Techmeme
April 24, 2024, 2:35 AM

Top News

Wall Street Journal:
The FTC bans noncompete clauses that restrict job switching, the first time in 50+ years that the FTC has issued a regulation mandating an economy-wide change  —  Move sets up high-stakes legal clash with business groups over the agency's power  —  WASHINGTON—The Federal Trade Commission …
Lauren Feiner / The Verge:
The US Senate passes the TikTok divestment bill by a margin of 79-18; the legislation now heads to President Biden, who has committed to sign it into law  —  A bill that would force China-based company Bytedance to sell TikTok — or else face a US ban of the platform …
Casey Newton / Platformer:
Legal scholars discuss how the TikTok divestment bill could survive a First Amendment challenge and why the US will likely rely on a national security argument  —  The First Amendment is a major obstacle, scholars say — but it isn't insurmountable  —  On Tuesday, the Senate voted overwhelmingly …
Victoria Song / The Verge:
Meta rolls out multimodal AI in early access for the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, mainly to help identify objects, translate signs, and write Instagram captions  —  When the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses launched last fall, they were a pretty neat content capture tool and a surprisingly solid pair of headphones.
Victoria Song / The Verge:
Meta's Ray-Ban Smart Glasses get support for video calling via WhatsApp and Messenger, hands-free Apple Music controls, and a new frame style  —  Meta just announced a slew of new updates for its Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses.  CEO Mark Zuckerberg just dropped an Instagram reel showing off …
Ming-Chi Kuo:
Sources: Apple cut 2024 Vision Pro shipments to 400K-450K units, vs. a 700K+ market consensus, and US demand has “fallen sharply beyond expectations”  —  My latest survey is as follows:  — Apple has cut its 2024 Vision Pro shipments to 400-450k units (vs. market consensus of 700-800k units or more).
Jacob Ridley / PC Gamer:
The European Parliament adopts right-to-repair rules clarifying manufacturer obligations to provide repair services, consumer access to spare parts, and more  —  The new rules will give customers new ways to claim support for a product throughout its lifetime, and also aid independent repair shops.
Andrew J. Hawkins / The Verge:
Nami Matsuura / Nikkei Asia:
Samsung starts mass production of its 9th-generation 286-layer 3D NAND memory chips, which increases data I/O speeds by 33% compared to 8th-gen 236-layer chips  —  286-layer product boosts data storage capacity by 50%, aiding AI  —  SEOUL — Samsung Electronics said Tuesday …
MacKenzie Sigalos / CNBC:
Block says it has finished the development of its own 3nm bitcoin mining chip and is working through the design with a “leading global semiconductor foundry”  —  Jack Dorsey says that his payments company, Block (formerly Square), is expanding its bitcoin mining ambitions …
Seb Joseph / Digiday:
For the third time, Google delays the deprecation of third-party cookies in Chrome, pushing back its plans to early 2025 amid regulatory scrutiny  —  Google is delaying the end of third-party cookies in its Chrome browser — again.  In other unsurprising developments, water remains wet.
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: IBM is nearing an acquisition of HashiCorp, which helps companies manage cloud infrastructure, in the coming days; HashiCorp's stock jumps 22%+  —  .  —  The details  —  A deal for HashiCorp could come together in the coming days, according to people familiar with the matter.
Sarah McBride / Bloomberg:
Xaira Therapeutics, which aims to use AI models to find new drugs to treat diseases, emerged from stealth with $1B in commitments from Sequoia and others  —  - Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned from Stanford after controversy  — New startup has backing from high-wattage tech investors
Quentyn Kennemer / The Verge:
Apple schedules a “special Apple Event” for May 7 at 10am ET, where new iPads are expected; rumors suggest the iPad Pro will get an OLED display and an M3 chip  —  After kicking off 2024 with the launch of the Vision Pro, the next act in Apple's 2024 script is a May product launch event.
Viola Zhou / Rest of World:
Interviews with 20+ current and former TSMC staff at its Arizona plant finds struggles over bridging Taiwanese and US norms, rigid hierarchies, and other issues  —  Missed deadlines and tension among Taiwanese and American coworkers are plaguing the chip giant's Phoenix expansion.
Marina Temkin / TechCrunch:
NY-based Campus, which is building an online alternative to traditional community colleges, raised a $23M Series A extension following a $29M Series A in 2023  —  Although many students in the United States enter community colleges intending to transfer to four-year universities …
Edward Zitron / Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At:
Emails released as part of US v. Google show how Google's finance and ad teams led by Prabhakar Raghavan made Search worse to make the company more money  —  This is the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for killing it.  —  The story begins on February 5th 2019 …
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Paul Sawers / TechCrunch:NEW
Paris-based FlexAI, which is developing an on-demand cloud service for AI training, emerges from stealth with a $30M in seed funding  —  Nvidia, Apple, Tesla and Intel are on CEO Brijesh Tripathi's resume  —  A French startup has raised a hefty seed investment to “rearchitect compute infrastructure” …
More: Sifted
Emilia David / The Verge:
Microsoft debuts Phi-3 Mini, a small 3.8B-parameter model about as capable as GPT-3.5, and plans Phi-3 Small and Phi-3 Medium models with 7B and 14B parameters  —  Microsoft launched the next version of its lightweight AI model Phi-3 Mini, the first of three small models the company plans to release.
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Sources: AI search engine Perplexity is raising $250M+ at a $2.5B to $3B valuation; previous backers NEA and IVP are among those looking to invest  —  Perplexity, the AI search engine startup, is a hot property at the moment.  TechCrunch has learned that the company is currently raising …
Shirin Ghaffary / Bloomberg:

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