Techmeme
August 30, 2024, 12:00 PM

Top News

Greg Bensinger / Reuters:
Sources: Amazon's revamped “Remarkable” Alexa, due for release in October 2024, will be powered primarily by Anthropic's Claude, and cost $5 to $10 per month  —  Amazon's revamped Alexa due for release in October ahead of the U.S. holiday season will be powered primarily …
Ryan Smith / AnandTech:
AnandTech shuts down after covering PC and mobile hardware for over 27 years; publisher Future plans to keep AnandTech's website and articles live indefinitely  —  It is with great sadness that I find myself penning the hardest news post I've ever needed to write here at AnandTech.
Takashi Mochizuki / Bloomberg:
Sources: Tencent and NetEase reconsider or scale back Japanese game studio investments, after yielding few hit games and the Chinese market staged a comeback  —  - China's biggest game publishers are rethinking expansion plans  — ‘Wukong’ success also encouraged looking domestically for hits
Bloomberg:
Sources: Intel explores options after a 50%+ stock drop YTD, including splitting its product and foundry units and potentially scrapping some factory projects  —  - Once-dominant chipmaker looks to longtime bankers for help  — Possible moves could include split of product, foundry units
Leo Schwartz / Fortune:
Bridge, which aims to build a global payment network around stablecoins, raised $40M led by Sequoia and Ribbit, taking its total funding to $58M  —  The crypto industry has long sought a “killer app” to bring digital assets into the mainstream.  Recently, though, some are pointing …
Bloomberg:
Sources: Nvidia, Apple, and Microsoft, the three most valuable tech companies, are in talks to participate in a funding round that would value OpenAI at $100B+  —  - Apple, Microsoft also have been in talks about participating  — Financing would value OpenAI at more than $100 billion
Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch:
Google rolls out Gmail Q&A, a feature that allows users who pay for Gemini to chat with the AI assistant about their emails, on Android and “coming soon to iOS”  —  Gmail users on Android devices can now chat directly with Google's AI assistant, Gemini, about their emails in the Gmail app.
Carl Franzen / VentureBeat:
Alibaba releases Qwen2-VL, a new AI model that it says can analyze videos longer than 20 minutes to summarize and answer questions about the videos' contents  —  Alibaba Cloud, the cloud services and storage division of the Chinese e-commerce giant, has announced the release of Qwen2-VL …
More: QwenX: @alibaba_qwen, @altryne, @altryne, and @reach_vbForums: r/LocalLLaMA
Rachel Graf / Bloomberg:
A federal judge dismisses a lawsuit claiming Elon Musk and Tesla pumped up Dogecoin into a “pyramid scheme”, finding that Musk's statements were “aspirational”  —  Investors who lost tens of thousands of dollars investing in the cryptocurrency faulted Musk for promoting …
Daniel Carvalho / Bloomberg:
On August 18, a Brazilian Supreme Court justice blocked SpaceX's bank accounts and threatened to block X in Brazil, in a bid to force Elon Musk to pay X's fines  —  - Starlink bank accounts blocked to pay for fines on X  — Court threatens to block X for lack of Brazil representative
Manish Singh / TechCrunch:
Investor note: 360 One valued Bengaluru-based VerSe, which runs popular news aggregator Dailyhunt, at $2.9B in June 2024, down from its ~$5B valuation in 2022  —  Indian tech and media startup VerSe, which operates popular news aggregator Dailyhunt, is worth about 42% below its last private valuation …
New York Times:
Sources: the cryptology part of France's charges against Pavel Durov raises concerns at US tech companies with E2EE messaging apps, like Signal, Apple, and Meta  —  The criminal charges against Pavel Durov, Telegram's founder, raised concerns in Silicon Valley about encryption and the app's approach to privacy and security.
Saritha Rai / Bloomberg:
A look at Google's HeAR, a bioacoustics health care AI model trained on 300M sounds, including 100M coughs, to analyze patients' coughs and detect tuberculosis  —  Google got together last week with an Indian AI startup to roll out a bioacoustics health-care model to detect disease from human sounds.

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More News

Jay Peters / The Verge:
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Earlier Picks

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
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Shirin Ghaffary / Bloomberg:
Nico Grant / New York Times: