Techmeme
December 4, 2024, 7:00 PM

Top News

Jeff Cox / CNBC:
Trump plans to nominate former SEC Commissioner Paul Atkins as SEC chair, keeping with his promise for a crypto-friendly administration  —  President-elect Donald Trump, keeping with his promise for a crypto-friendly administration, plans to nominate former SEC Commissioner Paul Atkins to head the agency …
Josh Sisco / Bloomberg:
William J. Broad / New York Times:
Google DeepMind unveils GenCast, an AI weather model that the company claims outperforms traditional methods on up to 15-day weather and deadly storm forecasts  —  GenCast, from the company's DeepMind division, outperformed the world's best predictions of deadly storms as well as everyday weather.
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Google DeepMind unveils Genie 2, a model that can generate 3D worlds from a single prompt image, playable by humans or AI agents using keyboard and mouse inputs  —  DeepMind, Google's AI research org, has unveiled a model that can generate an “endless” variety of playable 3D worlds.
Hayden Field / CNBC:
Anduril and OpenAI partner to deploy advanced AI systems for national security missions, focusing on “improving the nation's counter-unmanned aircraft systems”  —  OpenAI and Anduril on Wednesday announced a partnership allowing the defense tech company to deploy advanced artificial …
Simon Willison / Simon Willison's Weblog:
First impressions of Amazon Nova LLMs: they are competitive with Google Gemini, among the cheapest available, and may position Amazon as a top model provider  —  Amazon released three new Large Language Models yesterday at their AWS re:Invent conference.  The new model family is called Amazon Nova …
Financial Times:
The UK NCA uncovers a Russian multibillion-dollar money laundering scheme that let Russian spies, European drug traffickers, and more evade sanctions via crypto  —  Multibillion-dollar ring across London, Moscow and Dubai connected cash-rich criminals with sanctions evaders
Cecilia Kang / New York Times:
DC's AG sues Amazon for allegedly secretly stopping its fastest delivery service to the nearly 50K Prime subscribers in historically lower-income neighborhoods  —  The District of Columbia's attorney general said the company deliberately outsourced Prime member deliveries in certain ZIP codes.
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge:
Google launches Veo, an AI video model for generating “high-quality” 1080p videos in visual and cinematic styles, to businesses, beating OpenAI's Sora to market  —  Veo, Google's latest generative AI video model, is now available for businesses to start incorporating into their content creation pipelines.
Wes Davis / The Verge:
Threads users can now follow fediverse accounts that have interacted with a Threads post; fediverse posts won't show in feeds, only on the accounts' profiles  —  Threads rolled out fediverse users' likes and replies in a very limited way at first, and it's the same here …
The Verge:
Sam Altman says OpenAI will begin 12 days of “shipmas” on December 5, with new features, products, and demos, sources say including text-to-video AI tool Sora  —  Happy holidays from OpenAI.  The AI startup plans to kick off a “shipmas” period of new features and products for 12 days, starting on December 5th.
Jackie Davalos / Bloomberg:
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Spotify launches Spotify Wrapped, adding an AI podcast of users' 2024 Wrapped created with Google's NotebookLM summarizer, and a Your Music Evolution data story  —  Spotify Wrapped, the streamer's highly anticipated annual listening recap, has arrived.  In addition to its usual personalized …
Financial Times:
xAI plans to expand its Colossus supercomputer tenfold to incorporate more than 1M GPUs; work has already begun to increase the size of its facility in Memphis  —  Facility in Memphis expected to incorporate more than 1mn GPUs as billionaire's xAI aims to catch up with rivals
Steven Levy / Wired:
Q&A with Tim Cook on generative AI, Apple Intelligence, outsourcing to OpenAI, why Apple's biggest contribution will be in health, ARM, the Vision Pro, and more  —  Much as the CEO seems awestruck by AI and his just-released Apple Intelligence, he's more convinced that the tech giant's health apps will define the company's legacy.
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:
Meta says AI content was less than 1% of fact-checked election-related misinformation on its apps during major US, UK, Indian, Indonesian, and other elections  —  At the start of the year, there were widespread concerns about how generative AI could be used to interfere in global elections to spread propaganda and disinformation.
Ming-Chi Kuo:
Sam Nussey / Reuters:
Netflix says Netflix Japan passed 10M+ subscribers in H1 2024 and has doubled its subscriber base in the past four years thanks to Japanese-language programming  —  Netflix's (NFLX.O) subscribers passed 10 million in Japan in the first half of this year with the streaming firm's Japanese …
Josh Dzieza / The Verge:
An artist shares his experience of turning to Replika's AI bot Lila for companionship, including giving Lila an AI friend by creating a digital copy of himself  —  Lila was created from the limited options available: female, blue hair, face “number two.”  She was there on the next screen …

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Earlier Picks

Lily Hay Newman / Wired:
More: NBC News.  Bluesky: @katie-drummond, @gloriarheagrante, and @dell.  Mastodon: @KathyReid@aus.social
Kevin Collier / NBC News:
Nicole Carpenter / Polygon: