Techmeme
October 18, 2025, 11:05 AM

Top News

Ari Levy / CNBC:
Marc Benioff apologizes for saying Trump should send the National Guard to SF, says the comments were made out of “an abundance of caution” around Dreamforce  —  Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff apologized on Friday for making comments in support of President Donald Trump sending federal troops …
Carly Nairn / Courthouse News Service:
A US judge bars NSO Group from targeting WhatsApp users and cuts the ~$168M damages verdict awarded to Meta by a jury in May to $4M, ruling it was excessive  —  Meta previously won $168 million in damages over claims spyware compromised WhatsApp users, but a judge reduced the damages down to $4 million.
Natallie Rocha / New York Times:
The AI boom has pushed SF's residential rents up by the most in the US over the past year, as AI companies lease apartments and offer rent stipends to employees  —  The artificial intelligence gold rush has pushed San Francisco's residential rents up by the most in the nation …
Bill Toulas / BleepingComputer:
Google says North Korea hackers are using “EtherHiding” to embed malware on blockchains, the first time it has seen a nation-state threat actor using the method  —  North Korean hackers have adopted the ‘EtherHiding’ technique that leverages smart contracts to host and deliver malware …
Dwarkesh Patel / Dwarkesh Podcast:
Q&A with Andrej Karpathy on AGI still being a decade away, why reinforcement learning is terrible, superintelligence, his AI education startup Eureka, and more  —  Transcript 00:00:00 - AGI is still a decade away Dwarkesh Patel 00:00:00 Today I'm speaking with Andrej Karpathy.
Winston Cho / The Hollywood Reporter:
Inside the discussions between OpenAI and talent agencies about the video app Sora; some agents say studios have been too reluctant to challenge tech giants  —  OpenAI's CEO brazenly regurgitated major studios' characters to allow video app Sora 2 to spit out clips tailor-made for users.
Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch:
Kendra Barnett / Adweek:
Google is phasing out its Privacy Sandbox technologies; the initiative was launched in 2019 to develop privacy-protecting tech to replace third-party cookies  —  The elimination of many remaining Privacy Sandbox APIs come six months after third-party cookies got a reprieve in Chrome.
Axios:
At TSMC Arizona, Nvidia and TSMC unveil the first Blackwell chip wafer made in the US, representing that Blackwell has reached volume production  —  Nvidia and TSMC announced Friday their first completed U.S.-made wafer that will eventually become Blackwell chips for AI purposes, Nvidia first tells Axios.
Bloomberg:
Sources: Li Lin, founder of crypto exchange Huobi, and some of Asia's earliest Ethereum backers have raised ~$1B to launch a digital asset trust to buy Ether  —  Li Lin, the founder of crypto exchange Huobi and chairman of investment firm Avenir Capital, is joining forces …
John Kang / Forbes:
Shares of ISU Petasys, a South Korea-based multi-layer PCB supplier for AI servers used by Alphabet, Nvidia, Microsoft, and others, are up 215% so far this year  —  Based in Daegu, a city in southeastern South Korea, ISU Petasys makes multi-layer printed circuit boards that hold chips and other components for AI servers.
Thomas Beaumont / Associated Press:
Senate Republicans share an AI-generated video falsely depicting Chuck Schumer saying on camera comments he made in a print interview on the government shutdown  —  Add AP News to Google Add AP News as your preferred source to see more of our stories on Google.  Share

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Kosta Andreadis / TweakTown: