Techmeme
January 2, 2025, 8:45 AM

Top News

Washington Post:
Sources: Chinese government hackers breached the US Treasury Department's OFAC, which administers economic sanctions, and two other Treasury offices  —  Treasury's sanctions office hacked by Chinese government, officials say A troubling series of breaches of U.S. firms and agencies …
Matt Simons / Courthouse News Service:
A US 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 …
Connie Loizos / TechCrunch:
Q&A with Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev about the company's aggressive plans for 2025, including competing with prediction markets like Kalshi  —  Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev has a lot to celebrate this holiday season.  After a bumpy few years following Robinhood's 2021 IPO …
Samantha Cole / 404 Media:
Pornhub now blocks users in 17 US states, including almost all of the South, after blocking Florida, Tennessee, and South Carolina due to age verification laws  —  As of today, three more states join the list of 17 that can't access Pornhub because of age verification laws.
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 …
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
Bloomberg:
Alibaba sells its 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 online business  —  - The e-commerce firm may be taking a big loss from the deal … China's e-commerce pioneer expects gross proceeds of up to HK$12.3 billion …
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.
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Asus, Samsung, and MSI separately unveil the world's first 27-inch QD-OLED gaming monitors, offering 4K OLED at 240Hz, without giving release dates or pricing  —  27-inch 4K OLED 240Hz monitors seem to be like buses: you wait ages for one and then three turn up at once.
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.

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The company at the heart of the AI bubble
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Lenny's Podcast:
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Could LLMs Be The Route To Superintelligence? — With Mustafa Suleyman
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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.
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New York Times: