Techmeme
November 29, 2023, 8:35 PM

Top News

Lora Kolodny / CNBC:
Elon Musk dismisses fear of advertisers leaving X after his controversial posts: “If somebody's gonna try to blackmail me with advertising ... go fuck yourself”  —  - In recent weeks, Musk has promoted and sometimes verbally endorsed what the White House called “antisemitic and racist hate” …
Jacob Kastrenakes / The Verge:
Elon Musk calls a Nov. 15 X post of his a mistake that “handed a loaded gun to those who hate me and arguably to those who are antisemitic” for which he's sorry  —  I should in retrospect not have replied to that one person and should have written in greater length what i meant.
Lawrence Abrams / BleepingComputer:
The US sanctions Sinbad, a crypto mixer allegedly used by the North Korean Lazarus hacking group, and the US, the Netherlands, and Poland seize the service  —  The U.S. Department of the Treasury has sanctioned the Sinbad cryptocurrency mixing service for its use as a money-laundering tool by the North Korean Lazarus hacking group.
Alex Ivanovs / Stack Diary:
Researchers develop a “divergence attack” that makes ChatGPT emit sequences copied from its training data, by prompting the LLM to repeat a word numerous times  —  Large language models, like ChatGPT, are trained on vast amounts of text data from books, websites, and other sources.
Alex Heath / The Verge:
OpenAI adds Microsoft as a non-voting observer on the nonprofit board that controls OpenAI, as Sam Altman's return as CEO is made official  —  Sam Altman is officially OpenAI's CEO again.  —  Just before Thanksgiving, the company said it had reached a deal in principle for him to return, and now it's done.
Todd Spangler / Variety:
Netflix plans to add Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy to its mobile app, the App Store, and Google Play on December 14, available to its users at no extra charge  —  The three classic titles in “Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition" will be available Dec. 14 for Netflix customers …
Mike Seymour / fxguide:
Unity plans to cut 265 jobs, or 3.8% of its workforce, and end its services deal with VFX company Wētā FX to focus on its core business in a “company reset”  —  UPDATE: Scroll down for a statement from WētāFX:  —  Reuters is reporting that Unity Software …
CBC News:
Google and Canada reach an agreement in their dispute over the country's Online News Act; Google plans to pay news companies around CA$100M per year, or ~$74M  —  Agreement comes 3 weeks before Online News Act rules come into force  —  Google and the federal government have reached …
Michael Peel / Financial Times:
Google DeepMind uses GNoME to find 2.2M crystal structures, over 45x more than all such substances ever found, and plans to make 381K available to scientists  —  Work shows power of AI to improve real-world technology in fields from renewable energy to advanced computation
Ann-Marie Alcántara / Wall Street Journal:
Spotify launches Spotify Wrapped 2023, adding a Me in 2023 feature that assigns users one of 12 themes to describe their listening habits, on mobile and desktop  —  The listening recap, available Wednesday, takes over social media every year  —  It's the time of year many people have been anxiously awaiting: Spotify Wrapped season.
Steven J. Horowitz / Variety:
Wayne Ma / The Information:
Sources: Apple licenses Arm's IP at less than 30 cents per device, the lowest rate among Arm's smartphone chip clients; Apple makes up under 5% of Arm's sales  —  In 2017, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son gathered a group of executives from Arm Holdings, the British chip designer SoftBank had just bought …
Ben Weiss / Fortune:
Wormhole, a Jump Crypto messaging protocol that lets developers communicate across blockchains, raised $225M at a $2.5B valuation, 2023's largest crypto raise  —  In a parched fundraising landscape, the team behind Wormhole, the messaging protocol that lets developers communicate across different blockchains …
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Amazon debuts Titan Image Generator, an AI model that creates images from text and adds an invisible watermark by default, in preview for AWS clients on Bedrock  —  Amazon is releasing an image generator — joining the ranks of the many, many other tech giants and startups that have already done so.
Jason Koebler / 404 Media:
Plex users express alarm after getting a “Week in Review” email that showed what they and their friends watched, part of Plex's opt-out Discover Together tool  —  “I can see that one of my friends is apparently watching a ton of cheesy, soft porn stuff,” a user said of Plex's Week …
Variety:
Robert De Niro blasts Apple and the Gotham Awards, after sources say Apple edited his prepared speech that slammed Trump; he read his original speech on a phone  —  The “Killers of the Flower Moon” actor was gearing up to slam Donald Trump at Monday's Gotham Awards, but when he took the stage …
Olga Kharif / Bloomberg:
SoFi tells its crypto customers to liquidate their accounts or move holdings to Blockchain.com by December 19, as it exits crypto due to regulatory scrutiny  —  - Customers have to move by Dec. 19 or liquidate their coins … The San Francisco-based company told crypto customers Wednesday …
Jay Peters / The Verge:
Intuit Mailchimp plans to shut down TinyLetter on February 29, 2024, to focus on its core Mailchimp marketing product; Mailchimp acquired TinyLetter in 2011  —  Mailchimp is shutting TinyLetter, a service that I loved that let individuals easily write and publish simple but nice-looking email newsletters.
Susan Heavey / Reuters:
The Senate Judiciary Committee says the CEOs of Meta, X, TikTok, Snap, and Discord plan to testify on online child sexual exploitation at a January 31 hearing  —  The chief executives of social media companies Meta (META.O), X, TikTok, Snap (SNAP.N) and Discord will testify …
Bloomberg:
Sources: London-based AI startup Stability AI held early-stage talks with several companies about a sale, as executives face investor pressure over its finances  —  - Move follows letter from investor Coatue calling for changes  — Coatue concerned about Stability AI's financial position
Eric Newcomer / Newcomer:
Together AI, which helps pre-train and fine-tune open-source foundation models more efficiently, raised a $102.5M Series A led by Kleiner Perkins  —  I spoke with Together AI CEO Vipul Ved Prakash  —  Together AI, a startup that's helping companies pre-train and fine-tune open source foundation models …

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More News

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Earlier Picks

Financial Times:
Graham Starr / Bloomberg: