Techmeme
February 18, 2025, 11:45 AM

Top News

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
xAI launches Grok-3 beta and Grok-3 mini, its latest AI models with reasoning, trained on 200K GPUs, or “10x” more compute than Grok-2, for X Premium+ users  —  Elon Musk's AI company, xAI, late on Monday released its latest flagship AI model, Grok 3, and unveiled new capabilities for the Grok iOS and web apps.
Andrej Karpathy / @karpathy:
Grok-3 hands-on: its thinking capability feels state of the art and rivals OpenAI's o1 pro models, DeepSearch offers a blend of search and reasoning, and more  —  I was given early access to Grok 3 earlier today, making me I think one of the first few who could run a quick vibe check.
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch:
X raises its Premium+ subscription to $40 per month, or $395 per year, after raising it to $22 per month in December 2024, following Grok-3's launch  —  Hours after Elon Musk's AI company, xAI released the latest version of its AI model, Grok 3, X has significantly hiked the price …
Amy Thomson / Bloomberg:
xAI unveils DeepSearch, a reasoning chatbot that explains its thought process for queries and is capable of doing research, brainstorming, and data analysis  —  Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI showed off the updated Grok-3 model, showcasing a version of the chatbot technology …
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:
An interview with Shuhei Yoshida, who led PlayStation Studios from 2008-2019 and left Sony on January 15, on his 31 years at PlayStation, early days, and more  —  Shu Yoshida has graduated.  He just completed 38 years at Sony, including 31 years at PlayStation, and he completed …
Financial Times:
A look at Apple's quiet pivot to India, where Foxconn now makes the iPhone 16 Pro; sources say China views Apple's growing business in India with suspicion  —  As Donald Trump was preparing to take office for the first time in 2017, Priyank Kharge was busy making calls to Apple's headquarters in Cupertino …
James Titcomb / Telegraph:
Acer CEO Jason Chen says the company will “probably” raise US laptop prices by 10% “by default” from March 2024 due to Trump's tariffs on Chinese imports  —  Acer considers shifting manufacturing out of China as trade war hits consumers  —  This feature is available for registered users.
Eileen Ng / Associated Press:
Huawei launches Mate XT, the industry's first tri-foldable, globally for €3,499, after its China launch in September 2024; the Mate XT has a 10.2-inch display  —  Huawei on Tuesday held a global launch for the industry's first tri-foldable phone, which analysts said marked a symbolic victory …
Victoria Song / The Verge:
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Hightouch, which makes AI marketing, sales, and customer service tools, raised an $80M Series C led by Sapphire at a $1.2B valuation, up from $615M in July 2023  —  Last decade, companies like Segment rewrote the book on how organizations used APIs to merge data from disparate apps to improve marketing strategies.

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Earlier Picks

Kate Clark / Bloomberg:
Financial Times: