Techmeme
February 7, 2024, 11:20 AM

Top News

Wayne Ma / The Information:
Source: Apple is building prototypes of at least two iPhones that fold widthwise; the phones are in early development and not set for production in 2024 or 2025  —  Apple is building prototypes of at least two iPhones that fold widthwise like a clamshell, according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation.
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:
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.
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 plateaus  — Alibaba is grappling with market and internal uncertainty
Charles Pulliam-Moore / The Verge:
Disney+ begins emailing subscribers about new changes to its TOS that will make sharing accounts harder, days after Hulu sent out similar notices  —  Today, Disney Plus began sending out emails informing subscribers about new changes to its terms of service that will, among other things …
Charlie Sorrel / iFixit News:
Apple Vision Pro and battery teardown: 50 Vision Pro pixels fit into a single iPhone 15 Pro pixel, not technically 4K, a roughly 100° field of view, and more  —  After the whirlwind of team activity that was our initial Vision Pro teardown, we've been digging much, much deeper into those dual displays …
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 …
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 …
Financial Times:
A German court sides with US-based R2 Semiconductor over Intel in a patent infringement suit; a source says the ruling could lead to a ban on HP and Dell sales  —  US chipmaker plans to appeal against decision that could lead to ban on sale of certain HP and Dell products
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.
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 …
Wall Street Journal:
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.

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Jonathan Vanian / CNBC:
Reuters:
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Abner Li / 9to5Google: