Open Links In New Tab
Mobile Archives Advertise Site News
Techmeme
March 20, 2026, 10:15 AM
Mediagazer memeorandum WeSmirch
Home River Leaderboards About Events Newsletter

Top News

Berber Jin / Wall Street Journal:
OpenAI plans to merge ChatGPT, Codex, and its browser into a desktop “superapp” to simplify the user experience and focus on engineering and business customers  —  The AI company will combine ChatGPT, Codex app and browser in an effort to focus and streamline its resources
Jordan Novet / CNBC:
US prosecutors charge three people affiliated with Super Micro, including co-founder Yih-Shyan Liaw, with smuggling Nvidia AI chips to China; SMCI drops 25%+  —  The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York has charged associates of an unidentified U.S. server maker …
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Jeff Bezos is in talks to raise $100B for a fund that would buy companies in industrial sectors like chipmaking and defense and automate them with AI  —  Amazon.com founder has traveled to Middle East, Singapore in fundraising effort linked to Project Prometheus AI startup
New York Times:
Sources: Jeff Bezos' $100B fund would be part of the same holding company as Project Prometheus and would invest in companies that could benefit from its tech  —  The new fund would operate alongside the Amazon founder's A.I. start-up, Project Prometheus.  —  Jeff Bezos is in early discussions …
Andy Greenberg / Wired:
A US DOJ operation disrupted four botnets that infected 3M+ devices and includes the Aisuru and Kimwolf botnets used in a 31.4 Tbps DDoS attack in November 2025  —  The Aisuru, Kimwolf, JackSkid, and Mossad botnets had used clever techniques to worm into home networks, infecting …
Greg Bensinger / Reuters:
Sources: Amazon's ZeroOne unit is developing “Transformer”, a phone that syncs with Alexa; it would be Amazon's second smartphone, after the Fire Phone in 2014  —  In 2014, Amazon (AMZN.O) introduced its first smartphone, hoping to take on Apple and Samsung.
Jose Antonio Lanz / Decrypt:
Microsoft releases MAI-Image-2, ranked third on Arena AI's text-to-image leaderboard behind only models from Google and OpenAI, available in the MAI Playground  —  Microsoft has been quietly building its own image generator.  Announced Thursday by the company's AI Superintelligence team …
Carl Franzen / VentureBeat:
Xiaomi unveils its MiMo-V2 AI models, including the 1T-parameter MiMo-V2-Pro, codenamed Hunter Alpha, which Xiaomi says benchmarks close to GPT-5.2 and Opus 4.6  —  Led by Fuli Luo, a veteran of the disruptive DeepSeek R1 project, the release represents what Luo characterizes as a “quiet ambush” on the global frontier.
Politico:
The White House releases an AI policy framework, explicitly calling on Congress to preempt state AI laws, create age-gating requirements for AI models, and more  —  The framework explicitly calls on Congress to preempt any state laws that regulate the way models are developed or that penalize companies …
Carl Franzen / VentureBeat:
MiniMax releases M2.7, a proprietary “self-evolving” LLM that the company used to build, monitor, and optimize the model's own reinforcement learning harnesses  —  In the last few years, Chinese AI startup MiniMax has become one of the most exciting in the crowded global AI marketplace …
Maria Curi / Axios:
Sources: Anthropic privately discussed issues like export controls with the House Homeland Security Committee on March 18, only briefly mentioning its DOD fight  —  - The discussion focused largely on issues like model distillation — shrinking powerful AI systems into smaller versions — and export controls.
More: NewsMax.com
Maria Curi / Axios:
Filing: the Pentagon says Anthropic's use of foreign workers, including from China, poses security risks and that its case is “different” from other companies'
Wired:
Signal's Moxie Marlinspike says his privacy-focused AI platform Confer will integrate its encryption tech into Meta AI to provide E2EE for chatbot conversations  —  Moxie Marlinspike says the technology powering his encrypted AI chatbot, Confer, will be integrated into Meta AI.
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: Google this week started privately consumer beta testing a dedicated Gemini app for macOS, as it seeks to compete with Mac apps for ChatGPT and Claude  —  Google is ramping up development of a dedicated Gemini AI app for Apple Inc.'s Mac computer lineup, looking to step up competition with OpenAI and Anthropic PBC.
Rachel Metz / Bloomberg:
Cursor launches Composer 2, an AI agent trained solely on coding-related data to perform lengthy coding tasks autonomously, to compete with Anthropic and OpenAI

Sponsor Posts

Niantic Spatial:
World models need real-world data  —  Scaniverse is the gateway to spatial services — self-serve and built for AI and robotics.  Large-area 3D reconstruction from 360° cameras and precise localization, anywhere machines operate.
Zoho:
Fixing communication friction: How Zoho Workplace gives every conversation the right space  —  Work doesn't break all at once.  It slowly, silently wears out.  It's not the dramatic communication failures that kill productivity.
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.
Anuma:
The Private AI That Remembers  —  Anuma is the all-in-one AI platform with private, portable memory.  Chat, text, create, build, and solve across every model.
Sponsor Techmeme

Featured Podcasts

Big Technology Podcast:
 Mark Cuban: AI Hype vs. Reality, OpenAI's Wasting $1 Trillion, Lebron vs. Jordan
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.
Uncapped with Jack Altman:
 Tarek Mansour from Kalshi
Conversations with people I admire about things I'm genuinely interested in.
Subscribe to Uncapped with Jack Altman.
Channels with Peter Kafka:
 AI Can Make Software Now. That Changes Everything, with Paul Ford
Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.
Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.
The Social Radars:
 Ron Conway, Founder, SV Angel: Silicon Valley Bank Crisis
Come be a fly on the wall as Y Combinator's Jessica Livingston and Carolynn Levy talk to some of the most successful founders in Silicon Valley about how they did it.
Subscribe to The Social Radars.
Invest Like the Best:
 Paul Tudor Jones - Lessons From 50 Years in Markets
The leading destination to learn about business and investing. We do this by showcasing exceptional talent and ideas.
Subscribe to Invest Like the Best.
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.
Add your podcast here
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 10:15 AM ET, March 20, 2026.

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

Dade Hayes / Deadline:
The NAB's CEO says the FCC's “nearly unprecedented request” for Disney to reapply for TV licenses is contrary to established principles and creates uncertainty

Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Amazon executives, including MGM Studios head Mike Hopkins, have discussed rebooting The Apprentice for Prime Video, with Donald Trump Jr. as the host

Brian Steinberg / Variety:
The CW and ESPN agree to let ESPN stream ~800 hours of CW sports per year; the CW and Roku plan to stream CW entertainment to The Roku Channel in Fall 2026

More News

Kyle Chayka / New Yorker:
How AI startups and founders use “taste” as the latest buzzword for describing and distinguishing their products, in an attempt to evoke an aura of artisanality
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Bluesky raised a $100M Series B led by Bain Capital Crypto in April 2025, following a $15M Series A in 2024 and an $8M seed in 2023; it now has over 43M users

Earlier Picks

Marissa Newman / Bloomberg:
Oasis Security, which specializes in securing non-human identities like AI bots and automated tools, raised a $120M Series B, taking its total funding to $195M
Dominic Preston / The Verge:
Google announces a new “advanced flow” for Android sideloading that requires a mandatory 24-hour cooling-off period to install apps from unverified developers
New York Times:
Mark Zuckerberg's original metaverse vision is effectively over, after renaming Facebook to Meta and spending ~$80B on the endeavor, as his focus shifts to AI
Kurt Wagner / Bloomberg:
Meta plans to reduce its reliance on third-party vendors for content moderation, in favor of AI tools that it says are better at spotting scams and other tasks
Wall Street Journal:
MLB makes Polymarket its official prediction markets platform, giving it exclusive data access; Polymarket will restrict contracts that pose “integrity risk”
Mediagazer memeorandum WeSmirch
Home River Leaderboards About Events Newsletter