Techmeme
August 21, 2023, 3:25 PM

Top News

Ronan Farrow / New Yorker:
Interviews with 30+ of Elon Musk's colleagues and dozens of others detail his growing power, childhood, career, politics, role in Russia's Ukraine war, and more  —  How the U.S. government came to rely on the tech billionaire—and is now struggling to rein him in.
Miles Kruppa / Wall Street Journal:
YouTube and Universal Music Group partner to explore new products, using music in AI tools, and paying artists whose work is used to make AI-generated content  —  YouTube has recruited Frank Sinatra's estate and other Universal Music Group UMG .39%increase; green up pointing triangle acts …
Dana Hull / Bloomberg:
Maine's attorney general says Tesla's May 2023 data breach impacted 75,735 people, included employee-related records, and was a result of “insider wrongdoing”  —  - Data breach included employee-related records, Maine AG says  — Tesla says two former employees shared info with Handelsblatt
Shaurya Malwa / CoinDesk:
Friend.tech, which lets people use crypto to buy “shares” of X accounts, hits 100K users, per a database of wallet addresses that has raised privacy concerns  —  The growth correlates with the more than $25 million in revenue generated by the platform since its Aug. 10 launch.
Vishal Chawla / The Block:
NFT platform Recur plans to shut down by November 16, 2023, after raising a $50M Series A in September 2021, and migrate the metadata of minted NFTs to the IPFS  —  - NFT platform Recur has decided to close less than two years after raising $50 million in a Series A funding round.
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Meta plans to launch a web version of Threads early this week, addressing a longstanding wish list item; Adam Mosseri confirmed testing the web app  —  Meta Platforms plans to launch a web version of microblogging app Threads early this week, the biggest new feature to be introduced …
AI Snake Oil:
An August 17 paper on ChatGPT's political biases seems to have many flaws, like poor prompts and testing an older model, but the broader topic merits research  —  A new paper making this claim has many flaws.  But the question merits research.  —  Previous research has shown …

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Elon Musk on Space GPUs, AI, Optimus, and his manufacturing method
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Earlier Picks

New York Times:
Dayana Mustak / Bloomberg: