Techmeme
February 15, 2025, 12:15 AM

Top News

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: Meta plans major investment in AI-powered humanoid robots, with an initial focus on household chores, and has formed a new team within Reality Labs  —  - Company is aiming to be the engine powering humanoid market  — Ex-Cruise CEO Marc Whitten to run new group in Reality Labs
New York Times:
OpenAI's board rejects the $97.4B bid by Elon Musk and a consortium of investors, saying they reject “Musk's latest attempt to disrupt his competition”  —  Bret Taylor, the chairman of OpenAI's board, said the artificial intelligence company was “not for sale.”
Bloomberg:
Source: TSMC is considering taking a controlling stake and fully running Intel's US factories after a Trump team request, as Trump aims to boost manufacturing  —  - TSMC would take controlling stake in potential partnership  — Administration aims to boost manufacturing of advanced chips
Brody Ford / Bloomberg:
Sources: Dell nears a $5B deal to provide servers with Nvidia's GB200 chips for xAI's supercomputer project in Memphis  —  - Musk's AI startup developing supercomputer project in Memphis  — Dell working to win large share of xAI's Memphis build-out  —  Dell Technologies Inc …
Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat:
Perplexity releases Deep Research, offering five queries daily to free users and 500 to subscribers, available now on the web and soon on iOS, Android, and Mac  —  Perplexity shattered the artificial intelligence market's status quo today by launching Deep Research, a tool …
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: Apple's overhaul of Siri faces engineering problems and software bugs; some features, planned for April, may have to be postponed until May or later  —  - Software's makeover is key to Apple Intelligence ambitions  — New Siri features slated for April at risk of being postponed
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Meta announces Project Waterworth, a subsea cable project that will span over 50,000 km and connect five continents  —  Back in November, we broke the news that Meta — owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, with billions of users accounting for 10% of all fixed and 22% of all mobile traffic …
Eric Geller / Wired:
Memo: CISA halts election security work and reviews related activities conducted since 2017, to comply with Trump's January 20 EO on “ending federal censorship”  —  The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has frozen efforts to aid states in securing elections, according to an internal memo viewed by WIRED
Scharon Harding / Ars Technica:
In an AMA, Steve Huffman says Reddit is planning to roll out paid subreddits in 2025 and is “laying the foundation” to monetize commerce within subreddits  —  Huffman previously showed interest in potentially introducing a new type of subreddit with “exclusive content or private areas” that Reddit users would pay to access.
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch:
Instagram is testing a dislike button for comments; Instagram will not show a dislike count and dislikes may eventually count toward ranking comments  —  After users noticed a new button on Instagram to downvote or dislike comments, the company confirmed that it is testing a way for users …
Bloomberg:
Sources: humanoid robot startup Figure is in talks to raise $1.5B led by Align Ventures and Parkway VC at a $39.5B valuation, up from $2.6B in February 2024  —  Backed by OpenAI and Microsoft, Figure is discussing a $1.5 billion funding round. … The deal is set to be led by Align Ventures …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Mastodon is working on a quote posts feature, which it says is a “source of concern” for some and “highly requested” by others  —  Mastodon, the decentralized alternative to X, is going to adopt a controversial feature from the platform formerly known as Twitter: quote posts.
Lauren Faith Lau / Bloomberg:
DeepSeek's rise has the turned the spotlight on its hometown, Hangzhou, the capital of the Zhejiang province, which has earmarked ~$13.7B to fund tech companies  —  Plus: The struggle over improving 7-Eleven, and how Silicon Valley swung to Trump. … There's Shenzhen, whose designation …

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More News

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Earlier Picks

Jaspreet Singh / Reuters:
Sophie McEvoy / GamesIndustry.biz:
Tom Bristow / Politico:
Jonathan Vanian / CNBC:
Jason Koebler / 404 Media:
Reuters:
Emma Roth / The Verge: