Techmeme
June 25, 2024, 10:00 PM

Top News

Andrew J. Hawkins / The Verge:
Waymo drops its waitlist in San Francisco, letting anyone download its app and hail a robotaxi; in Phoenix, Waymo has been open to the public since October 2020  —  ‘Simply download the app and ride.’  —  The wait(list) is over.  —  Waymo is opening up its robotaxi service to anyone who wants to ride in San Francisco.
Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch:
The RIAA's lawsuit against generative music startups will be the bloodbath AI needs and an object lesson in hubris for similarly unethical AI companies  —  Like many AI companies, Udio and Suno relied on large-scale theft to create their generative AI models.
Rachel Metz / Bloomberg:
OpenAI delays the release of its advanced Voice Mode for ChatGPT by a month to address safety issues and plans to roll out the feature to Plus users in the fall  —  - Company says it needs extra month to “reach our bar to launch”  — Voice feature was a key focus at launch event in mid-May
Chance Miller / 9to5Mac:
OpenAI says the ChatGPT macOS app is now available to all users, after initially rolling it out to Plus subscribers  —  Over the last month, OpenAI has gradually been rolling out its first-ever ChatGPT app for Mac with Plus subscribers.  Starting today, however, OpenAI says that the ChatGPT app for macOS is now available to everyone.
Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Land:
Google is dropping continuous scroll in Search, saying it didn't lead to significantly higher user satisfaction and pagination enables serving results faster  —  Google Search will stop its continuous scroll user experience where Google loads more results as you scroll past the first page of the search results.
Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat:
Anthropic debuts Projects, letting Claude.ai Pro and Team users work with chats, docs, code, and more in one place; each project has a 200K-token context window  —  Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company backed by Amazon, Google, and Salesforce, has launched a suite …
Javier Espinoza / Financial Times:
In preliminary findings, the EU charges Microsoft with antitrust violations over concerns that it gave Teams an “undue advantage” by bundling it with Office  —  Allegations that software giant is ‘tying’ its video app to Office are the first such case against it in more than a decade
Samantha Cole / 404 Media:
Users of the popular AI chatbot platform Character.AI are reporting that their bots' personalities changed a few days ago and aren't as fun as they once were  —  The company denied making “major changes,” but users report noticeable differences in the quality of their chatbot conversations.
Allison Johnson / The Verge:
Samsung schedules its next Galaxy Unpacked event for July 10 at 9AM ET in Paris, where Galaxy AI updates, the Galaxy Z Fold 6, and Z Flip 6 are expected  —  Samsung's next Unpacked summer launch event will take place on July 10th in Paris, France, the company announced on Tuesday.
Filipe Espósito / 9to5Mac:
Some iPhone users running the latest iOS 18 beta report being able to send and receive RCS messages on select US carriers  —  As we reported yesterday, Apple has been getting ready to roll out RCS support on the iPhone with iOS 18.  However, doing so also requires mobile carriers to work …
Abner Li / 9to5Google:
Google will hold a Pixel event on August 13 at 10AM PT in Mountain View, where the Pixel 9, Pixel 9 Pro, Pixel 9 Pro Fold, and Pixel Watch 3 are expected  —  Google this morning announced that its annual Pixel hardware event will be taking place on August 13.
Renée DiResta / New York Times:
Stanford Internet Observatory's former research director details the online rumor mill that led to SIO ending its rapid-response election observation work  —  In 2020 the Stanford Internet Observatory, where I was until recently the research director, helped lead a project that studied election rumors and disinformation.
Deepa Seetharaman / Wall Street Journal:
Stability AI says it closed a new funding round; sources: investors committed $80M to take over the company, and some suppliers have forgiven debt obligations  —  Stability AI raised $100 million-plus in 2022 but is being recapitalized and aims to build a business around image-generation tool
Carl Franzen / VentureBeat:
ElevenLabs debuts its first iOS app, which turns any English-language text, including from PDFs and ePubs, into narrations by one of its “human-like voices”  —  If you've ever started reading an article on your iPhone only to have to drive somewhere, walk, bike, do chores …
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Etched, which is building Sohu, an inferencing chip that only runs transformer AI models, raised a $120M Series A, bringing its total funding to $125.36M  —  As generative AI touches a growing number of industries, the companies producing chips to run the models are benefitting enormously.

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