Techmeme
June 5, 2024, 9:15 AM

Top News

Shakeel Hashim / Transformer:
Former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner says he was fired in April 2024 for sharing a memo with the board over concerns about OpenAI's security practices  —  Leopold Aschenbrenner also said he was interrogated about his team's “loyalty to the company”
Kevin Roose / New York Times:
Current and former OpenAI and Google DeepMind staff sign an open letter warning of a culture of recklessness and secrecy at “frontier AI companies”  —  Daniel Kokotajlo, a former researcher in OpenAI's governance division, is an organizer of a group of former and current employees …
Will Shanklin / Engadget:
Twitch says its Twitch Tier 1 subscriptions in the US will increase from $4.99 to $5.99 per month on July 11, the first price rise for US subscribers  —  Monthly Tier 1 memberships will go up by $1 in July.  —  Twitch is joining Spotify, Max, Peacock, Crunchyroll, EA and other content services …
Simon Sharwood / The Register:
Australia's eSafety commissioner ends the legal action asking X to remove a video of a clergyman's stabbing; Musk labelled the action an assault on free speech  —  Australia's eSafety commissioner has ended legal action that aimed to compel social network X to take down a video depicting …
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Joe Benarroch, X's head of business operations and one of Linda Yaccarino's closest advisers, is leaving; his style rubbed colleagues the wrong way  —  X Corp. Chief Executive Linda Yaccarino's right-hand man and head of business operations, Joe Benarroch, is leaving the company, according to people familiar with the matter.
Joanna Stern / Wall Street Journal:
Apple plans to fix another Screen Time bug that let kids visit X-rated websites; two researchers say they reported the bug to Apple in March and August 2021  —  Apple's Screen Time continues to be marred by bugs that let its youngest users circumvent parental controls
Joseph Cox / Wired:
An excerpt from the book Dark Wire, which details how the biggest FBI sting operation ran the Anøm encrypted phone network to catch criminals like “Microsoft”  —  When a drug kingpin named Microsoft tried to seize control of an encrypted phone company for criminals, he was playing right into its real owners' hands.
Paul Sawers / TechCrunch:
SAP plans to buy Tel Aviv-based WalkMe, which helps users navigate UIs of other software services, for $1.5B in cash; WalkMe raised $300M ahead of a 2021 IPO  —  Enterprise software giant SAP is acquiring “digital adoption” platform provider WalkMe in an all-cash transaction worth $1.5 billion.
Nduka Orjinmo / Bloomberg:
Sixteen Republican lawmakers accuse Nigeria of taking Binance executive Tigran Gambaryan “hostage” and urge Biden to help secure his release in a June 4 letter  —  US lawmakers accused Nigeria of taking a Binance Holdings Ltd. executive “hostage” and urged President Joe Biden to help secure his release.
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
Tobiko, which offers a dbt-compatible data transformation service to help teams manage data, raised a $4.5M seed and $17.3M Series A led by Theory Ventures  —  Data transformation startup Tobiko may not be a household name yet, but you may have seen co-founder and CEO Tyson Mao on …
More: SiliconANGLE and Tobiko
Samantha Murphy Kelly / CNN:
AT&T resolves an outage that preventing many customers from completing calls between carriers, but 911 calls still worked; Verizon users also reported issues  —  A nationwide AT&T outage is once again leaving some customers in the dark on Tuesday.  —  In a statement sent to CNN …
Gerrit De Vynck / Washington Post:
Pika, which offers AI tools to generate and edit videos, raised $80M from Spark, Lightspeed, and others at a $470M valuation, taking its total funding to $135M  —  Pika, a video-generation start-up that raised $80 million in its latest funding round, already has a publicly available product, as OpenAI and Google keep theirs under wraps
Alex Konrad / Forbes:
How billionaire investors of the internet era are fighting to determine whether AI's future will be one of concentrated safety or unfettered advancement  —  Billionaire investors of the internet era are now locked in a war of words and influence to determine whether AI's future …
Olivia Solon / Bloomberg:
How Uganda's government under President Yoweri Museveni has increasingly used the country's biometric identity system to target opponents and consolidate power  —  The East African country's identity card system has become integral to banking, voting — and targeting critics
Cagan Koc / Bloomberg:
ASML CFO Roger Dassen says TSMC, Intel, and Samsung will all get its €350M high-NA EUV machines by the end of 2024; the machines can print 8nm lines on chips  —  - TSMC has previously said ASML's new machine is too expensive  — Intel has already received its first high-NA EUV machine
More: The Elec

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.
Cloudflare:
Cloudflare Connect 2026: The Agentic Conference  —  Stop preparing for agents.  Start running them.  100+ sessions, workshops, and speakers from OpenAI, Arm, and Cloudflare across AI, security, and performance.
Zoho:
The 90-day recognition cliff: Why praise programs fade, and what keeps them alive  —  Recognition programs often start with enthusiasm.  Employees participate, managers share shoutouts, and teams have a new way to celebrate achievements.
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

Big Technology Podcast:
SAP CEO: AI Won't Kill Software, But It Will Change Your Job — With Christian Klein
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.
Channels with Peter Kafka:
David Ellison's Paramount-Warner Empire & The Fight That Comes Next
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.
Sources:
Factory CEO on why AGI is already here
Candid conversations with the leaders shaping what's next in AI and the broader tech industry. Hosted by Alex Heath, who has covered Silicon Valley for more than a decade.
Subscribe to Sources.
Invest Like the Best:
Noah Shinn - Building Instinct: The Personal Agent
The leading destination to learn about business and investing. We do this by showcasing exceptional talent and ideas.
Subscribe to Invest Like the Best.
Lenny's Podcast:
The grief, loneliness, and burnout sweeping through the tech industry right now | Molly Graham
Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.
Subscribe to Lenny's Podcast.
Great Chat:
Doomers at Dreamforce
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.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 9:15 AM ET, June 5, 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

Saritha Rai / Bloomberg:
Emilia Terzon / ABC:
Mike Wheatley / SiliconANGLE:
MK Manoylov / The Block:
Emily Bary / MarketWatch:
Sourasis Bose / Reuters:

Earlier Picks

Zaheer Kachwala / Reuters:
David Heaney / UploadVR:
Jordan Novet / CNBC:
Emily Baker-White / Forbes: