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February 18, 2025, 8:30 PM
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Top News

Brody Ford / Bloomberg:
HP will acquire assets from Humane for $116M; Humane's Ai Pin business will be wound down, and Humane's team, including its founders, will join HP  —  - Humane's Ai pin business to be wound down after rocky launch  — New unit at HP will focus on implementation of AI in devices
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
xAI launches Grok-3 beta and Grok-3 mini, its latest AI models with reasoning, trained on 200K GPUs, or “10x” more compute than Grok-2, for X Premium+ users  —  Elon Musk's AI company, xAI, late on Monday released its latest flagship AI model, Grok 3, and unveiled new capabilities for the Grok iOS and web apps.
Andrej Karpathy / @karpathy:
Grok-3 hands-on: its thinking capability feels state of the art and rivals OpenAI's o1 pro models, DeepSearch offers a blend of search and reasoning, and more  —  I was given early access to Grok 3 earlier today, making me I think one of the first few who could run a quick vibe check.
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch:
X raises its Premium+ subscription to $40 per month, or $395 per year, after raising it to $22 per month in December 2024, following Grok-3's launch
Amy Thomson / Bloomberg:
xAI unveils DeepSearch, a reasoning chatbot that explains its thought process for queries and is capable of doing research, brainstorming, and data analysis
Jowi Morales / Tom's Hardware:
xAI says Grok-3 outperforms Gemini-2 Pro, DeepSeek-V3, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and GPT-4o in some benchmarks; Musk says xAI's mission is to “understand the universe”
Ina Fried / Axios:
Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati announces Thinking Machines Lab, a new AI startup that she's leading, with Barret Zoph as CTO and John Schulman as chief scientist  —  - “Instead of focusing solely on making fully autonomous AI systems, we are excited to build multimodal systems that work …
Samantha Subin / CNBC:
Intel shares close up 16.1% following a February 15 report that both Broadcom and TSMC are potentially weighing deals that could break the chipmaker in two  —  Intel shares rallied 16.1% on Tuesday following a Wall Street Journal report that both Broadcom and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing …
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Meta says LlamaCon, its first developer conference dedicated to generative AI, will take place on April 29, and Meta Connect will be held on September 17 and 18  —  Meta on Tuesday announced that it'll host its first-ever dev conference dedicated to generative AI.
Bloomberg:
Sources: Niantic is in talks to sell its games unit to Saudi Arabia-controlled Scopely for ~$3.5B; the deal would include Pokémon Go and other mobile games  —  A deal could be announced in coming weeks.  The price being discussed is about $3.5 billion, according to one of the people.
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:
Starting Feb. 19, Meta will store Facebook Live broadcasts for 30 days instead of storing them indefinitely and will remove videos currently older than 30 days  —  Facebook announced on Tuesday that live videos will now only be stored on the social network for 30 days, after which they will be deleted.
Francisco Rodrigues / CoinDesk:
Arkham: FTX users with claims below $50K have started to receive funds via Kraken and BitGo, expected to total $1.2B; users with $50K+ claims will be paid in Q2  —  What to know: Creditors with claims below $50,000 have started receiving payouts with 9% interest since November 2022.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Google Play Books for iOS will now let users complete their e-book or audiobook purchase on the Google Play website, under Apple's “reader apps” exception  —  Google has gained permission to sell its e-books and audiobooks directly to customers through its iOS app, Google Play Books.
José Adorno / BGR:
Protector, an iOS app that offers on-demand personal security, including armed agents, debuts in NYC and LA; adviser Nikita Bier calls it “Uber with guns”  —  There's a new app on the App Store called Protector, which, as its advisor describes it, is “Uber with guns.”
Lauren Forristal / TechCrunch:
Amazon discontinues Inspire, which was launched in December 2022 as a TikTok-style feed in its app for discovering products  —  Amazon is shutting down “Inspire,” its TikTok-like, short-form video and photo feed that was previously available in its mobile app.
James Titcomb / Telegraph:
Acer CEO Jason Chen says the company will “probably” raise US laptop prices by 10% “by default” from March 2025 due to Trump's tariffs on Chinese imports  —  Acer considers shifting manufacturing out of China as trade war hits consumers  —  This feature is available for registered users.

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This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 8:30 PM ET, February 18, 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

Financial Times:
Hedge fund manager Crispin Odey drops his £79M libel lawsuit against the Financial Times, after FT said 15 women were willing to testify in court against him

William Bishop / Pew Research Center:
Survey: 64% of US adults read a print book in the past year, down from 72% in 2011; 31% read an e-book, vs. 17% in 2011, while 26% have listened to an audiobook

Kelcee Griffis / Bloomberg:
Sources: Nexstar has begun directing stations to fill local newscasts with segments from Nexstar's NewsNation instead of national networks' content like NBC's

More News

Kevin Purdy / Ars Technica:
Asus ROG Flow Z13 review: the ~$2,300 convertible tablet's integrated GPU in its AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 chip offers performance comparable to a GeForce RTX 4060

Earlier Picks

Eileen Ng / Associated Press:
Huawei launches Mate XT, the industry's first tri-foldable, globally for €3,499, after its China launch in September 2024; the Mate XT has a 10.2-inch display
Financial Times:
A look at Apple's quiet pivot to India, where Foxconn now makes the iPhone 16 Pro; sources say China views Apple's growing business in India with suspicion
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:
An interview with Shuhei Yoshida, who led PlayStation Studios from 2008-2019 and left Sony on January 15, on his 31 years at PlayStation, early days, and more
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