Techmeme
March 26, 2025, 12:10 PM

Top News

Benj Edwards / Ars Technica:
Developers say aggressive AI crawlers are overwhelming open-source infrastructure; LibreNews: up to 97% of some projects' traffic comes from AI companies' bots  —  Software developer Xe Iaso reached a breaking point earlier this year when aggressive AI crawler traffic from Amazon overwhelmed …
Simon Willison / Simon Willison's Weblog:
In an addendum to the GPT-4o System Card, OpenAI says it is “not blocking the capability to generate adult public figures” and that public figures can opt out  —  Introducing 4o Image Generation.  When OpenAI first announced GPT-4o back in May 2024 one of the most exciting features …
Kylie Robison / The Verge:
Richard Lawler / The Verge:
Microsoft unveils AI “deep reasoning” agents for 365 Copilot: Researcher, based on OpenAI's deep research model, and Analyst, based on o3-mini, coming in April  —  Multi-step reasoning AI is coming to Microsoft Copilot. … After Google and OpenAI offered up AI news on Tuesday …
Philip Stafford / Financial Times:
Sources: Fidelity Investments is in the advanced stages of testing its own stablecoin, managed by its digital assets arm; Trump pledged to back USD stablecoins  —  Asset manager is in advanced stages of testing token as the Trump administration prepares to overhaul crypto oversight
Ana Swanson / New York Times:
The US adds export restrictions to 80 organizations, primarily targeting Chinese companies, including server maker Nettrix and clients of Nvidia, Intel, and AMD  —  The additions included companies that are customers of Intel and Nvidia, and one firm that was the focus of a New York Times investigation last year.
TechCrunch:
Leaked email: Block lays off 931 employees, or ~8% of staff, and moves 193 managers to individual contributor roles, after cutting ~1,000 roles in January 2024  —  Fintech Block laid off 931 people, roughly 8% of the company's staff, on Tuesday, according to a leaked message from the company seen by TechCrunch.
Simon Willison / Simon Willison's Weblog:
Gemini 2.5 Pro hands-on: a very strong model with 1M input tokens, 64K output tokens, a January 2025 knowledge cut-off, and very, very impressive coding skills  —  There's a new release from Google Gemini this morning: the first in the Gemini 2.5 series.  Google call it “a thinking model …
Kurt Wagner / Bloomberg:
eMarketer expects X to generate $1.31B in US ad sales in 2025, up 17.5%, and $2.26B in global ad sales, up 16.5%, its first year of ad revenue growth since 2022  —  - Projections from Emarketer show sales up 17.5% this year  — Sales remain significantly lower than before Musk's purchase
Angel Au-Yeung / Wall Street Journal:
Mercury, which helps startups manage their finances, raised $300M led by Sequoia at a $3.5B valuation; the fintech saw $2B in deposits after SVB's collapse  —  Fintech banking startup Mercury says it has more than doubled its valuation to $3.5 billion after raising $300 million in its latest funding round.
Blake Brittain / Reuters:
Anthropic convinced a California federal judge to reject a preliminary bid to block it from using lyrics owned by UMG and other music publishers to train Claude  —  Artificial intelligence company Anthropic convinced a California federal judge on Tuesday to reject a preliminary bid to block …
Jason Kehe / Wired:
A look at RISC architecture's origins, the Arm vs. RISC-V war, and how RISCites beat the CISCites, as RISC's increasing adoption risks US companies' dominance  —  “RISC architecture is gonna change everything.”  Those absurdly geeky, incredibly prophetic words were spoken 30 years ago.
Yun Li / CNBC:
GameStop says its board has unanimously approved a plan to buy bitcoin with its corporate cash, and it has not set a ceiling on how much bitcoin it may purchase  —  Video game retailer GameStop announced Tuesday its board has unanimously approved a plan to buy bitcoin with its corporate cash …

Sponsor Posts

ElevenLabs:
ElevenAgents by ElevenLabs  —  You know us for voice.  Now meet ElevenAgents — featuring Expressive Mode, our most human-sounding AI voice technology in 70+ languages with ultra-low latency.  Hear it for yourself.
Intel:
5G's most deployed platform  —  Powering live networks with built-in Inference across Core and RAN.  That's the power of Intel Inside®
Zoho:
Introducing intelligent document processing with Zoho RPA  —  Documents are a major bottleneck at many organizations.  Invoices, contracts, forms, ID cards, receipts: They all arrive in different shapes and sizes …
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Featured Podcasts

Hard Fork:
The Future of Addictive Design + Going Deep at DeepMind + HatGPT
The future is already here. Each week, journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore and make sense of the latest in the rapidly changing world of tech.
Subscribe to Hard Fork.
Great Chat:
Go touch some grass (but don't tweet about it)
A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.
Subscribe to Great Chat.
Lenny's Podcast:
An AI state of the union: We've passed the inflection point, dark factories are coming, and automation timelines | Simon Willison
Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.
Subscribe to Lenny's Podcast.
Access:
The future of AI might be on your finger
A show about the tech industry's inside conversation, hosted by tech reporter Alex Heath and founder whisperer Ellis Hamburger.
Subscribe to Access.
The Upstarts Podcast:
Axiom's Carina Hong: Solving Math's Hardest Problems With AI, And AI's Problems With Math
Veteran tech reporter Alex Konrad sits down with breakout entrepreneurs taking on the status quo to shake up their fields in AI, design, nuclear energy, space, and more.
Subscribe to The Upstarts Podcast.
Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith:
Ryan Roslansky: Turning AI Anxiety into Skills for the Future of Work
Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith speaks with leaders in government, business, and culture to explore the most critical challenges at the intersection of technology and society.
Subscribe to Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 12:10 PM ET, March 26, 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.

More News

Ananya Bhattacharya / Rest of World:

Earlier Picks

Erin Brodwin / Axios:
Bloomberg:
Jonathan Stempel / Reuters:
Rick Porter / The Hollywood Reporter:
James Laporta / CBS News:
Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch:
Chance Miller / 9to5Mac: