Techmeme
September 25, 2024, 12:25 AM

Top News

Brady Dale / Axios:
Caroline Ellison, a star witness in the prosecution of FTX founder and former boyfriend SBF, is sentenced to two years in prison for her role in the FTX scandal  —  - “I've seen a lot of cooperators in 30 years. … - She talked to the government prior to Bankman-Fried's arrest …
New York Times:
Sources: Mark Zuckerberg wants to get away from politics, pulling back from charitable causes that may seem partisan, tamping down employee activism, and more  —  It was only a little more than a decade ago that Mark Zuckerberg had few qualms about airing his politics.
Larry Dignan / Constellation Research:
Google Cloud debuts Gemini 1.5 Flash and 1.5 Pro with a 2M context window, twice as big as before, “grounding” for better Google search accuracy, and new agents  —  Google Cloud launched a series of updates including new Gemini 1.5 Flash and 1.5 Pro models with a 2 million context window …
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge:
Ryan Browne / CNBC:
Gaby Del Valle / The Verge:
The US DOJ sues Visa, alleging it has an illegal monopoly over debit network markets and has tried to unlawfully crush competitors, including PayPal and Square  —  The financial service company reportedly tried to ‘smother’ competitors and feared Apple as an ‘existential threat.’
Katie Kilkenny / The Hollywood Reporter:
SAG-AFTRA calls a strike against League of Legends, formerly strike exempt, filing an NLRB complaint and saying Formosa Interactive also refuses “fair AI terms”  —  The union charges one of the multiplayer game's producers, Formosa Interactive, with attempting to work around …
Carly Page / TechCrunch:
The world's second largest money transfer company, MoneyGram, blames an unspecified “cybersecurity issue” for an ongoing days-long outage affecting its users  —  U.S.-based money transfer giant MoneyGram has blamed an unspecified “cybersecurity issue” for an ongoing days-long outage affecting the company and its users.
Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch:
OpenAI adds five voices to Advanced Voice Mode, which is now rolling out to ChatGPT Plus and Teams users and, next week, to enterprise and education users  —  OpenAI announced it is rolling out Advanced Voice Mode (AVM) to an expanded set of ChatGPT's paying customers on Tuesday.
Emma Roth / The Verge:
Marques Brownlee says “I hear you” after criticism of his new freemium wallpaper app Panels, over privacy concerns, a $50/year price for full access, and more  —  Marques Brownlee, the YouTuber known as MKBHD, has responded to backlash over the launch of his new wallpaper app, called Panels.
Meir Orbach / CTech:
Salesforce agrees to buy Zoomin, an Israeli data management company that makes unstructured data accessible to AI agents  —  The deal comes less than three weeks after the software giant paid $1.9 billion for Own, another Israel-founded company.  —  Salesforce  —  Zoomin  —  Acquisition
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge:
Spotify rolls out its AI Playlist feature in beta to Premium subscribers in the US, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand, after launching in the UK and Australia  —  Spotify is expanding an AI feature that creates customized playlists from your text descriptions to additional English-speaking regions.
Winston Cho / The Hollywood Reporter:
Filing: OpenAI agrees to give representatives for authors suing the company access to review its training data to see if OpenAI used authors' copyrighted works  —  At a secure room in its San Francisco office, representatives for authors suing OpenAI will examine materials that were used to train its AI system.
Tim Starks / CyberScoop:
CrowdStrike SVP Adam Meyers apologizes before Congress over the company's faulty update that caused a global IT outage, to largely sympathetic House lawmakers  —  House lawmakers struck a sympathetic tone toward the company at a hearing where they nevertheless said nothing like that could happen again.
Rebecca Rainey / Bloomberg Law:
The US DOL releases AI & Inclusive Hiring Framework, a set of guidelines to help employers ensure AI doesn't lead to discrimination for disabled job seekers  —  Search by Topic  —  The US Labor Department rolled out a new website Tuesday to instruct employers and workers …
More: Peatworks and Forbes
Alex Weprin / The Hollywood Reporter:
Stability AI says filmmaker James Cameron has joined its board of directors  —  The director says that “the intersection of generative AI and CGI image creation is the next wave” of film technology, as he joins the company behind the popular Stable Diffusion AI model.
Tom Matsuda / Sifted:
London-based Apron, which is aiming to become the financial super app for SMBs, raised a $30M Series B led by Zinal Growth, bringing its total funding to $50.5M  —  Apron CEO Bogdan Uzbekov says the fintech is currently focused on growth over profitability  —  A former product lead at Revolut …
More: FinSMEs

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More News

Rohan Goswami / CNBC:
Chris Welch / The Verge:

Earlier Picks

Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch:
Lucas Shaw / Bloomberg: