Techmeme
August 6, 2024, 9:15 AM

Top News

Leah Nylen / Bloomberg:
US v. Google: a federal judge rules that Google illegally monopolized the search market, including through deals to be the default option on phones and browsers  —  Google's payments to make its search engine the default on smartphone web browsers violates US antitrust law, a federal judge ruled Monday …
More: Ars Technica, BBC, Platformer, Reuters, United States District Court for the District of Columbia, CNBC, 9to5Mac, The Mirror, Wired, Search Engine Roundtable, CNN, Politico, ITPro, TechCrunch, Tech.co, Washington Post, Yahoo Finance, WinBuzzer, Bizcommunity, One Man & His Blog, Bloomberg Law, Silicon Republic, GSMArena.com, The Stack, Proactive, iClarified, PaymentExpert.com, TipRanks Financial, B&T, News/Media Alliance, AdExchanger, WAtoday, The Information, The Week, Constellation Research, Reclaim The Net, SFist, SiliconANGLE, Investor's Business Daily, Cult of Mac, Patently Apple, The Register, GZERO, Hürriyet Daily News, W Media Research, Courthouse News Service, Computerworld, PCMag, Mashable, Adweek, and Philip Elmer‑DeWitt
Lauren Feiner / The Verge:
US v. Google: a judge says Google has a monopoly in “general search text advertising” and used exclusive agreements to raise prices without any competition  —  A federal judge ruled that Google violated US antitrust law by maintaining a monopoly in the search and advertising markets.
Jason Del Rey / Fortune:
Apple and Mozilla will take a big revenue hit if the Google search ruling is upheld; in 2021 to 2022, $510M of Mozilla's $593M revenue came from its Google deal  —  “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.”  —  With those words from United States District judge Amit Mehta …
Steve Lohr / New York Times:
Google losing its US antitrust case may have major ripple effects for Apple, Amazon, and Meta, just as Microsoft's loss in 2000 influenced the Google decision  —  Nearly a quarter-century after Microsoft lost a similar case, a judge's decision that Google abused a monopoly in internet search is likely to have major ripple effects.
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
John Schulman / @johnschulman2:
OpenAI co-founder John Schulman departs to join Anthropic and focus on AI alignment, and says “I'm not leaving due to lack of support for alignment research”  —  I shared the following note with my OpenAI colleagues today: I've made the difficult decision to leave OpenAI. This choice stems from my desire to deepen my focus on AI alignment, and to start a new chapter of my career where I can return to hands-on technical work. I've decided
The Information:
OpenAI President Greg Brockman says he's taking a sabbatical through the end of 2024; a source says OpenAI product leader Peter Deng, who joined in 2023, left  —  Greg Brockman, OpenAI's president and one of 11 cofounders of the artificial intelligence firm, is taking an extended leave of absence.
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Wes Davis / The Verge:
A look at some of Apple's pre-prompt instructions for Apple Intelligence, including “do not hallucinate” for a text generation feature  —  Apple's latest developer betas launched last week with a handful of the generative AI features that were announced at WWDC and are headed to your iPhones …
Cherlynn Low / Engadget:
New York Times:
In an email to staff, Linda Yaccarino says X will close its San Francisco office and move workers to San Jose offices and a new Palo Alto office shared with xAI  —  Elon Musk, X's owner, has clashed with California's leaders and has said the social media platform would move its headquarters to Texas.
Chris Welch / The Verge:
Google unveils the $100 Google TV Streamer, with better performance than Chromecast with Google TV, Thread and Matter support, and more, shipping September 24  —  Google isn't waiting for its upcoming hardware event to announce the Chromecast's successor.  Alongside the new, sleeker Nest Thermostat …
Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer:
Google releases patches for 46 Android security vulnerabilities, including a kernel zero-day the company says “may be under limited, targeted exploitation”  —  Android security updates this month patch 46 vulnerabilities, including a high-severity remote code execution (RCE) exploited in targeted attacks.
Anton Shilov / Tom's Hardware:
Samsung starts mass production of the world's thinnest LPDDR5X DRAM, claiming it is 9% thinner than most LPDDR5X and improves devices' heat resistance by 21.2%  —  The new package frees additional space.  —  Samsung has started mass production of the world's thinnest LPDDR5X DRAM packages featuring 12 GB and 16 GB capacities.
Samantha Cole / 404 Media:
Sources: Nvidia scraped sources like Netflix and YouTube to train an unreleased foundational model; concerned staff were told they had full clearance to do so  —  Nvidia scraped videos from Youtube and several other sources to compile training data for its AI products, internal Slack chats …
Wall Street Journal:
How Google's Character.AI deal, which sources say had a $2B licensing fee, and other Big Tech AI deals show startups are seeking bailouts after raising billions  —  Amazon, Google and Microsoft are using a new type of deal to get employees and technology from artificial-intelligence firms
More: Sector 6
Washington Post:
Letter: the secretaries of state from PA, WA, MI, NM, and MN ask Elon Musk to change X's Grok to stop the AI assistant from spreading false election information  —  Grok, the AI search assistant on Musk's X platform, suggested that Kamala Harris had missed the ballot deadline in nine states.

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Lionel Laurent / Bloomberg:
X: @adamkovac, @benthompson, @dhh, and @adamkovacLinkedIn: Lionel LaurentForums: r/neoliberal
Todd Bishop / GeekWire:
Mihai Matei / SamMobile: