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.

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:
Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning  —  SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds.  Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.
Cape:
Most carriers track everything.  Cape doesn't.  —  Unlimited talk, text & data, 24-hr metadata deletion, network ID rotation, SIM-attack defense, and more.  Switch today and get 29% off for life.
Zoho:
Introducing Zoho Expense Integrated Travel solution : The Smarter Way to Manage Business Travel  —  Business travel has become increasingly complex.  Employees expect consumer-grade booking experiences …
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.

Featured Podcasts

Great Chat:
Tech's short-term era
A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.
Subscribe to Great Chat.
Access:
Meet the most AI-pilled CEO on Earth
A show about the tech industry's inside conversation, hosted by tech reporter Alex Heath and founder whisperer Ellis Hamburger.
Subscribe to Access.
The Upstarts Podcast:
Basis's Matt Harpe: Why AI Won't Replace Accountants — It'll Make Them Richer
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.
Channels with Peter Kafka:
Lucas Shaw on Warner Bros' Limbo, Netflix's Anxiety, and Hollywood's Sort-of Comeback
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.
Big Technology Podcast:
How China Caught U.S. AI — With Grace Shao
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.
Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith:
Connecting the Unconnected: Doreen Bogdan-Martin
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.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 9:00 AM ET, February 7, 2024.

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

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