Techmeme
February 18, 2025, 6:50 AM

Top News

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
xAI launches Grok3 beta and Grok3 mini, its latest AI models with reasoning capabilities, trained on “10x” more compute than Grok2, for X Premium+ subscribers  —  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.
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  —  Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI showed off the updated Grok-3 model, showcasing a version of the chatbot technology …
Andrej Karpathy / @karpathy:
Grok3 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.
Kate Clark / Bloomberg:
Source: Ilya Sutskever's startup Safe Superintelligence is raising $1B+ at a $30B+ valuation led by Greenoaks Capital, which plans to invest $500M  —  - SSI raising more than $1 billion, including from Greenoaks  — Former OpenAI chief scientist left the company last year
Bloomberg:
President Xi meets Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma, Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei, and others, signaling Beijing's support for the long-marginalized private sector  —  - Meeting signals a more supportive stance toward private firms  — Xi promises relief from excessive fines, level playing field
Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer:
Chase plans to stop users making Zelle payments deemed “as originating from contact through social media”; the CFPB had claimed Zelle lacked adequate safeguards  —  JPMorgan Chase Bank (Chase) will soon start blocking Zelle payments to social media contacts to combat a significant rise …
Forums: Slashdot
Financial Times:
Surj, the sporting arm of Saudi Arabia's PIF, plans to invest $1B in DAZN and a new joint venture with the sports streamer; source: Surj will take a <5% stake  —  Surj Sports Investment will take stake in DAZN and help fund a Middle East broadcasting joint venture
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  —  Shu Yoshida has graduated.  He just completed 38 years at Sony, including 31 years at PlayStation, and he completed …
Matt Binder / disruptionist:
X shows error messages when trying to share Signal's Signal.me links in DMs, posts, and profile pages, and a warning page if users click on already posted links  —  Signal has been a primary method of communication for federal workers looking to blow the whistle on DOGE.

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Earlier Picks

Romain Dillet / TechCrunch:
Namanyay Goel / N's Blog:
David Barnett / The Guardian: