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Techmeme
February 15, 2025, 3:10 AM
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Top News

New York Times:
OpenAI's board rejects the $97.4B bid by Elon Musk and a consortium of investors, saying they reject “Musk's latest attempt to disrupt his competition”  —  Bret Taylor, the chairman of OpenAI's board, said the artificial intelligence company was “not for sale.”
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: Meta plans major investment in AI-powered humanoid robots, with an initial focus on household chores, and has formed a new team within Reality Labs  —  - Company is aiming to be the engine powering humanoid market  — Ex-Cruise CEO Marc Whitten to run new group in Reality Labs
Bloomberg:
Source: TSMC is considering taking a controlling stake and fully running Intel's US factories after a Trump team request, as Trump aims to boost manufacturing  —  - TSMC would take controlling stake in potential partnership  — Administration aims to boost manufacturing of advanced chips
Brody Ford / Bloomberg:
Sources: Dell nears a $5B deal to provide servers with Nvidia's GB200 chips for xAI's supercomputer project in Memphis  —  - Musk's AI startup developing supercomputer project in Memphis  — Dell working to win large share of xAI's Memphis build-out  —  Dell Technologies Inc …
Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat:
Perplexity releases Deep Research, offering five queries daily to free users and 500 to subscribers, available now on the web and soon on iOS, Android, and Mac  —  Perplexity shattered the artificial intelligence market's status quo today by launching Deep Research, a tool …
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: Apple's overhaul of Siri faces engineering problems and software bugs; some features, planned for April, may have to be postponed until May or later  —  - Software's makeover is key to Apple Intelligence ambitions  — New Siri features slated for April at risk of being postponed
Scharon Harding / Ars Technica:
In an AMA, Steve Huffman says Reddit is planning to roll out paid subreddits in 2025 and is “laying the foundation” to monetize commerce within subreddits  —  Huffman previously showed interest in potentially introducing a new type of subreddit with “exclusive content or private areas” that Reddit users would pay to access.
Eric Geller / Wired:
Memo: CISA halts election security work and reviews related activities conducted since 2017, to comply with Trump's January 20 EO on “ending federal censorship”  —  The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has frozen efforts to aid states in securing elections, according to an internal memo viewed by WIRED.
Emily Nicolle / Bloomberg:
Tether acquires a minority stake in the iconic Italian football club Juventus, as part of a broader push to integrate digital assets into sports franchises  —  Tether Holdings SA de CV said it's acquired a minority stake in Juventus Football Club SpA, as one of crypto's most valuable companies continues …
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Meta announces Project Waterworth, a subsea cable project that will span over 50,000 km and connect five continents  —  Back in November, we broke the news that Meta — owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, with billions of users accounting for 10% of all fixed and 22% of all mobile traffic …
Dwarkesh Patel / Dwarkesh Podcast:
Q&A with Google's Jeff Dean and Noam Shazeer on Google's path to AGI, future of Moore's Law and TPUs, inference scaling, open research, and more  —  Two of Gemini's co-leads on Google's path to AGI  —  This week I welcome on the show two of the most important technologists ever, in any field.
Bloomberg:
Sources: humanoid robot startup Figure is in talks to raise $1.5B led by Align Ventures and Parkway VC at a $39.5B valuation, up from $2.6B in February 2024  —  Backed by OpenAI and Microsoft, Figure is discussing a $1.5 billion funding round. … The deal is set to be led by Align Ventures …
J. Edward Moreno / Sherwood News:
Analysis: consumers spent $259.1B on Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash in 2024, up from $218.5B in 2023, with $162.8B on Uber, $80.2B on DoorDash, and $16.1B on Lyft  —  Lyft and DoorDash just reported their first years with net profits.  Instacart is likely next.  —  For a long time …
Hugh Son / CNBC:
Zelle's payment volume crossed $1T in 2024, the most ever for a P2P platform, user base jumped 12% YoY to 151M accounts, and the total dollars sent grew 27% YoY  —  Zelle, the payments network run by banks-owned Early Warning Services, crossed $1 trillion in total volumes last year …
Eric Newcomer / Newcomer:
Sources: Lightspeed, whose bets include Wiz, Anthropic, and Stripe, returned $8B from current and active funds in the past five years, with $3B+ coming in 2024  —  I've got my hands on slides from Lightspeed's $7 billion fundraising effort  —  Lightspeed Venture Partners …

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About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 3:10 AM ET, February 15, 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

A.J. Katz / The Wrap:
AdImpact: political ad spending and reservations for the 2025-26 election cycle have reached a record $11.21B, surpassing the entire 2024 election cycle

Todd Spangler / Variety:
Memo: Skydance offers certain employees a voluntary buyout in a “one-time offer” and moves to a mandatory five-days-per-week in-office policy

Alex Ritman / Variety:
Disney and UK network Channel 4 strike a deal to bring Channel 4's linear channel and on-demand content to Disney+ in the UK and Ireland in early 2027

More News

Earlier Picks

Vittoria Elliott / Wired:
DOGE's Tom Krause, the US Treasury's new Fiscal Assistant Secretary, is still the CEO of Cloud Software Group; critics say it may be a conflict of interest
David Heaney / UploadVR:
EssilorLuxottica says it has sold 2M+ Ray-Ban Meta glasses since their Q4 2023 launch, and plans to raise annual production capacity to 10M by the end of 2026
More: The Verge, Next Reality, and Reuters
Threads: @documentingmeta and @szed_ar.  X: @gartenberg.  Forums: r/virtualreality
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Mastodon is working on a quote posts feature, which it says is a “source of concern” for some and “highly requested” by others
Lauren Feiner / The Verge:
Sources: around 20 technologists at CFPB were fired on Thursday, gutting a team that specialized in understanding Big Tech's entrance into financial products
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch:
Instagram is testing a dislike button for comments; Instagram will not show a dislike count and dislikes may eventually count toward ranking comments
Reuters:
Sources: the White House plans to renegotiate some Chips Act awards after changing current requirements, and has signaled delays to some upcoming disbursements
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