|
January 1, 2025, 6:35 PM
|
Mediagazer
memeorandum
WeSmirchTop News
| 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
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.
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.
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:
Generate Sample Data the Way You Want It Using AI, for Free — Finding good sample data is harder than it should be.If you've ever tried to test a dashboard, build a demo, or train a team on an analytics tool, you know the drill.
Generate Sample Data the Way You Want It Using AI, for Free — Finding good sample data is harder than it should be.If you've ever tried to test a dashboard, build a demo, or train a team on an analytics tool, you know the drill.
IDrive:
IDrive Autonomy: low-cost L2+ driver assistance with AI — L2+ driver assistance with a scalable AI stack built for automotive companies and laying the foundation for the autonomous future.
IDrive Autonomy: low-cost L2+ driver assistance with AI — L2+ driver assistance with a scalable AI stack built for automotive companies and laying the foundation for the autonomous future.Featured Podcasts
Big Technology Podcast:
Cloudflare CEO: We're Ready To Block Millions of Websites From AI — With Matthew Prince
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:
Data Centers, Elon Musk, and the New Politics of Tech, with David Weigel
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.
Access:
Sam Altman on OpenAI's next model and the AI backlash
A show about the tech industry's inside conversation, hosted by tech reporter Alex Heath and founder whisperer Ellis Hamburger.
Subscribe to Access.
Uncapped with Jack Altman:
Brian Singerman from GPx
Conversations with people I admire about things I'm genuinely interested in.
Subscribe to Uncapped with Jack Altman.
Training Data:
Making Cities Awesome: Peregrine's Nick Noone & Ben Rudolph
Sequoia Capital partners host conversations with leading AI builders and researchers to develop a deeper understanding of the evolving technologies and their implications.
Subscribe to Training Data.
Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith:
Connecting the Unconnected: Doreen Bogdan-Martin
Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith speaks with leaders in government, business, and culture to explore the most critical challenges at the intersection of technology and society.
Subscribe to Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith.
About This Page
This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 6:35 PM ET, January 1, 2025.
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.
From Mediagazer
Danielle Salisbury / MLive.com:Max Tani / Semafor:
Benjamin Mullin / New York Times:
Upcoming Tech Events
More News
| New York Times: |
More: TechCrunch and HotAir
Bluesky: @justinm.one, @paramjitkahai, @rweingarten, @shevotesil, and @catmcamp
X: @alleighmarre, @ttp_updates, @ttp_updates, and @ttp_updates
| Bill Toulas / BleepingComputer: |
More: arXiv.org, WinBuzzer, and How-To Geek
Bluesky: @bagder.mastodon.social …, @carnage4life, @joshgrant.online, and @quinnypig.com
Mastodon: @bagder@mastodon.social and @schalkneethling@hachyderm.io
Earlier Picks
| Ryan Browne / CNBC: |
More: South China Morning Post, The Decoder, SiliconANGLE, Cryptopolitan, The Information, PYMNTS.com, WinBuzzer, and Reuters
Forums: r/LocalLLaMA, r/baba, and Slashdot
| Reuters: |
More: The Korea Herald, BBC, Bitcoin Insider, Tech in Asia, South China Morning Post, The Daily Hodl, Associated Press, Boing Boing, The Crypto Times, Cryptonews, CryptoSlate, Cointelegraph, The Block, CryptoPotato, Engadget, Cryptopolitan, Bloomberg, CoinJournal, and Semafor
X: @pourteaux, @sunil_trades, and @courthousenews
| Manish Singh / TechCrunch: |
More: Moneycontrol, Trak.in, Times of India, Reuters, Inc42 Media, The Economic Times, and YourStory.com
| Brian Krebs / Krebs on Security: |
More: The Verge, PCMag, 9to5Mac, acecomments.mu.nu, The Register, PhoneArena, SiliconANGLE, Boing Boing, Reuters, HealthcareInfoSecurity.com, The Information, and The Desk
Bluesky: @vxundergroundre and @bradhoward
Mastodon: @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social, @briankrebs@infosec.exchange, and @nixonnixoff@infosec.exchange
X: @vxdb, @nixonnixoff, @nixonnixoff, @benlovejoy, @imposecost, @vxunderground, @matthewkeyslive, @kimzetter, @vxunderground, and @kimzetter
Forums: Hacker News, r/technology, r/army, and Slashdot