Techmeme
March 21, 2025, 8:40 AM

Top News

Alex Reisner / The Atlantic:
A look at LibGen, one of the largest online pirate libraries, with 7.5M+ books and 81M+ research papers, allegedly used by Meta and OpenAI to train AI models  —  Meta pirated millions of books to train its AI.  Search through them here.  —  When employees at meta started developing …
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: Vision Pro creator Mike Rockwell will take over Siri, which is being removed from AI head John Giannandrea's command, and report to Craig Federighi  —  Mark Gurman Answers Your Questions About Apple Mark Gurman Answers Your Questions About Apple Mark Gurman Answers Your Questions About Apple
Cheyenne Ligon / CoinDesk:
The US SEC says proof-of-work crypto mining doesn't trigger federal securities laws and mining operators do not need to register their transactions with the SEC  —  In a staff statement published Thursday, the SEC said that both solo mining and mining pool operations would fail the first prong of the Howey Test.
Abner Li / 9to5Google:
Google adds “smarter search” to Gmail for Android, iOS, and the web, using AI to show the most relevant results instead of showing emails in chronological order  —  Google is introducing “smarter search” to Gmail for Android, iOS, and the web that leverages “AI to show you the most relevant results, faster.”
Reuters:
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Anthropic adds web search in preview for Claude 3.7 Sonnet, available now for paid US Claude users, with support for free users and more countries coming soon  —  Anthropic's AI-powered chatbot, Claude, can now search the web — a capability that had long eluded it.
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
OpenAI adds gpt-4o-mini-tts, a text-to-speech model that it says delivers more nuanced and realistic-sounding speech, and two speech-to-text models to its API  —  OpenAI is bringing new transcription and voice-generating AI models to its API that the company claims improve upon its previous releases.
Kif Leswing / CNBC:
At Nvidia's Quantum Day, Jensen Huang walked back his January comments that cast doubt on the timeline for useful quantum computing and caused a stock selloff  —  Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Thursday walked back comments he made in January, when he cast doubt on whether useful quantum computers would hit the market in the next 15 years.
The Guardian:
Researchers unveil Aardvark, an AI weather prediction system that they say uses thousands of times less computing power and is much faster than current methods  —  Researchers say Aardvark Weather uses thousands of times less computing power and is much faster than current systems
Financial Times:
A profile of Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport, who served in Israel's elite cyber intelligence unit 8200; sources say Wiz was on track to surpass $1B of ARR in 2025  —  Cybersecurity start-up's fast-moving CEO agrees higher sale price after turning down Alphabet's $23bn offer last summer
More: CRN
Gary Rivlin / Bloomberg:
A book excerpt from AI Valley details the 2024 mass defection of staff at Inflection AI, which seemed to be thriving but faced scaling challenges, to Microsoft  —  An excerpt from AI Valley tells the story of why the staff at Inflection AI, which seemed to be thriving, defected en masse to Microsoft in 2024.
Simon Sharwood / The Register:
Tencent says it has slowed the pace of its GPU rollout since implementing DeepSeek, and that most of its GPU capex goes toward its ad and gaming businesses  —  Chinese giant says locals are more efficient than Western hyperscalers, and has tiny capex to prove it
More: WinBuzzer
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Threads rolls out new features: ability to set following feed or any custom feed as the default, limit post replies to followers, a better video player, more  —  Threads will also let you limit replies to just followers and add topics to your bio. … Meta is finally allowing Threads users …
Kara Fellows / CBS News:
Google says it uncovered 10K+ illegitimate listings, including for fake businesses, on Maps and files a lawsuit against the alleged scammers behind the fraud  —  Google says it uncovered thousands of illegitimate listings, including for fake businesses, on Google Maps and has announced …

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:
Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning  —  SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds.  Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.
Cape:
Most carriers track everything.  Cape doesn't.  —  Unlimited talk, text & data, 24-hr metadata deletion, network ID rotation, SIM-attack defense, and more.  Switch today and get 29% off for life.
Equals:
Stop vibe coding analytics  —  Equals AI turns questions about your business into auditable spreadsheet models and dashboards.  Build once, iterate for years.
Zoho:
Pro tips: 5 ways to close WhatsApp leads in Zoho CRM  —  This is a guest post by Orkhan Jafarli, Growth PM at TimelinesAI.More buyers now reach out on WhatsApp before they ever fill out a form.
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

Big Technology Podcast:
What Happens If AI Fails?, Subprime Data Center Crisis, How Bad Can SpaceX Get?
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.
Hard Fork:
OpenAI Models Go Rogue + Kimi K3 Freakout + A.I. Superforecasting
The future is already here. Each week, journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore and make sense of the latest in the rapidly changing world of tech.
Subscribe to Hard Fork.
The Talk Show With John Gruber:
'A Scam Held Together With Patriotism and Golden Paint', With Quinn Nelson
The director's commentary track for Daring Fireball. Long digressions on Apple, technology, design, movies, and more.
Subscribe to The Talk Show With John Gruber.
The Upstarts Podcast:
Abridge's Shiv Rao: The Doctor Founder Taking On Microsoft In Healthcare AI
Veteran tech reporter Alex Konrad sits down with breakout entrepreneurs taking on the status quo to shake up their fields in AI, design, nuclear energy, space, and more.
Subscribe to The Upstarts Podcast.
Great Chat:
Too big to laugh: how tech lost its sense of humor
A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.
Subscribe to Great Chat.
Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith:
Connecting the Unconnected: Doreen Bogdan-Martin
Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith speaks with leaders in government, business, and culture to explore the most critical challenges at the intersection of technology and society.
Subscribe to Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 8:40 AM ET, March 21, 2025.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

More News

Counterpoint Research:

Earlier Picks

Shirin Ghaffary / Bloomberg:
Reuters:
Bloomberg:
Lauren Thomas / Wall Street Journal: