Techmeme: Leaked documents reveal life-threatening issues at Amazon's primary-care service One Medical, raising concerns about Amazon's frugal approach to health care (Caroline O'Donovan/Washington Post)

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June 15, 2024, 11:55 PM

Top News

The Information:

Source: Altman told investors that OpenAI could become a for-profit business not controlled by its nonprofit board; Microsoft execs favor a for-profit option — OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently told some shareholders that the artificial intelligence developer is considering changing …

More: Neowin, The Shortcut, Cointelegraph, The Crypto Times, Business Today, WinBuzzer, and Reuters

Bluesky: @noelfrench.bsky.social and @annmlipton.bsky.social

X: @pernillet, @krishnanrohit, @aaronpholmes, @amir, and @0xkarmatic

Forums: r/singularity and Slashdot

Caroline O'Donovan / Washington Post:

Leaked documents reveal life-threatening issues at Amazon's primary-care service One Medical, raising concerns about Amazon's frugal approach to health care — Patient safety issues have increased since One Medical shifted care to a call center staffed by contractors, employees say.

X: @rakeshsfnyc, @fenitn, @bulldoghill, @drpanmd, @bijans, @chiglinsky, @boltyboy, and @peter_grinspoon. LinkedIn: Dr Saif Abed

Andrew Williams / Wired:

Apple may not be bringing Apple Intelligence to iPhone 15, which has 6GB of RAM vs. iPhone 15 Pro's 8GB, due to RAM requirements for on-device AI processing — Older iPhones might well be able to cope with Apple's AI, so why won't your $900 year-old model run it? Here's why.

More: The Shortcut, TechRadar, and MacDailyNews

Threads: @thatchriscarley, @jslxmd, @phonearena, and @sung.kim.mw

X: @carnage4life, @bendee983, @simonhartleyusa, @markgurman, @davetroy, @nimishdubey, @vadimyuryev, @masnconrad, @jessicascott09, @carnage4life, @r3dash, and @chaitanya7483

Forums: r/apple and r/technology

Chris Metinko / Crunchbase News:

A look at tech companies' investments in AI startups: Nvidia and NVentures completed a total of 32 deals in 2023, while Microsoft and M12 made 21 investments — Just last week it was reported chip giant Nvidia, Salesforce Ventures 1 and Cisco all participated in a $450 million investment for Toronto-based AI startup Cohere.

Juli Clover / MacRumors:

Apple added a Vocal Shortcuts accessibility feature in iOS 18 that lets users give Siri a new wake word, such as “hello, computer” — Apple in iOS 18 added a Vocal Shortcuts accessibility feature, and now that iOS 18 is available in a beta capacity, users have figured …

More: 9to5Mac, Gizmochina, iMore, and TechRadar

Threads: @ajvizz, @sdw, and @andreasjr. Mastodon: @ChrisChaffin@dragonscave …. Bluesky: @patrickmaroney.bsky.social

X: @aaronp613, @phyllbo_baggins, @iryantldr, @colinhughesuk, and @techpalstalk

Forums: r/iOSBeta, r/apple, and MacRumors Forums

Ben Cohen / Wall Street Journal:

How Duolingo uses streaks and notifications to keep users coming back to the app; 70% of Duolingo's 30M+ DAUs have weeklong streaks and 5M have one-year streaks — The learning app doesn't just teach languages. It harnesses the power of streaks and hooks you with perfectly timed nudges.

Bluesky: @silversalty.bsky.social. X: @kushkatakia and @jakewengroff

Rollo Romig / New York Times:

A profile of game publisher Devolver Digital, which gives indie studios immense creative freedom, doesn't take IP rights from them, and is turning 15 on June 25 — Devolver Digital teams with independent video game studios and gives them immense freedom. Just don't kill Jeff Bezos.

Bloomberg:

DefiLlama: crypto startup funding has crossed $100B since 2014; The Block Research: Coinbase Ventures has made 443 investments or ~4% of all deals since 2017 — - Investment picked up amid a rebound in the crypto market — Tokens from startups are a potential bright spot for exits

X: @ryanjamesweeks and @crypto

Ankit Patel / NVIDIA Blog:

Nvidia announces Nemotron-4 340B, a family of models that developers can use to generate synthetic data for training LLMs for commercial applications — Nemotron-4 340B, a family of models optimized for NVIDIA NeMo and NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM, includes cutting-edge instruct and reward models, and a dataset for generative AI training.

More: NVIDIA, VentureBeat, MarkTechPost, WinBuzzer, Maginative, The Decoder, The Crypto Times, PYMNTS.com, and Hugging Face

Threads: @sung.kim.mw and @sung.kim.mw

X: @lmsysorg, @chrisrohlf, @gneubig, @altryne, and @jphme

LinkedIn: José Manuel de la Chica and Oleksii Kuchaiev

Forums: Hacker News and r/singularity

Paresh Dave / Wired:

How the launch of AI search chatbots such as Bing Copilot is affecting advertisers, as they look for new ways to target users with relevant ads — Microsoft and Google are bringing ads to their AI search experiences. But users don't always find it helpful.

Mastodon: @kubikpixel@chaos.social. Bluesky: @self.agency. LinkedIn: Paresh Dave

Keza MacDonald / The Guardian:

Indie games were the real stars of the Summer Game Fest 2024; the top 10 bestselling games of 2024 so far on Steam in terms of units sold are almost all indie — In this week's newsletter: While the blockbuster end of the games industry is in the doldrums, independent developers are leading a creative resurgence

More: Digital Trends and Bloomberg

X: @ms5000watts, @marioprime, and @thevtran

Andrew Leland / New York Magazine:

How disabled people use Apple Vision Pro for work, entertainment, and more, and interviews with some disabled Apple staff who built the accessibility features — The headset is already changing disabled users' lives. — In her childhood bedroom, Maxine Collard had a PC connected …

More: Six Colors and Investor's Business Daily

Mastodon: @pixelate@tweesecake.social, @harshil@mastodon.social, and @Shelly@zeppelin.flights

X: @iconredesign, @ramalmediax, @richlyons_, @annazivarts, and @ramalmediax

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From Mediagazer

Paul Glynn / BBC:

HarperCollins UK drops children's author and comedian David Walliams following allegations of inappropriate behavior toward young women

Ken Vogel / @kenvogel:

Politico ends its print edition after 19 years, as its early reliance on print ad revenue fades and its audience relies more on digital platforms

Nicholas Henriquez / New Yorker:

The New Yorker has digitized its full archive covering 100 years, including covers and adding upgraded search capabilities; subscribers get unlimited access

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More News

Camomile Shumba / CoinDesk:

Nigeria drops tax evasion charges against Binance executives Tigran Gambaryan and Nadeem Anjarwalla, who still face money laundering charges

More: Reuters, Bitcoinist.com, Bloomberg, Financial Times, Blockworks, Cointelegraph, Decrypt, The Crypto Times, crypto.news, CryptoSlate, Cryptonews, CoinGape, Coinpedia Fintech News, and TechCabal

X: @onu_kwue, @a_greenberg, and @a_greenberg. LinkedIn: Eleanor Hughes

Jake Bleiberg / Bloomberg:

US prosecutors charge two men with operating Empire Market, a dark web marketplace for illicit goods and services that did $430M+ in sales between 2018 and 2020

More: US Department of Justice, Cryptonews, PCMag, The Crypto Times, CBS News, FOX 32 Chicago, and CoinDesk

X: @uspis_chi and @ndilnews. LinkedIn: Matthew Osegard

Riley de León / CNBC:

Tempus AI's shares closed up 8.8% at $40.25 in the company's Nasdaq debut, giving it a market value of about $6.6B, after raising $410.7M in its IPO

More: SiliconANGLE, The Information, Axios, Seeking Alpha, Reuters, MarketWatch, Seeking Alpha, Bloomberg, Inc.com, TechCrunch, Fierce Healthcare …, Proactive, Forbes, Cautious Optimism, and Tech Startups. LinkedIn: Scott Gottlieb

The Information:

Sources: Sakana AI, a Tokyo-based LLM developer founded last year by Google alumni, is raising ~$100M at a $1B valuation in a round led by NEA, Khosla, and Lux

More: Nikkei Asia

Earlier Picks

Bloomberg:

Gemini will return ~$50M of digital assets to investors who were locked out of their accounts when Gemini Earn collapsed, to settle a lawsuit by New York's AG

More: NY State Attorney General, The Daily Hodl, Bitcoinist.com, Reuters, DL News, Cryptopolitan, Decrypt, The Crypto Times, crypto.news, Cointelegraph, CryptoSlate, CoinGape, The Block, Blockworks, Axios, and Bitcoin Insider

Financial Times:

Sources: the EU has determined that Apple's anti-steering rules for developers do not comply with the DMA, and plans charges against Apple in the coming weeks

More: MacRumors, GSMArena.com, HotHardware, WinBuzzer, Cult of Mac, Spyglass, Forbes, 24/7 Wall St., The Register, 9to5Mac, The Verge, PYMNTS.com, Reuters, Supercharged, OSnews, Android Headlines, Philip Elmer‑DeWitt, Investing.com, iPhone in Canada Blog, New York Post, PhoneArena, IGN, Platformonomics, Livemint, iMore, The Verge, AppleInsider, and MacDailyNews

Threads: @eshumarneedi. Mastodon: @brucelawson@social …. X: @kayjebelli, @openwebadvocacy, @florian4gamers, @counternotions, @rjonesy, and @stevesi

Forums: Hacker News, Slashdot, Ars OpenForum, and MacRumors Forums

Foo Yun Chee / Reuters:

Meta will pause the launch of Meta AI in EU after the Irish DPC asked it to delay training its LLMs using adult EU users' public Facebook and Instagram content