Techmeme
September 24, 2024, 8:30 PM

Top News

Larry Dignan / Constellation Research:
Google Cloud debuts Gemini 1.5 Flash and 1.5 Pro with a 2M context window, twice as big as before, “grounding” for better Google search accuracy, and new agents  —  Google Cloud launched a series of updates including new Gemini 1.5 Flash and 1.5 Pro models with a 2 million context window …
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge:
New York Times:
Sources: Mark Zuckerberg wants to get away from politics, pulling back from charitable causes that may seem partisan, tamping down employee activism, and more  —  It was only a little more than a decade ago that Mark Zuckerberg had few qualms about airing his politics.
Brady Dale / Axios:
Caroline Ellison, a star witness in the prosecution of FTX founder and former boyfriend SBF, is sentenced to two years in prison for her role in the FTX scandal  —  - “I've seen a lot of cooperators in 30 years. … - She talked to the government prior to Bankman-Fried's arrest …
Gaby Del Valle / The Verge:
The US DOJ sues Visa, alleging it has an illegal monopoly over debit network markets and has tried to unlawfully crush competitors, including PayPal and Square  —  The financial service company reportedly tried to ‘smother’ competitors and feared Apple as an ‘existential threat.’
Emma Roth / The Verge:
Marques Brownlee says “I hear you” after criticism of his new freemium wallpaper app Panels, over privacy concerns, a $50/year price for full access, and more  —  Marques Brownlee, the YouTuber known as MKBHD, has responded to backlash over the launch of his new wallpaper app, called Panels.
Carly Page / TechCrunch:
The world's second largest money transfer company, MoneyGram, blames an unspecified “cybersecurity issue” for an ongoing days-long outage affecting its users  —  U.S.-based money transfer giant MoneyGram has blamed an unspecified “cybersecurity issue” for an ongoing days-long outage affecting the company and its users.
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge:
Spotify rolls out its AI Playlist feature in beta to Premium subscribers in the US, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand, after launching in the UK and Australia  —  Spotify is expanding an AI feature that creates customized playlists from your text descriptions to additional English-speaking regions.
Katie Kilkenny / The Hollywood Reporter:
SAG-AFTRA calls a strike against League of Legends, formerly strike exempt, filing an NLRB complaint and saying Formosa Interactive also refuses “fair AI terms”  —  The union charges one of the multiplayer game's producers, Formosa Interactive, with attempting to work around …
Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch:
OpenAI adds five voices to Advanced Voice Mode, which is now rolling out to ChatGPT Plus and Teams users and, next week, to enterprise and education users  —  OpenAI announced it is rolling out Advanced Voice Mode (AVM) to an expanded set of ChatGPT's paying customers on Tuesday.
Bloomberg:
Sources: Wiz is in discussions to sell existing shares at a valuation between $15B and $20B, after abandoning a deal in July to be acquired by Google for $23B  —  Cybersecurity startup Wiz Inc. is in discussions to sell existing shares at a valuation as high as $20 billion, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
More: Reuters
Meir Orbach / CTech:
Salesforce agrees to buy Zoomin, an Israeli data management company that makes unstructured data accessible to AI agents  —  The deal comes less than three weeks after the software giant paid $1.9 billion for Own, another Israel-founded company.  —  Salesforce  —  Zoomin  —  Acquisition
Tim Starks / CyberScoop:
CrowdStrike SVP Adam Meyers apologizes before Congress over the company's faulty update that caused a global IT outage, to largely sympathetic House lawmakers  —  House lawmakers struck a sympathetic tone toward the company at a hearing where they nevertheless said nothing like that could happen again.
Alex Weprin / The Hollywood Reporter:
Stability AI says filmmaker James Cameron has joined its board of directors  —  The director says that “the intersection of generative AI and CGI image creation is the next wave” of film technology, as he joins the company behind the popular Stable Diffusion AI model.
Winston Cho / The Hollywood Reporter:
Filing: OpenAI agrees to give representatives for authors suing the company access to review its training data to see if OpenAI used authors' copyrighted works  —  At a secure room in its San Francisco office, representatives for authors suing OpenAI will examine materials that were used to train its AI system.
Lucas Shaw / Bloomberg:
TikTok says it plans to shut down TikTok Music on November 28 and delete user data; originally called Resso, the app launched in 2019 and was in five countries  —  TikTok Music will go offline on Nov. 28 and customer data will be deleted, the music division said in a post on its website.

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.
Cloudflare:
Cloudflare Connect 2026: The Agentic Conference  —  Stop preparing for agents.  Start running them.  100+ sessions, workshops, and speakers from OpenAI, Arm, and Cloudflare across AI, security, and performance.
Zoho:
Get UAE eInvoicing ready with Zoho  —  The UAE announced its eInvoicing mandate on 30 October 2024, when the Ministry of Finance issued Federal Decree-Laws No. 16 and 17 of 2024, laying the legal groundwork for a national eInvoicing system.
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

Sources:
Marc Benioff on the AI boom, SaaSpocalypse, and future of Slack
Candid conversations with the leaders shaping what's next in AI and the broader tech industry. Hosted by Alex Heath, who has covered Silicon Valley for more than a decade.
Subscribe to Sources.
Invest Like the Best:
Gabe Stengel - Building Investing Superintelligence
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:
Inside the AI Startup Making Customer Support 65% Cheaper
Grit explores what it takes to create, build and scale world-class organizations.
Subscribe to Grit.
Lenny's Podcast:
90 minutes of unfiltered product advice from Snap and Discord's product chief | Peter Sellis
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.
Big Technology Podcast:
AI Doom Backlash Arrives, Anthropic & OpenAI IPO Outlook, Frontier Business Momentum Slows
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.
Channels with Peter Kafka:
AI Wants to Shop for You. What Could Go Wrong?
Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.
Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 8:30 PM ET, September 24, 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

Rohan Goswami / CNBC:

Earlier Picks

Chris Welch / The Verge:
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch:
New York Times: