Techmeme
February 13, 2025, 12:25 PM

Top News

Vlad Savov / Bloomberg:
Alibaba Chair Joe Tsai says Apple will use the Chinese tech giant's AI tech on iPhones sold in China, speaking at the World Government Summit in Dubai  —  “Apple has been very selective, they talked to a number of companies in China, and in the end they choose to do business with us …
Joe Rossignol / MacRumors:
Apple resumes advertising on X for the first time since November 2023, when it halted ads due to Elon Musk's comments; @Apple is running a Safari privacy promo  —  Apple this month started advertising on X for the first time in more than a year.  The company had stopped advertising …
Jez Corden / Windows Central:
PlayStation's State of Play event showed that Microsoft might publish more PS5 games in 2025 than Sony does, even as Xbox hardware sales continue to decline  —  Sony had its semi-regular State of Play showcase yesterday, and PlayStation gamers hoping for a roadmap received a lot of third-party multiplatform titles instead.
Andy Robinson / Video Games Chronicle:
Sony reports PlayStation 5 sales in Q3 were 9.5M, the best quarter since its launch, and hits 75M total PS5 sales; MAUs across its platform rose 43% YoY to 129M  —  PS5 SHIPMENTS ARE NOW NECK-AND-NECK WITH PS4  —  PlayStation 5 enjoyed its best-ever holiday period in 2024 …
Emma Roth / The Verge:
Tim Cook teases an announcement of “the newest member of the family” on February 19; Mark Gurman reported Apple would update the iPhone SE  —  Apple will reveal its next device on February 19th.  —  Apple will reveal its next device on February 19th.
Andy Greenberg / Wired:
Recorded Future: Salt Typhoon breached five more telcos and ISPs, including two US telcos, and 12+ universities in December-January by exploiting Cisco routers  —  Despite high-profile attention and even US sanctions, the group hasn't stopped or even slowed its operation, including the breach of two more US telecoms.
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Sam Altman says GPT-5 will include o3, which is no longer set to ship as a standalone model, GPT-4.5 will be OpenAI's last non-chain-of-thought model, and more  —  OpenAI has effectively canceled the release of o3, which was slated to be the company's next major AI model …
Igor Bonifacic / Engadget:
Kylie Robison / The Verge:
Malathi Nayak / Bloomberg:
Filing: OpenAI says Elon Musk's $97.4B bid contradicts his attacks in his lawsuit against OpenAI that its assets can't be “transferred away” for “private gain”  —  The public showdown between Elon Musk and OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman over Musk's $97.4 billion bid …
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Joseph Menn / Washington Post:
Sen. Ron Wyden and Rep. Andy Biggs write to National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard asking her to demand the UK retract its back door request to Apple  —  Letter urges new intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard to take resolute action to stymie a top ally's controversial and confidential order.
Emma Roth / The Verge:
Google plans to begin testing an ML-based model in the US in 2025 that estimates whether a user is under 18 to help provide more “age-appropriate experiences”  —  Google says the technology will help it provide ‘age-appropriate experiences.’  —  Google says the technology …
Stephanie Palazzolo / The Information:
Source: Anthropic has developed a hybrid AI model that combines traditional LLM capabilities with reasoning features and plans to release it in the coming weeks  —  After OpenAI released its reasoning models last fall, Google, Alibaba, High-Flyer Capital Management and others followed with their own.
More: The Decoder and Verdict
Ken Bensinger / New York Times:
Elon Musk and right-wing influencers redefine “doxxing” to include reporting on government employees; free speech advocates say they aim to intimidate the press  —  Right-wing influencers are criticizing journalists who have published public information about government employees.
Alexandra Bruell / Wall Street Journal:
The Atlantic, Politico, Vox and others sue Cohere, alleging it used copyrighted works to train its LLM and shared versions of entire articles without permission  —  Lawsuit accuses Canadian company of sharing versions of entire articles without permission  —  The Atlantic, Politico …
Amanda Silberling / TechCrunch:
YouTube updates Shorts to integrate Google DeepMind's latest video model Veo 2, letting creators generate AI video clips to add to any of their Shorts  —  YouTube Shorts is integrating with Google DeepMind's latest video model, Veo 2, allowing creators to generate AI video clips for their posts.
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: X agrees to pay ~$10M to settle Trump's 2021 lawsuit against Twitter and then-CEO Jack Dorsey over the ban on his accounts after the January 6 riot  —  Musk's platform becomes second social-media company to settle with Trump after Jan. 6, 2021 riot triggered bans
Krisztian Sandor / CoinDesk:
Plasma, which is developing a bitcoin-based network designed to handle stablecoin transactions efficiently with zero-fee USDT transfers, raised a $20M Series A  —  The project, which also claims Tether's Paolo Ardoino as an investor, aims to enhance stablecoin adoption through a Bitcoin sidechain that allows zero-fee USDT transactions.
More: The Block and Fortune
Beatrice Nolan / Fortune:
After Meta laid off 3,600 of its “lowest performers” on February 10, some say they had good performance reviews, and experts say the label is highly subjective  —  - <strong>Meta said it was cutting low performers in its most recent round of cuts.  However, some staffers and experts have questioned the company's methods.

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More News

Hsiuwen Liu / Rest of World:

Earlier Picks

Paul Sawers / TechCrunch:
CJ Haddad / CNBC:
Paige Smith / Bloomberg:
Jonathan Vanian / CNBC:
Benjamin Mayo / 9to5Mac: