Techmeme
March 12, 2024, 4:55 PM

Top News

Chance Miller / 9to5Mac:
Apple unveils App Store updates for the EU, including letting qualifying developers offer apps on their websites via a Web Distribution tool from spring 2024  —  Last week, Apple released iOS 17.4 with big changes to the iPhone and App Store ecosystem to comply with the Digital Markets Act in the European Union.
Sean O'Kane / TechCrunch:
Self-driving startup Applied Intuition raised a $250M Series E led by Lux, Elad Gil, and Porsche at a $6B valuation and works with “18 of the top 20 automakers”  —  Autonomous vehicle software company Applied Intuition has raised $250 million in a round that values the startup at $6 billion …
Washington Post:
Sources: in summer 2023, Donald Trump asked Elon Musk if he wanted to buy Truth Social; Trump's advisers say the pair have talked about politics and business  —  The idea went nowhere, but the former president and the billionaire X owner have continued to communicate more than was previously known
Ashlee Vance / Bloomberg:
Cognition AI, which offers a Copilot-like coding assistant that, the startup says, can finish whole projects, raised $21M from Founders Fund, Elad Gil, and more  —  A new startup called Cognition AI can turn a user's prompt into a website or video game.  —  A new installment of Silicon Valley's …
Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch:
Google confirms rolling out restrictions to limit Gemini surfacing answers on election queries globally; the update is live in the US and rolling out in India  —  If you want to ask Google's AI chatbot a question about an upcoming election, you will have to do it from a country where there are no elections taking place.
Charlotte Trueman / DatacenterDynamics:
Meta details its two new data center scale clusters, both containing 24,576 Nvidia H100 GPUs that the company is using for AI workloads like training Llama 3  —  Have been built to support AI research and development  —  Meta has shared the details of the hardware, network, storage, design …
More: Engineering at MetaThreads: @stshankLinkedIn: Yann LeCun, Mathew Oldham, Adi Gangidi, and Soumith ChintalaForums: Hacker News
Financial Times:
Docs: Nigeria, which has held two Binance execs since February amid a crypto exchange crackdown, is pushing Binance for info on its top 100 local users and more  —  Authorities hold senior company executives for two weeks after crackdown on cryptocurrency websites
Alexandra Alper / Reuters:
Sources: Intel's Trump-era license to sell advanced laptop CPUs to Huawei remains, despite AMD's pressure on Biden; source: AMD sought a similar license in 2021  —  Intel has survived an effort to halt hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of chip sales to Huawei, two people familiar with the matter said …
The SP Android:
Analysis: TikTok's app code shows a separate TikTok Photos app, a potential Instagram rival that syncs with the main app and may debut “soon” on iOS and Android  —  Tiktok has dominated the short form video market from a long time and other platform like Instagram and YouTube copied …
Hannah Murphy / Financial Times:
An interview with Pavel Durov on running Telegram, which has ~50 full-time staff, its Dubai HQ, reaching 1B MAUs in 12-14 months, Russia, moderation, and more  —  As the messaging platform gears up for a potential stock market flotation, it is under pressure to curtail use by criminals
Andrew Marantz / New Yorker:
A profile of several AI “doomers”, including AI Impacts researcher Katja Grace, and “effective accelerationists”, as both make arguments about the future of AI  —  Some people think machine intelligence will transform humanity for the better.  Others fear it may destroy us.
Abner Li / 9to5Google:
Google, Apple, Mozilla, and Microsoft launch Speedometer 3.0, a benchmark to “create a shared understanding of web performance”; Speedometer 2.0 debuted in 2018  —  Speedometer has long been Google's preferred benchmark, previously noting how it's the “most reflective of the real world” …
Pew Research Center:
A survey of US teens: 38% say they spend too much time on their phone, vs. 27% for too much social media; girls are more likely to report too much time on both  —  Most teens at least sometimes feel happy and peaceful when they don't have their phone, but 44% say this makes them anxious.

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Featured Podcasts

The Upstarts Podcast:
Runway's Cris Valenzuela: Building The Hollywood-Friendly Video AI That OpenAI Couldn't
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Hard Fork:
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The Talk Show With John Gruber:
'Food and Beverage Director', With MG Siegler
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What happens when AI runs a store
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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.
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Earlier Picks

Matt Burgess / Wired:
Isaac Taylor / Wall Street Journal:
Foo Yun Chee / Reuters: