Techmeme
October 21, 2024, 2:10 PM

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.
Jamie Crawley / CoinDesk:
Stripe announces it has finalized a deal to acquire stablecoin infrastructure company Bridge; Michael Arrington says the deal was worth $1.1B  —  Bridge, which has raised $54 million in funding, previously said it aspired to become the blockchain version of Stripe, operating a global system in which other developers could integrate
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
xAI launches an API for “grok-beta” priced at $5 per million input tokens or $15 per million output tokens; it is unclear which AI model “grok-beta” might be  —  In August, Elon Musk's xAI promised to make Grok, the company's flagship generative AI model powering a number of features on X, available via an API.
Forums: Hacker News
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 …
Joe Warminsky / The Record:
UK-based Sophos plans to acquire Atlanta-based cybersecurity company Secureworks for ~$859M, expected to close in early 2025; Dell owns ~79% of Secureworks  —  Prominent cybersecurity company Sophos is acquiring another well-known firm in the industry, Secureworks, for about $859 million, the two companies announced Monday.

Sponsor Posts

Command Line:
Copilot to autopilot: Why no single safeguard is enough  —  Microsoft designed a layered model that lets an AI agent resolve network incidents on its own within defined boundaries.
Will Reed:
The best sales leaders aren't job hunting.  Here's how to reach them without months of cold outreach.  —  Our team came from Box, Square, and Brex, so we already know the GTM leaders worth meeting.
Zoho:
Diwali 2026: Your festive planning checklist with Zoho Notebook  —  The Diwali countdown is on!  From lighting up every corner of the house to going a little overboard with the festive shopping …
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

Great Chat:
AI's Spooky Season
A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.
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Sources:
Sundar Pichai on Gemini 4 and the AI compute crunch
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Big Technology Podcast:
Google CEO Sundar Pichai: AI's Infinite Possibilities, Compute Scarcity Dilemmas, Future AI Products
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
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Cheeky Pint:
How Toto Wolff built the most valuable team in F1
Stripe cofounder John Collison interviews founders, builders, and leaders over a pint.
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Training Data:
Inside the Robot Data Factory: Mecka's Josh Gao on Sensorizing Humans to Train Robots
Sequoia Capital partners host conversations with leading AI builders and researchers to develop a deeper understanding of the evolving technologies and their implications.
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