Techmeme
October 21, 2024, 10:05 AM

Top News

Chris Welch / The Verge:
Hands-on with Apple's hearing health features for AirPods Pro 2, set for iOS 18.1: hearing aids work well, hearing protection in all modes, and a hearing test  —  The AirPods Pro 2 will soon offer more robust hearing protection and a new hearing aid feature.  But it's the hearing test that has really hooked me.
Todd Bishop / GeekWire:
Microsoft unveils 10 new AI agents for its enterprise-focused Dynamics 365 apps covering sales, finance, and more, ahead of Salesforce's Agentforce availability  —  AI agents are reigniting the competition between Microsoft and Salesforce.  —  Microsoft announced 10 new AI agents …
Ben Cohen / Wall Street Journal:
A profile of and interview with Tim Cook on being “perfectly fine with not being first”, running Apple, Vision Pro, AI, the Design Studio, group chats, and more  —  The CEO of the world's most valuable company led two of the biggest product launches of his tenure this year …
João da Silva / BBC:
ByteDance says it fired an intern in its ad tech team for “maliciously interfering” with AI training, and says operations were unaffected by their actions  —  TikTok owner, ByteDance, says it has sacked an intern for “maliciously interfering” with the training of one of its artificial intelligence (AI) models.
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Perplexity is looking to raise ~$500M to double its valuation to $8B or more; Perplexity's annualized revenue is ~$50M, up from ~$10M in March 2024  —  Search-based chatbot seeks to raise about $500 million in what would be its fourth funding round in a year
Alexandra Marquez / NBC News:
After Elon Musk promises to give $1M to one swing state voter per day who signs his PAC's petition, PA's governor says “law enforcement could take a look”  —  Musk announced Saturday that every day until Election Day, he would give $1 million to a randomly selected voter who signs a petition circulated by his super PAC.
More: Election Law Blog, Talking Points Memo, The Verge, Disconnect, Fortune, New York Times, The Daily Beast, Reuters, CNBC, BBC, Benzinga, CCN.com, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Washington Examiner, Rolling Stone, Metro.co.uk, The Gateway Pundit, The Daily Caller, Associated Press, CBS News, New York Post, The Indian Express, Mother Jones, Financial Times, NPR, The Information, Global News, KTVU-TV, and Breitbart
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: some at Apple think it is over two years behind the leaders in generative AI; a closer look at changes in Apple's HR and hardware engineering groups  —  Apple's new iPad mini highlights the company's secret advantage in artificial intelligence.  Also: Sonos weighs a headphone reboot …
Paayal Zaveri / Bloomberg:
Zip, which uses AI to help businesses manage buying goods and services, raised $190M led by BOND at a $2.2B valuation, up from $1.5B in May 2023  —  - The procurement startup raised $190 million in the deal  — Bond led the financing, with participation from DST and CRV
Sean Michael Kerner / VentureBeat:
IBM launches its open source Granite 3.0 models, including 2B and 8B general purpose versions and Mixture-of-Experts models, aimed at enterprise customers  —  Make no mistake about it, enterprise AI is big business, especially for IBM.  —  IBM already has a $2 billion book of business related …

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More News

Washington Post:
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Earlier Picks

Cate Lawrence / Tech.eu:
Bloomberg: