Techmeme
February 8, 2023, 1:30 PM

Top News

Martin Coulter / Reuters:
Google's Bard announcement tweet had a GIF showing the AI chatbot giving an inaccurate answer to a question about the James Webb Space Telescope; GOOG drops 8%+  —  Google published an online advertisement in which its much anticipated AI chatbot BARD delivered inaccurate answers.
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:
Google launches Immersive View for Maps in London, LA, NYC, San Francisco, and Tokyo and plans to release “glanceable directions” globally in the coming months  —  Google is launching new updates for Maps that are part of its plan to make the navigation app more immersive and intuitive for users …
Jay Peters / The Verge:
Google details AI updates: expanding multisearch globally on mobile, new features for EV drivers, Lens translation, and updates to Translate  —  Google announced a bunch of AI-enabled search, Maps, and Translate updates as part of its Google presents: Live from Paris event on Wednesday.
Katharine Gemmell / Bloomberg:
The UK CMA finds Microsoft's proposed $69B Activision Blizzard acquisition will harm competition in the UK's gaming market and asks Microsoft for remedies  —  Microsoft Corp.'s $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard Inc. will harm competition in the UK gaming market …
Financial Times:
James Vincent / The Verge:
Google's AI demo in Paris paled in comparison to Microsoft's “new Bing” event, highlighting why Google needs to widely release its ChatGPT rival service Bard  —  Google demoed its latest advances in AI search at a live event in Paris on Wednesday — but the features pale in comparison …
Parmy Olson / Bloomberg:
Google and Microsoft's race to add AI chatbots to search results will be messy and risky; Bing shows AI results in a sidebar with citations, which Google lacks  —  Here's something you don't see everyday: Microsoft Corp. is serving up a snazzy web search tool.
Washington Post:
A live blog of the House Oversight Committee hearing with ex-Twitter executives Vijaya Gadde, James Baker, and Yoel Roth on Hunter Biden laptop “censorship”  —  A congressional hearing today represents a moment of political reckoning more than two years in the making …
Paul Thurrott / Thurrott:
Microsoft plans to embed Adobe's Acrobat PDF tech in Edge for Windows 10 and Windows 11 starting in March 2023 and remove Edge's legacy PDF engine in March 2024  —  Microsoft announced today that it is partnering with Adobe to bring Acrobat PDF capabilities to the Microsoft Edge web browser on Windows.
Thomas Claburn / The Register:
Mozilla says the company is doing “exploratory work” for a Gecko-based browser on iOS in case Apple drops its WebKit requirement, after a similar move by Google  —  Work on a Gecko-based version of Firefox for iOS is underway, again  —  UPDATED Mozilla is planning for the day when Apple …
Kellen Browning / New York Times:
Uber reports Q4 revenue up 49% YoY to $8.6B, gross bookings up 19% YoY to $30.7B, MAUs up 11% YoY to 131M, and customer trips up 19% YoY to a record 2.1B  —  The company, which was hit hard in the early stages of the pandemic, saw revenue jump 49 percent from the same period a year ago.
Makena Kelly / The Verge:
At the State of the Union, Biden called for Congress to strengthen data privacy protections and antitrust enforcement to stop Big Tech from self-preferencing  —  President Joe Biden threw his support behind tougher rules regulating Silicon Valley during his Second State of the Union speech Tuesday night.
Suvashree Ghosh / Bloomberg:
Binance Asia-Pacific Head Leon Foong says a full audit will take “a longer time” as accountants are still learning about crypto, after Mazars pulled its report  —  Binance Holdings Ltd., operator of the world's largest digital-asset exchange, indicated a full audit of its assets …
Jack Schickler / CoinDesk:
The Bank of England issues two papers on a digital pound, seeming to favor a centralized database over a blockchain and limiting personal holdings to £10K-£20K  —  The Bank of England has set out technical features of its central bank digital currency, which officials have said is likely to be needed.
Pallabi Munsi / CNN:
How pro-military Telegram channels in Myanmar share hundreds of abusive sexual videos and images of women and dox them, often for their pro-democracy views  —  Editor's Note: This story is part of ‘Systems Error’, a series by CNN As Equals, investigating how your gender shapes your life online.
Politico:
UK PM Rishi Sunak creates the standalone Department of Science, Innovation & Technology, led by Michelle Donelan, stripping the DCMS of its digital oversight  —  LONDON — British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is creating a standalone science, innovation and technology department as part …

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:
SubQ Snap 1.1: the first long-context decision model for real enterprise work  —  Tied for #1 on the AA Decision Index, Snap is a multimodal model with a 384k-token context window for fast reasoning and agentic decisions.
Zoho:
The quiet power of email marketing to maximize impact for nonprofits  —  A life changed.  A problem solved.  A community strengthened.  A future made a little better than it was yesterday.For nonprofits, that's the metric.
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.
WebBrain:
WebBrain: an open-source AI agent for your browser  —  Read pages, fill forms and automate tasks in Chrome or Firefox.  Use local models or your preferred AI provider.  Get started free.

Featured Podcasts

Grit:
The Difference Between 1% Improvements and 10x Growth | Immad Akhund
Grit explores what it takes to create, build and scale world-class organizations.
Subscribe to Grit.
Lenny's Podcast:
How a 19-year-old intern built the growth engine behind this $2B AI company | Hector Serrano
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.
Big Technology Podcast:
Big Tech's Ugly Week, Getting Rich At Anthropic, AI Costs Plunge
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.
Machine Gods:
OpenAI's Latest Discoveries Spark a Backlash + Help! My Kid Hates AI
The official podcast of the singularity, from Casey Newton and Kevin Roose. Twice-weekly news, analysis, and interviews with the people who are building the future.
Subscribe to Machine Gods.
The Upstarts Podcast:
The Accidental YC Founder Solving AI's GPU Crisis | SF Compute's Evan Conrad
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.
Cheeky Pint:
Why Sam Altman is against a single superintelligence
Stripe cofounder John Collison interviews founders, builders, and leaders over a pint.
Subscribe to Cheeky Pint.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 1:30 PM ET, February 8, 2023.

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

Earlier Picks

Joanna Stern / Wall Street Journal:
Ashley Capoot / CNBC: