Techmeme
October 21, 2024, 9:30 AM

Top News

Chris Welch / The Verge:
Hands-on with Apple's hearing health features for AirPods Pro 2, set for iOS 18.1: hearing aids work well, hearing protection in all modes, and a hearing test  —  The AirPods Pro 2 will soon offer more robust hearing protection and a new hearing aid feature.  But it's the hearing test that has really hooked me.
Todd Bishop / GeekWire:
Microsoft unveils 10 new AI agents for its enterprise-focused Dynamics 365 apps covering sales, finance, and more, ahead of Salesforce's Agentforce availability  —  AI agents are reigniting the competition between Microsoft and Salesforce.  —  Microsoft announced 10 new AI agents …
João da Silva / BBC:
ByteDance says it fired an intern in its ad tech team for “maliciously interfering” with AI training, and says operations were unaffected by their actions  —  TikTok owner, ByteDance, says it has sacked an intern for “maliciously interfering” with the training of one of its artificial intelligence (AI) models.
Ben Cohen / Wall Street Journal:
A profile of and interview with Tim Cook on being “perfectly fine with not being first”, running Apple, Vision Pro, AI, the Design Studio, group chats, and more  —  The CEO of the world's most valuable company led two of the biggest product launches of his tenure this year …
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Perplexity is looking to raise ~$500M to double its valuation to $8B or more; Perplexity's annualized revenue is ~$50M, up from ~$10M in March 2024  —  Search-based chatbot seeks to raise about $500 million in what would be its fourth funding round in a year
Alexandra Marquez / NBC News:
After Elon Musk promises to give $1M to one swing state voter per day who signs his PAC's petition, PA's governor says “law enforcement could take a look”  —  Musk announced Saturday that every day until Election Day, he would give $1 million to a randomly selected voter who signs a petition circulated by his super PAC.
More: Election Law Blog, Talking Points Memo, The Verge, Disconnect, Fortune, New York Times, The Daily Beast, BBC, CNBC, Reuters, CCN.com, Benzinga, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Rolling Stone, The Gateway Pundit, The Daily Caller, Associated Press, Washington Examiner, CBS News, New York Post, The Indian Express, Mother Jones, Financial Times, NPR, The Information, Global News, KTVU-TV, and Breitbart
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: some at Apple think it is over two years behind the leaders in generative AI; a closer look at changes in Apple's HR and hardware engineering groups  —  Apple's new iPad mini highlights the company's secret advantage in artificial intelligence.  Also: Sonos weighs a headphone reboot …
Sean Michael Kerner / VentureBeat:
IBM launches its open source Granite 3.0 models, including 2B and 8B general purpose versions and Mixture-of-Experts models, aimed at enterprise customers  —  Make no mistake about it, enterprise AI is big business, especially for IBM.  —  IBM already has a $2 billion book of business related …

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Copilot to autopilot: Why no single safeguard is enough  —  Microsoft designed a layered model that lets an AI agent resolve network incidents on its own within defined boundaries.
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Earlier Picks

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