Techmeme
March 21, 2024, 5:05 PM

Top News

Wall Street Journal:
The US DOJ sues Apple, alleging the company blocked its competitors from accessing iPhone features, made switching to non-Apple devices more difficult, and more  —  Justice Department says iPhone maker leveraged its dominance to block software and limit functionality of competing devices
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Jason Snell / Six Colors:
Joe Rossignol / MacRumors:
Apple says the US DOJ winning its lawsuit “would set a dangerous precedent, empowering government to take a heavy hand in designing people's technology”  —  The U.S. Department of Justice today filed an antitrust lawsuit against Apple, accusing the company of operating …
Matt Rosoff / TechCrunch:
The DOJ's Apple suit has a lot of parallels to its Microsoft suit in the 1990s, but Apple's monopoly position is not nearly as clear-cut as Microsoft's was  —  The U.S. Department of Justice plus attorneys general from 16 states and the District of Columbia sued Apple for antitrust this morning in federal court.
Bloomberg:
Reddit closes up 48%, at $50.44 per share, in its New York Stock Exchange debut, valuing the company at about $9.5B on a fully diluted basis  —  - Social media company, holders raised $748 Million in IPO … The San Francisco-based company's stock closed at $50.44 each on Thursday in New York …
Kevin Roose / New York Times:
Paul Graham / Y Combinator:
Emma Roth / The Verge:
Meta rolls out Threads fediverse integration beta in the US, Canada, and Japan, letting users cross-post and view likes from federated platforms like Mastodon  —  Threads is rolling out a beta of its fediverse integration in the US, Canada, and Japan.  In a post on Thursday …
Samuel Stolton / Bloomberg:
Sources: the EU plans to announce investigations into Apple's and Google's DMA compliance in the coming days; Meta's subscriptions could also face scrutiny  —  - Meta also expected to face scrutiny in EU's Big Tech clampdown  — Digital Markets Act investigations could pave way for fines
The Information:
Source: Microsoft agreed to pay Inflection ~$650M when hiring its staff, mostly via a licensing deal that makes Inflection's models available for sale on Azure  —  Microsoft doesn't want its plan to hire two of Inflection AI's co-founders and most of its 70-person staff to be seen as an acquisition.
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Microsoft unveils the Surface Laptop 6 and Surface Pro 10 for enterprises, adding a Copilot key, a Neural Processing Unit for Windows 11's AI features, and more  —  Microsoft is gearing up for its “year of the AI PC” with two new Surface devices that won't be sold directly to consumers.
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch:
The Browser Company, which makes the Arc browser, raised $50M led by Pace Capital at a $550M valuation, bringing its total funding to $128M  —  The Browser Company, which makes the Arc browser, has raised $50 million in a round led by Pace Capital at a $550 million valuation, TechCrunch has learned exclusively.
Sidhartha Shukla / Bloomberg:
In a letter to Judge Kaplan, FTX CEO John Ray says SBF's claims of “zero” harm to users are “demonstrably false” and FTX had only 105 bitcoin when Ray took over  —  - Ray called the claims ‘callously’ and ‘demonstrably’ false  — SBF had claimed customers on the exchange suffered no harm
Financial Times:
Chinese state media: Tim Cook said “there's no supply chain in the world that's more critical to us than China” and praised “modernization in Chinese factories”  —  Apple chief Tim Cook has said China is “critical” to its business in comments made during a visit to the country …
Kate Knibbs / Wired:
Fairly Trained certifies KL3M, an LLM legal tech consultancy startup 273 Ventures claims to have built without the permissionless use of copyrighted materials  —  OpenAI claimed it's “impossible” to build good AI models without using copyrighted data.  An “ethically created” …
Yossi Matias / The Keyword:
In a research paper, Google Research details how AI helped to provide more accurate flood forecasting in 80+ countries up to seven days in advance of the flood  —  A paper published in Nature today shows how Google Research uses AI to accurately predict riverine flooding and help protect livelihoods …
Anna Tong / Reuters:
Tokyo-based Sakana AI, founded by two ex-Google researchers, releases three Japanese language models built using “model merging”, which combines existing models  —  Sakana AI, a Tokyo-based artificial intelligence startup founded by two prominent former Google (GOOGL.O) researchers …
Ashley Gold / Axios:
After a classified briefing on TikTok, Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell says that “the next steps might be something more public, like a hearing”  —  - But Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has not committed to putting the bill on the floor anytime soon.
Zephyr Teachout / The Atlantic:

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More News

Ashley Carman / Bloomberg:
Abner Li / 9to5Google:

Earlier Picks

Reuters:
David Gilbert / Wired:
Krisztian Sandor / CoinDesk:
Bloomberg:
Emily Mullin / Wired: