Techmeme
February 7, 2024, 9:00 AM

Top News

Emilia David / The Verge:
OpenAI says DALL-E 3 will embed watermarks to images with C2PA metadata and acknowledges the metadata can easily be removed either accidentally or intentionally  —  OpenAI's image generator DALL-E 3 will add watermarks to image metadata as more companies roll out support for standards …
Mike Isaac / New York Times:
Jane Zhang / Bloomberg:
Alibaba reports Q3 revenue up 5% YoY to ~$36.7B, net income down to ~$2B, Taobao and Tmall revenue up 2% YoY to ~$18B, and a $25B share buyback; BABA drops ~5%  —  - The move may appeal to some investors as growth slows  — Alibaba is grappling with market and internal uncertainty
Matt Burgess / Wired:
A look at Meta's plan to build interoperability into WhatsApp and Messenger under the DMA; Meta plans to make third-party chats opt-in and in a separate inbox  —  New EU rules mean WhatsApp and Messenger must be interoperable with other chat apps.  Here's how that will work.
CNN:
New Hampshire's AG says fake robocalls using deepfaked audio of Biden to discourage voters numbered 5K to 25K and are linked to Lingo Telecom and a Texas firm  —  A robocall that used an AI voice resembling President Joe Biden's to advise New Hampshire voters against voting …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Mozilla announces Monitor Plus, a $14/month US service that scans 190+ data broker sites and automatically submits requests for removal of the user's data  —  Mozilla today is introducing a new subscription service that will help people locate and remove their personal and sensitive information from data broker websites around the web.
Nelson Wang / Unchained:
MicroStrategy bought 31,775 bitcoin in Q4 2023 for an average cost of $39,411, taking its total holdings to 190K bitcoin acquired for a total cost of $5.93B  —  Software firm MicroStrategy, the largest corporate holder of bitcoin, acquired 31,755 bitcoins in the fourth quarter of 2023 …
Camilla Hodgson / Financial Times:
Uber reports Q4 revenue up 15% YoY to $9.9B, Gross Bookings up 22% YoY to $37.6B, a $1.9B net income, 150M MAUs, and first full-year operating profit of $1.1B  —  Ride-hailing app beats forecasts and boasts of ‘inflection point’  —  Uber has reported its first full year of operating profits …
Ron Miller / TechCrunch:
Apple releases a beta version of visionOS 1.1, which brings enterprise device management to the Vision Pro  —  It's been hard to avoid news about the Apple Vision Pro, the company's entry into the virtual reality market, in recent days.  It was officially released on Friday to much fanfare, but how will it fare in the enterprise?
Wall Street Journal:
Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat:
Smaug-72B, a Qwen-72B-based open-source LLM released by Abacus AI, tops the Hugging Face Open LLM leaderboard and outperforms GPT-3.5 on several benchmarks  —  A new open-source language model has claimed the throne of the best in the world, according to the latest rankings from Hugging Face …
Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat:
Apple partners with University of California researchers to release open-source AI model MGIE, which can edit images based on natural language instructions  —  Apple has released a new open-source AI model, called “MGIE,” that can edit images based on natural language instructions.
Reuters:
The Netherlands says Chinese state-sponsored hackers broke into the Dutch Ministry of Defence's internal network in 2023, using a Fortinet vulnerability  —  Chinese state-backed cyber spies gained access to a Dutch military network last year, Dutch intelligence agencies said on Tuesday …
Foo Yun Chee / Reuters:
Trade group CISPE, representing Amazon and 26 EU cloud providers, is working with Microsoft to try to resolve EU antitrust concerns over Microsoft's licensing  —  Microsoft (MSFT.O) is in talks with CISPE in an attempt to resolve its European Union antitrust complaint about the U.S. software …
More: Bloomberg
AJ Vicens / CyberScoop:
Google's TAG publishes a report on commercial spyware, detailing ~40 vendors, and says global governments should take more aggressive steps to combat spyware  —  The commercial spyware industry continues to supply highly advanced surveillance capabilities despite efforts to better regulate it.
Antoaneta Roussi / Politico:
Kaitlyn Tiffany / The Atlantic:
Inside Zuzalu, a co-living experiment organized by Vitalik Buterin in Montenegro in 2023, as the techno-utopian “Network State” concept inspires more projects  —  Silicon Valley has always dreamed of building its own utopias.  Who's ready to move in?  —  I.

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Earlier Picks

Jonathan Vanian / CNBC:
Abner Li / 9to5Google:
Will Oremus / Washington Post: