song / The Verge:
Meta's Ray-Ban Smart Glasses get support for video calling via WhatsApp and Messenger, hands-free Apple Music controls, and a new frame style  —  Meta just announced a slew of new updates for its Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses.  CEO Mark Zuckerberg just dropped an Instagram reel showing off …
Emilia David / The Verge:
Microsoft debuts Phi-3 Mini, a small 3.8B-parameter model about as capable as GPT-3.5, and plans Phi-3 Small and Phi-3 Medium models with 7B and 14B parameters  —  Microsoft launched the next version of its lightweight AI model Phi-3 Mini, the first of three small models the company plans to release.
Ming-Chi Kuo:
Sources: Apple cut 2024 Vision Pro shipments to 400K-450K units, vs. a 700K+ market consensus, and US demand has “fallen sharply beyond expectations”  —  My latest survey is as follows:  — Apple has cut its 2024 Vision Pro shipments to 400-450k units (vs. market consensus of 700-800k units or more).
Quentyn Kennemer / The Verge:
Apple schedules a “special Apple Event” for May 7 at 10am ET, where new iPads are expected; rumors suggest the iPad Pro will get an OLED display and an M3 chip  —  After kicking off 2024 with the launch of the Vision Pro, the next act in Apple's 2024 script is a May product launch event.
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: IBM is nearing an acquisition of HashiCorp, which helps companies manage cloud infrastructure, in the coming days; HashiCorp's stock jumps 22%+  —  .  —  The details  —  A deal for HashiCorp could come together in the coming days, according to people familiar with the matter.
Jacob Ridley / PC Gamer:
The European Parliament adopts right-to-repair rules clarifying manufacturer obligations to provide repair services, consumer access to spare parts, and more  —  The new rules will give customers new ways to claim support for a product throughout its lifetime, and also aid independent repair shops.
Shirin Ghaffary / Bloomberg:
Perplexity AI, which offers an AI chatbot that summarizes search results, raised ~$63M led by Daniel Gross at a $1B+ valuation, up from $520M in January 2024  —  Perplexity's valuation has doubled in three months in a clear sign of investor enthusiasm for the company's artificial intelligence chatbot.
Andrew J. Hawkins / The Verge:
Counterpoint Research:
iPhone sales in China fell 19.1% YoY to a 15.7% share in Q1 2024; Vivo fell 0.4% YoY to 17.4%, Honor rose 11.5% YoY to 16.1%, and Huawei rose 69.7% YoY to 15.5%  —  - China's smartphone sales grew 1.5% YoY and 4.6% QoQ in Q1 2024, marking the second consecutive quarter of positive YoY growth.
Viola Zhou / Rest of World:
Interviews with 20+ current and former TSMC staff at its Arizona plant finds struggles over bridging Taiwanese and US norms, rigid hierarchies, and other issues  —  Missed deadlines and tension among Taiwanese and American coworkers are plaguing the chip giant's Phoenix expansion.
Sara Dorn / Forbes:
The US Senate advances the bill forcing a sale or ban of TikTok, preparing for a final vote on the bill as soon as Tuesday evening  —  The Senate is all but certain to pass the House-approved package that could ultimately ban TikTok if its China-based parent company doesn't sell the app …
Forbes:
Taser company Axon launches an AI tool that turns body cam audio into police reports to save time; critics worry it will introduce errors into crucial evidence  —  Axon says its AI will help get more police out of the office and on the streets.  Critics worry it'll make cops lazy and potentially introduce errors into crucial evidence.
Ashley Carman / Bloomberg:
Spotify Q1: revenue up 20% YoY to €3.6B, MAUs up 19% to 615M, vs. 617.9M est., subscribers up 14% to 239M, and a €168M operating income; SPOT closes up 11.41%  —  - Subscribers to paid Spotify tiers jumped 14% to 239 million  — Swedish audio-streaming company posted record operating profit

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