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January 1, 2025, 6:35 PM
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| Matt Simons / Courthouse News Service: |
A judge blocks parts of California's SB 976, a law to protect kids from social media, citing 1A concerns, but allows a ban on “addictive feeds” for minors — Parts of the law will still take effect Wednesday. — A federal judge on Tuesday barred the state of California … | Wall Street Journal: |
As Beijing pushes for self-sufficiency in the $80B+ per year car chip business, sources say the use of homemade chips in Chinese cars has risen to around 15% — U.S. objects to rival's push for self-sufficiency in $80 billion business and opens trade probe| Raquel Coronell Uribe / NBC News: |
The US Treasury sanctions Iranian and Russian entities over attempted election interference, including a Moscow entity that directed the creation of deepfakes — The Treasury Department said Iran and Russia sought to divide Americans through targeted disinformation campaigns in the 2024 elections.
More: U.S. Department …, SiliconANGLE, PCMag, The Hacker News, Security Affairs, United States Department …, Notebookcheck, Office of Foreign …, Raw Story, Radio Free Europe/Radio …, TASS, Reuters, The Hill, USA Today, UPI, Al Jazeera, Newsweek, The Boston Globe, IRNA English, Washington Post, Vulnerable U, Reuters, Rolling Stone, CSO, New York Post, CyberScoop, The Times of Israel, The Record, CBS News, Android Headlines, and Engadget
Bluesky: @areidross, @ecmclaughlin, @cstross.wandering …, @roryflynn808, and @maxbrockbank.com
X: @ustreasury, @iranintl_en, @iranintl_en, @officejjsmart, @ralakbar, @w7voa, @ustreasury, @ustreasury, @statedeptspox, @catherinebelton, and @wendysiegelman. LinkedIn: Brian Cole
| Bloomberg: |
Alibaba sells Sun Art Retail stake to PE firm DCP for ~$1.6B, after paying ~$3.6B in 2020 to double the stake to 70%+, as it focuses on its core online business — - Sun Art had attracted interest from other private equity firms … China's e-commerce pioneer said it could receive gross proceeds … | Camilla Hodgson / Financial Times: |
KoBold Metals, which uses AI to sift through historical and scientific data to identify untapped mineral deposits, raised a $537M Series C at a $2.96B valuation — KoBold Metals aims to lead race for critical minerals needed for energy transition — A mining and artificial intelligence start … | Gerrit De Vynck / Washington Post: |
Elon Musk got new support for his OpenAI lawsuit in filings last week, including from tech advocacy group Encode, backed by AI researchers like Geoffrey Hinton — The billionaire is attempting to block the ChatGPT maker's transition into a for-profit company. His own start-up xAI competes with OpenAI.| Coco Feng / South China Morning Post: |
Government data: users on Douyin, WeChat, and other short video apps in China dropped for the first time to 1.05B in June 2024, down ~300M from December 2023 — The number of short video app users in China reached 1.05 billion at the end of June, about 300 million fewer than in December last year| Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: |
OpenAI missed its goal to launch Media Manager, an opt-out tool for creators, by 2025; sources: the tool was rarely viewed as an important launch internally — Back in May, OpenAI said it was developing a tool to let creators specify how they want their works to be included in — or excluded from — its AI training data.| Simon Willison / Simon Willison's Weblog: |
Some 2024 LLM takeaways: multimodal vision became common, LLM prices crashed, overall environmental impact worsened despite efficiency gains, and slop arrived — A lot has happened in the world of Large Language Models over the course of 2024. Here's a review of things we figured …
More: Don't Worry About the Vase. Bluesky: @randomwalker, @lu.is, @jweiss.io, @philipmai.com, @anildash.com, @aleximas, @randfish, and @simon.fedi.simonwillison …. Mastodon: @eloquence@social.coop
Forums: Hacker News, r/programming, and lobste.rs
| Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: |
St. Louis-based tech services company World Wide Technology agrees to acquire Canadian IT provider Softchoice in an all-cash deal valuing Softchoice at ~CA$1.8B — One last mega-deal closed out an eventful 2024. — On Tuesday, World Wide Technology (WWT), a tech services company based in St. Louis … | John Herrman / New York Magazine: |
Meta saying it expects AI characters to populate its apps is its friendly rebrand of an effective but alienating effort to automate social interactions — Why AI friends are coming to Facebook and Instagram. — Among Meta's many resolutions for the new year — making augmented reality …
More: Futurism, The Debrief, Passionfruit, Social Media Today, Fox Business, Meristation, The Post Millennial, TechSpot, and Twitchy
Bluesky: @kylehugh.es, @frydawolff, @sternbergh, @hypervisible, @jwherrman, @goodkid-saadcity, @charlieangus104, @milesklee, and @edzitron.com. Mastodon: @dbreunig@note.computer
X: @andrewcurran_, @justinebateman, @timcast, @battleangelviv, @p_kallioniemi, @awestruckvox, @_whitneywebb, and @nnewsteevie
Forums: r/interesting and r/technology
| Nikkei Asia: |
Huawei Rotating Chair Meng Wanzhou says the company is helping train 300,000+ tech students per year, in cooperation with 3,000+ universities in 110 countries — TAIPEI — China's Huawei Technologies said it has built tech “academies” in 110 nations to cultivate hundreds of thousands of engineers a year …
More: South China Morning Post, Huawei Central, Huawei Central, and Semafor
X: @huawei_me and @wmhuo168
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