Techmeme
May 1, 2024, 9:10 PM

Top News

Jennifer Elias / CNBC:
Sources: Google laid off at least 200 employees from its “Core” teams, including its Python developer team, and plans to move some roles to Mexico and India  —  Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer of Alphabet Inc., during Stanford's 2024 Business, Government …
Hayden Field / CNBC:
Anthropic launches a free iOS app and Team, its first enterprise plan, which offers access to its Claude 3 Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku models for $30/user/month  —  Anthropic on Wednesday announced its first-ever enterprise offering and a free iPhone app.  —  The generative artificial intelligence startup …
Ashley Capoot / CNBC:
In a US Senate hearing, the UnitedHealth CEO says the company paid a $22M ransom to hackers who accessed a Change Healthcare server that wasn't protected by MFA  —  UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty testifies before the Senate Finance Committee on Capitol Hill on May 1, 2024 in Washington, DC.
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai / TechCrunch:
UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty testifies that the Change Healthcare hack impacted “maybe a third” of Americans and it'll take “several months” to notify victims  —  Two months after hackers broke into Change Healthcare systems stealing and then encrypting company data …
More: CNN, Reuters, and CNBC
Mastodon: @lorenzofb@infosec.exchangeX: @ronwydenForums: Hacker News and Slashdot
Leah Nylen / Bloomberg:
US v. Google: Google paid Apple $20B in 2022 to be the default search engine in Safari; in 2020, Google's payments constituted 17.5% of Apple's operating income  —  The deal between the two tech giants is at the heart of the landmark case, in which antitrust enforcers allege Google …
Bloomberg:
US v. Google: Microsoft invested in OpenAI over fears of falling behind Google; Kevin Scott said he was “very, very worried” in a 2019 email to Satya Nadella  —  - Google faces US antitrust case about its dominance in search  — Microsoft's communications deemed relevant to defense by judge
Asa Fitch / Wall Street Journal:
New Jersey-based CoreWeave, which offers GPUs in the cloud, raised $1.1B led by Coatue at a $19B valuation, up from $7B after raising $642M in December 2023  —  Company raises $1.1 billion from investors including Fidelity, Magnetar Capital  —  CoreWeave, a cloud-computing company backed by Nvidia …
Gretchen Morgenson / NBC News:
Sources: US federal prosecutors are digging into internal practices at Block, discussing with an ex-employee alleged widespread and yearslong compliance lapses  —  Internal documents indicate Block processed crypto transactions for terrorist groups and Square processed transactions involving nations subject to economic sanctions.
Orlando Mayorquín / New York Times:
Airbnb launches Icons, a new category of experiences that lets users meet celebrities and stay in outlandish venues, like a replica of the house from Pixar's Up  —  The company announced a new category of outlandish stays in partnership with brands and celebrities, building on the success of gimmicks like the Barbie Malibu DreamHouse.
Ash Parrish / The Verge:
Meta unveils Batman: Arkham Shadow, a VR game and the next entry in the iconic Batman: Arkham game series, launching exclusively on the Quest 3 later in 2024  —  Iron Man VR developer Camouflaj and Oculus Studios are developing the game, which is set to release later this year.
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
Karissa Bell / Engadget:
LinkedIn debuts three Wordle-style puzzle games: theme-based guessing game Pinpoint, Sudoku- and Minesweeper-style crossover Queens, and trivia game Crossclimb  —  How long until “What I learned about B2B sales from playing Crossclimb”?  —  LinkedIn, the professional network known …
Andy Greenberg / Wired:
Elliptic, MIT, and IBM release an AI detection model and its 200M-transaction training dataset to help identify money laundering on Bitcoin's blockchain  —  Blockchain analysis firm Elliptic, MIT, and IBM have released a new AI model—and the 200-million-transaction dataset it's trained on …
Annie Palmer / CNBC:
An NLRB judge finds Amazon CEO Andy Jassy violated US labor law with his comments in 2022 suggesting workers would be “less empowered” if they voted in a union  —  Amazon CEO Andy Jassy violated federal labor law in comments he made to media outlets about unionization efforts at the company …
More: Bloomberg
Steven Levy / Wired:
Q&A with White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Arati Prabhakar on her role, working at DARPA, AI, showing ChatGPT to Biden, and more  —  Arati Prabhakar has the ear of the US president and a massive mission: help manage AI, revive the semiconductor industry, and pull off a cancer moonshot.
Reuters:
Reuters/Ipsos poll: ~58% agree with the statement that the Chinese government uses TikTok to “influence American public opinion”, and 50% support banning TikTok  —  - A majority of Americans believe that China uses TikTok to shape U.S. public opinion, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted …

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.
Equals:
Stop vibe coding analytics  —  Equals AI turns questions about your business into auditable spreadsheet models and dashboards.  Build once, iterate for years.
Zoho:
Simplifying benefits management in Zoho People  —  Let's consider a new hire on their first day of orientation.  They receive a brief introduction to the benefits plans, and almost immediately, questions start to surface …
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

Uncapped with Jack Altman:
Sam Blond from Monaco
Conversations with people I admire about things I'm genuinely interested in.
Subscribe to Uncapped with Jack Altman.
Training Data:
Anthropic's Katelyn Lesse & Angela Jiang: Building an Ecosystem, not a Walled Garden
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.
Invest Like the Best:
John Kim - How to Raise a Few Billion Dollars
The leading destination to learn about business and investing. We do this by showcasing exceptional talent and ideas.
Subscribe to Invest Like the Best.
Grit:
The Sales Framework Every Founder Needs | Mark Roberge
Grit explores what it takes to create, build and scale world-class organizations.
Subscribe to Grit.
Lenny's Podcast:
How tech workers actually feel about AI in 2026 | Annual AI sentiment survey (Noam Segal)
Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.
Subscribe to Lenny's Podcast.
Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith:
Connecting the Unconnected: Doreen Bogdan-Martin
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.
Subscribe to Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 9:10 PM ET, May 1, 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

Allison Johnson / The Verge:

Earlier Picks

Politico:
David Gilbert / Wired:
Justine Calma / The Verge:
Antonio Olivo / Washington Post:
Ben Schoon / 9to5Google:
Maxwell Zeff / Gizmodo: