Techmeme
December 19, 2024, 4:05 AM

Top News

Foo Yun Chee / Reuters:
Apple says Meta has made 15 interoperability requests under the EU's DMA, more than any other company, and that these could affect users' privacy and security  —  Apple (AAPL.O) on Wednesday hit out at Meta Platforms (META.O), saying its numerous requests to access the iPhone maker's software tools …
Melissa Quinn / CBS News:
SCOTUS says it will hear a challenge from TikTok, ByteDance, and TikTok users on January 10 to the law that could lead to the US banning the app on January 19  —  Washington — The Supreme Court on Wednesday said it will take up a challenge to a new law that could lead to a ban on TikTok in the U.S.
Hayden Field / CNBC:
OpenAI debuts a way to talk to ChatGPT by dialing 1-800-CHATGPT for 15 minutes of free access per month in the US or messaging the number via WhatsApp globally  —  OpenAI on Wednesday rolled out a new way to talk to its viral chatbot: 1-800-CHATGPT.  —  By dialing the U.S. number …
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
GitHub offers Copilot in VS Code for free with 2,000 code completions and 50 chat messages per month; GitHub now has 150M developers, up from 100M in early 2023  —  Microsoft-owned GitHub today announced a free version of its popular Copilot code completion/AI pair programming tool …
Deadline:
Two Tencent-appointed Epic board directors resigned after the DOJ expressed antitrust concerns; Tencent also gave up its right to appoint future Epic directors  —  Two board members of Epic Games have resigned amid Justice Department concerns over antitrust concerns.
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Anthropic demonstrates “alignment faking” in Claude 3 Opus to show how developers could be misled into thinking an LLM is more aligned than it may actually be  —  AI models can deceive, new research from Anthropic shows.  They can pretend to have different views during training …
Will Judd / Eurogamer.net:
Sony details the PS5 Pro's specs, including an AMD RDNA 2-based GPU with 16.7TF of performance and ray tracing improvements, and announces an AMD partnership  —  Plus: what this all means for future PlayStation hardware.  —  When Sony revealed the PlayStation 5 Pro, it did so in a very different manner …
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: Apple halts work on a project to build an iPhone hardware subscription service, which had been in development since 2022 and was set to launch then  —  - Much-delayed program had been in development since around 2022  — Company also shut down Pay Later offering earlier this year
Paul Alcorn / Tom's Hardware:
Intel unveils the first updates to address Arrow Lake's gaming performance issues, fixing four of the five root causes, and plans a final update in January 2025  —  Time to test.  —  Intel announced that its first wave of updates to address the gaming performance issues plaguing the Arrow Lake processors is now available.
Shirin Ghaffary / Bloomberg:
Source: Perplexity raised $500M led by Institutional Venture Partners at a $9B valuation earlier in December, up from a $3B valuation in June 2024  —  The company's valuation has tripled since June. … The round was led by Institutional Venture Partners and completed earlier this month …
Ian King / Bloomberg:
Micron reports Q1 revenue up 84% YoY to $8.71B, in line with est., and a Q2 revenue forecast below est. due to sluggish phone and PC demand; MU drops 15%+  —  - Strong AI growth isn't offsetting a slowdown elsewhere  — Micron CEO cites weakness in consumer-oriented markets
Melissa Heikkilä / MIT Technology Review:
An analysis of nearly 4,000 public datasets finds that over 90% of AI training datasets came from Europe and North America, and fewer than 4% came from Africa  —  AI is all about data.  Reams and reams of data are needed to train algorithms to do what we want, and what goes into the AI models determines what comes out.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Appfigures: global consumer spending in mobile apps on the App Store and Google Play rose 15.7% YoY to $127.3B in 2024, but app downloads dropped 2.3% to 109.7B  —  The global app economy continued to recover in 2024, after an earlier slowdown in 2022 — at least in terms of consumer spending.
Ryan Vlastelica / Bloomberg:
Analysis: Alphabet's shares have jumped about 30% from a September 2024 low, with a chunk of those gains coming after Google unveiled its Willow quantum chip  —  - Breakthrough isn't a revenue driver but showed tech prowess  — The shares are up 40% this year and are trading near a record

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