Techmeme
July 25, 2024, 11:55 AM

Top News

Samantha Cole / 404 Media:
Source and doc: Runway scraped thousands of videos from YouTube creators and brands, including Disney and VICE News, to train its Gen-3 AI video generation tool  —  A leaked internal document shows Runway's celebrated Gen-3 AI video generator collected thousands of YouTube videos and pirated movies for training data.
Bloomberg:
Google DeepMind rolls out AlphaProof AI model, which specializes in math reasoning, and AlphaGeometry 2, an updated version of a model focused on geometry  —  AI models, trained on text, have historically struggled with math reasoning  —  Google DeepMind, Alphabet Inc.'s artificial …
Zac Bowden / Windows Central:
Microsoft unveils Bing generative search, which shows LLM-generated answers with the sources used to create them, currently available to a small subset of users  —  Bing will soon prioritize AI-generated answers alongside traditional search results.  —  When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.
Financial Times:
Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Land:
Microsoft says “Bing stopped crawling Reddit” after Reddit updated its robots.txt file on July 1 to prohibit “all crawling of their site”  —  Reddit has updated its robots.txt file, preventing Bing and many other search engines from crawling the site.
Emanuel Maiberg / 404 Media:
Akila Quinio / Financial Times:
Revolut secures a UK banking license, ending a more-than-three-year-long regulatory battle; the London-based fintech has ~9M UK customers and 45M+ globally  —  London-based fintech receives approval from regulators in boost to expansion plans  —  Revolut has secured a UK banking licence …
Olivia Carville / Bloomberg:
Meta removes ~63K Instagram accounts used by sextortion scammers in Nigeria, along with ~7,200 Facebook accounts, Pages, and Groups linked to the Yahoo Boys  —  - Purge includes thousands of Groups offering sextortion ‘tips’  — One network of 20 criminals was running 2,500 fake accounts
Nick Robins-Early / The Guardian:
Insurer Parametrix estimates that the global outage sparked by CrowdStrike's faulty update will cost US Fortune 500 companies, excluding Microsoft, $5.4B  —  Banking and healthcare firms, major airlines expected to suffer most losses, according to insurer Parametrix
Josh Eidelson / Bloomberg:
Around 500 World of Warcraft workers vote to unionize with the CWA, bringing the number of unionized US gaming employees at Microsoft to around 1,750  —  World of Warcraft workers have voted to unionize the popular video-game franchise, expanding organized labor's new foothold at Microsoft Corp. by around 500 employees.
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch:
After investigating how Meta handles explicit AI-generated images, the Oversight Board asks Meta to shift “derogatory” terminology to “non-consensual”, and more  —  Following investigations into how Meta handles AI-generated explicit images, the company's semi-independent observer body …
Paul Alcorn / Tom's Hardware:
AMD delays its Zen 5 Ryzen 9000 launch, originally set for July, to August due to an unspecified quality issue, and pulls back all shipped units to replace them  —  AMD hits the brakes on its Zen 5-powered Ryzen 9000 processors.  —  AMD announced today that it has delayed its Zen 5 Ryzen 9000 launch due …
Todd Spangler / Variety:
The new Disney+, Hulu, and Max streaming bundle goes on sale in the US for $16.99 per month with ads and $29.99 per month without ads  —  Dragons, Jedis, Marvel and DC superheroes, Harry Potter, Disney princesses — and more from Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery — are now available to stream for a reduced monthly price.
Dana Hull / Bloomberg:
Elon Musk's X poll asking whether Tesla should invest $5B in xAI ends with 67.9% voting yes, after Musk said on Tesla's earnings call that he supported the idea  —  - CEO takes poll on whether EV maker should back his startup  — The two companies have intermingled on procurement, recruiting
Romain Dillet / TechCrunch:
Privacy-focused developer Proton debuts a self-custody bitcoin wallet, its first cryptocurrency product, initially for early access Proton Visionary subscribers  —  When you think about it, Proton has always been a crypto company — cryptography, not cryptocurrency.
Sara Fischer / Axios:
A group of 17 US lawmakers ask Meta to delay shutting down CrowdTangle for at least six months, saying that Meta Content Library has “significant limitations”  —  A group of bipartisan lawmakers on Wednesday sent Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg a letter asking the firm to delay shutting down CrowdTangle for six months.
Justine Calma / The Verge:
A NASA-funded study of satellite data finds traffic-related N02 pollution spiked ~20% near ~150K large US warehouses, which have proliferated due to e-commerce  —  The data is in, and it shows a significant rise in air pollution where e-retailers build their warehouses …
Victoria Song / The Verge:
Samsung Galaxy Ring review: great hardware, long battery life, and requires no subscription, but it's Android only and health tracking accuracy is a mixed bag  —  It's not so much a standalone health tracker or a smartwatch alternative as an accessory for your Galaxy Watch.
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Crunchbase: in H1 2024, generative AI startups raised $500M across 198 angel/seed deals, $8.7B across 39 early-stage deals, and $3.1B across 18 late-stage deals  —  Investments in generative AI startups — those that are creating AI-powered products to generate text, audio, video and more — aren't slowing down.
Chance Miller / 9to5Mac:
Apple launches Apple Maps on the web in beta, available in English and compatible with Safari and Chrome on Mac and iPad, and Chrome and Edge on Windows PCs  —  Apple is bringing Apple Maps to the web for the first time.  In a press release today, the company announced that you can now access Apple Maps …

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