Techmeme
February 14, 2024, 2:00 PM

Top News

Alex Heath / The Verge:
In a video, Mark Zuckerberg shares his thoughts on the Vision Pro, saying Quest 3 “is the better product, period”, highlighting Apple's tradeoffs, and more  —  Now that it can be strapped to our faces and worn in strange places, opinions about Apple's Vision Pro are flying left and right.
More: The Independent, MobileSyrup, Deadline, Dexerto, Sandhill Report, Silicon UK, CNBC, Raleigh News & Observer, New York Post, TechRadar, Wait But Why, Marques Brownlee on YouTube, Cult of Mac, BeInCrypto, MIXED Reality News, Gizchina, Android Headlines, Wccftech, Business Insider, and UploadVR
M.G. Siegler / Spyglass:
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Microsoft and OpenAI say hackers, including Russian, North Korean, Iranian, and Chinese-backed groups, are already using LLMs to refine and improve cyberattacks  —  Microsoft and OpenAI are revealing today that hackers are already using large language models like ChatGPT to refine and improve their existing cyberattacks.
Bloomberg:
Sony reports Q3 revenue up 22% YoY to ~$25.11B, operating income up 10% YoY to ~$3.1B, both meeting est., and 8.2M PS5 units sold, roughly 1M lower than est.  —  - Company reversing course after taking the unit private in 2020  — Underwhelming PlayStation 5 sales led to outlook cut
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: Bart Andre, Apple's longest-serving senior industrial designer, told colleagues in February that he's retiring; Andre joined in 1992 alongside Jony Ive  —  - Bart Andre retiring after three decades on design team  — Departure marks near-complete turnover of group since Ive era
Thomas Germain / Gizmodo:
A Mozilla study of 11 AI romance chatbots finds that they harvest shockingly personal information, and that 10 of them may sell or share the data they collect  —  The privacy mess is troubling because the chatbots actively encourage you to share details that are far more personal than in a typical app.
Emma Roth / The Verge:
Slack rolls out AI features that summarize threads, offer channel recaps, let users ask questions, and more to Enterprise users, after testing Slack AI in 2023  —  Slack is launching a suite of built-in AI features that serve up summaries of threads and channel recaps, while also allowing …
Harish Jonnalagadda / Windows Central:
Nvidia Chat with RTX hands-on: 35GB installer, Mistral 7B and Llama 2 are 70GB, great at summarizing details and targeted questions, but no follow-up questions  —  NVIDIA's AI chatbot runs locally on your PC, and it works with the data you provide.  —  NVIDIA does a lot of interesting things around AI …
Sean Michael Kerner / VentureBeat:
Stability AI details Stable Cascade, a new image generation model built on an architecture different to SDXL to improve performance and accuracy, now in preview  —  Stability AI, the company behind the popular Stable Diffusion text-to-image generative AI technology is now previewing a new image generation model called Stable Cascade.
Aamir Siddiqui / Android Authority:
Samsung announces an upcoming Galaxy S24 series update that adds a Vividness display slider, after users complained that the more natural color tuning is dull  —  - Samsung has announced that the upcoming February update for the Galaxy S24 series will improve its display and camera experiences.
Aggi Cantrill / Bloomberg:
Google's TAG details how pro-Palestinian hacking group Blackatom tried to dupe Israeli software engineers into downloading malware weeks ahead of October 7  —  Apple's Longest-Serving Designer to Depart Company, Adding to Exodus  —  Apple iMessage, Microsoft Bing Dodge EU's Big Tech Crackdown
Wes Davis / The Verge:
DuckDuckGo adds a Sync & Backup tool to its browser that syncs passwords, bookmarks, and favorites without requiring an account, and says the data is E2EE  —  DuckDuckGo has added a new “Sync & Backup” feature to its privacy-first browser that will keep passwords, bookmarks …
Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat:
In a research paper, Apple researchers detail Keyframer, an AI animation prototyping tool that uses LLMs to animate static images via natural language prompts  —  Apple researchers have unveiled a new AI tool called “Keyframer,” which harnesses the power of large language models (LLMs) …
The Information:
AI researcher Andrej Karpathy, one of OpenAI's founding members, leaves the startup; Karpathy was developing a product that he had described as an AI assistant  —  Andrej Karpathy, one of the founding members of OpenAI, has left the company, a spokesperson confirmed.
Paayal Zaveri / Bloomberg:
Y Combinator releases a new list of 20 types of startups the accelerator wants to join its program, the biggest overhaul of its Request for Startups since 2018  —  The prominent Silicon Valley startup accelerator overhauled its list of promising startup sectors.
Alistair Barr / Business Insider:
A typo in Lyft's Q4 release mistakenly forecast a 500 BPS of EBITDA margin improvement for 2024, causing a stock surge, before the error was corrected to 50 BPS  —  - Lyft mistakenly forecast 500 basis points of margin improvement for 2024, causing a stock surge.
Antonia Mufarech / Bloomberg:
Bloomberg:
Google partners with the Environmental Defense Fund to help track and attribute methane emissions observed by the MethaneSAT satellite set to launch in March  —  The tech company will work with the Environmental Defense Fund to track some of the world's most devastating and avoidable emissions observed by the nonprofit's satellite.
Lauren Kaori Gurley / Washington Post:
Uber and Lyft drivers in at least 17 US cities, including Los Angeles and Chicago, hold a one-day strike over pay; UK-based food app couriers are also on strike  —  Thousands of drivers for ride-share platforms Uber and Lyft, as well as the food delivery service DoorDash are expected to strike on Wednesday …

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Hayden Field / CNBC:
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