Techmeme
June 5, 2024, 9:10 AM

Top News

Shakeel Hashim / Transformer:
Former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner says he was fired in April 2024 for sharing a memo with the board over concerns about OpenAI's security practices  —  Leopold Aschenbrenner also said he was interrogated about his team's “loyalty to the company”
Kevin Roose / New York Times:
Current and former OpenAI and Google DeepMind staff sign an open letter warning of a culture of recklessness and secrecy at “frontier AI companies”  —  Daniel Kokotajlo, a former researcher in OpenAI's governance division, is an organizer of a group of former and current employees …
Will Shanklin / Engadget:
Twitch says its Twitch Tier 1 subscriptions in the US will increase from $4.99 to $5.99 per month on July 11, the first price rise for US subscribers  —  Monthly Tier 1 memberships will go up by $1 in July.  —  Twitch is joining Spotify, Max, Peacock, Crunchyroll, EA and other content services …
Simon Sharwood / The Register:
Australia's eSafety commissioner ends the legal action asking X to remove a video of a clergyman's stabbing; Musk labelled the action an assault on free speech  —  Australia's eSafety commissioner has ended legal action that aimed to compel social network X to take down a video depicting …
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Joe Benarroch, X's head of business operations and one of Linda Yaccarino's closest advisers, is leaving; his style rubbed colleagues the wrong way  —  X Corp. Chief Executive Linda Yaccarino's right-hand man and head of business operations, Joe Benarroch, is leaving the company, according to people familiar with the matter.
Joanna Stern / Wall Street Journal:
Apple plans to fix another Screen Time bug that let kids visit X-rated websites; two researchers say they reported the bug to Apple in March and August 2021  —  Apple's Screen Time continues to be marred by bugs that let its youngest users circumvent parental controls
Joseph Cox / Wired:
An excerpt from the book Dark Wire, which details how the biggest FBI sting operation ran the Anøm encrypted phone network to catch criminals like “Microsoft”  —  When a drug kingpin named Microsoft tried to seize control of an encrypted phone company for criminals, he was playing right into its real owners' hands.
Paul Sawers / TechCrunch:
SAP plans to buy Tel Aviv-based WalkMe, which helps users navigate UIs of other software services, for $1.5B in cash; WalkMe raised $300M ahead of a 2021 IPO  —  Enterprise software giant SAP is acquiring “digital adoption” platform provider WalkMe in an all-cash transaction worth $1.5 billion.
Nduka Orjinmo / Bloomberg:
Sixteen Republican lawmakers accuse Nigeria of taking Binance executive Tigran Gambaryan “hostage” and urge Biden to help secure his release in a June 4 letter  —  US lawmakers accused Nigeria of taking a Binance Holdings Ltd. executive “hostage” and urged President Joe Biden to help secure his release.
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
Tobiko, which offers a dbt-compatible data transformation service to help teams manage data, raised a $4.5M seed and $17.3M Series A led by Theory Ventures  —  Data transformation startup Tobiko may not be a household name yet, but you may have seen co-founder and CEO Tyson Mao on …
More: SiliconANGLE and Tobiko
Samantha Murphy Kelly / CNN:
AT&T resolves an outage that preventing many customers from completing calls between carriers, but 911 calls still worked; Verizon users also reported issues  —  A nationwide AT&T outage is once again leaving some customers in the dark on Tuesday.  —  In a statement sent to CNN …
Gerrit De Vynck / Washington Post:
Pika, which offers AI tools to generate and edit videos, raised $80M from Spark, Lightspeed, and others at a $470M valuation, taking its total funding to $135M  —  Pika, a video-generation start-up that raised $80 million in its latest funding round, already has a publicly available product, as OpenAI and Google keep theirs under wraps
Olivia Solon / Bloomberg:
How Uganda's government under President Yoweri Museveni has increasingly used the country's biometric identity system to target opponents and consolidate power  —  The East African country's identity card system has become integral to banking, voting — and targeting critics
Alex Konrad / Forbes:
How billionaire investors of the internet era are fighting to determine whether AI's future will be one of concentrated safety or unfettered advancement  —  Billionaire investors of the internet era are now locked in a war of words and influence to determine whether AI's future …
Mike Wheatley / SiliconANGLE:
Cisco introduces new AI products and services, including its Nexus HyperFabric AI clusters in partnership with Nvidia, and announces a $1B AI investment fund  —  Cisco Systems Inc. is doubling down on its artificial intelligence push with a host of new AI-powered products and services, plus various other initiatives focused on AI.
Cagan Koc / Bloomberg:
ASML CFO Roger Dassen says TSMC, Intel, and Samsung will all get its €350M high-NA EUV machines by the end of 2024; the machines can print 8nm lines on chips  —  - TSMC has previously said ASML's new machine is too expensive  — Intel has already received its first high-NA EUV machine
More: The Elec

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