Techmeme
February 18, 2025, 7:05 PM

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
Aaron Souppouris / Engadget:
Humane says Ai Pin's online features will stop working on February 28, when all customer data will be deleted, and it will refund some customers  —  Humane is discontinuing the AI Pin and selling out to HP.  —  AI hardware startup Humane has given its users just ten (10!) days notice that their Pins will be disconnected.
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  —  Hours after Elon Musk's AI company, xAI released the latest version of its AI model, Grok 3, X has significantly hiked the price …
Amy Thomson / Bloomberg:
Jowi Morales / Tom's Hardware:
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.

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