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Techmeme
February 15, 2023, 7:15 AM

Top News

Platformer:
Sources: Twitter engineers built a system to boost Elon Musk's tweets over everyone else's after Musk complained Joe Biden's Super Bowl tweet outperformed his  —  After his Super Bowl tweet did worse numbers than President Biden's, Twitter's CEO ordered major changes to the algorithm
Bloomberg:
Speaking at a conference, Elon Musk says he is “guessing toward the end” of 2023 will be time for a new Twitter CEO as the company will be in “stable condition”  —  Elon Musk said he may need the rest of this year to put things right at Twitter Inc. before handing off …
Andrew Griffin / The Independent:
Some users say the “new Bing” is questioning its existence, outright lying, and responding with “unhinged”, aggressive, and nearly incomprehensible answers  —  System appears to be suffering a breakdown as it ponders why it has to exist at all  —  Microsoft is adding Chat GPT tech to Bing
Stephen Wolfram Writings:
An in-depth look at how OpenAI's ChatGPT decodes input queries to produce a “reasonable continuation” of the text, the underlying dataset, neural nets, and more  —  It's Just Adding One Word at a Time  —  That ChatGPT can automatically generate something that reads even superficially …
The Guardian:
An investigation exposes “Team Jorge”, an Israeli hacking and social media disinformation unit for hire claiming covert involvement in 33 presidential elections  —  - Group sells hacking services and access to vast army of fake social media profiles  — Evidence unit behind disinformation campaigns across world
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: Apple plans to evaluate Pay Later borrowers based on spending history, the Apple devices they own, whether they applied for an Apple Card, and more  —  With Apple Inc. pushing into the lending business with a “buy now, pay later” service, the company is laying out rules for how it will approve transactions.
Bloomberg:
Filing: Berkshire Hathaway cut its holdings of TSMC's American depositary shares by 86% last quarter to 8.29M, valued at $617.7M; TSMC's stock drops 3.5%+  —  Warren Buffett slashed his holding of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. just months after disclosing a major stake …
Andrew J. Hawkins / The Verge:
Hyundai and Kia are offering free anti-theft software updates for 8M+ vehicles, after hundreds of car thefts inspired by the viral “Kia Challenge” on TikTok  —  Hyundai and Kia are offering free software updates for millions of their cars in response to a rash of car thefts inspired …
Benjamin Robertson / The Block:
Bankrupt crypto lender Celsius proposes a sale to investment firm NovaWulf, founded in 2021 by Wall Street dealmakers; smaller creditors may regain 70% of funds  —  - Proposed sale would see smaller creditors get around 70% of their money back  — Larger creditors would become shareholders …
Thomas Germain / Gizmodo:
Google launches Privacy Sandbox for Android in beta, starting with a “small percentage” of Android 13 devices, similar to Apple's App Tracking Transparency  —  Here's a preview of the Privacy Sandbox, the newfangled way companies will follow you around the web that's supposed to be better for your privacy.
Jane Lanhee Lee / Reuters:
SandboxAQ, a startup spun out of Alphabet that is developing post-quantum cryptography and simulation software for drug and material development, raised $500M  —  Sandbox AQ, a startup spun off from Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O) last year, said on Tuesday it raised $500 million as it helps customers prepare for a quantum computing future.
Catherine Wang / Forbes:
How BandLab, a music production app and social network for creators, woos users through its SongStarter AI tool, which generates royalty-free instrumental ideas  —  A scion of Malaysia's richest family, Kuok Meng Ru transformed his love of classic rock and blues into a music empire.
Nilay Patel / The Verge:
Q&A with Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker on the company's history, battling Microsoft, working with rivals, generative AI, WebKit, iOS, Chrome, Mastodon, and more  —  Mozilla chair Mitchell Baker on competing — and cooperating — with Google, Apple, and the rest of Big Tech.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Apptopia: consumer interest in Lensa AI and other top AI-powered photo apps fell quickly after hitting peak downloads and in-app purchases in mid-December 2022  —  Is the AI photo app trend already over?  Over the past several months, AI-powered photo apps have been going viral on the App Store …
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
GitHub's enterprise AI code completion tool Copilot for Business hits general availability after the beta launch in December 2022, available for $19 per month  —  GitHub today announced that Copilot for Business, the company's $19/month enterprise version of its AI-powered code completion tool …
Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch:
Xiaomi's earlier mover advantages are eroding in India, where it is facing declining shipments, a tax investigation, and key top-level management departures  —  The Chinese giant is challenged in the world's second-largest smartphone market, with key local departures and declining shipments
South China Morning Post:
At a recent event, senior execs at Tencent, NetEase, and other Chinese gaming companies said they plan to better promote China's culture, as regulations ease  —  China's major video gaming companies are looking to better promote the nation's culture and uphold social values …
Lawrence Abrams / BleepingComputer:
Microsoft releases 77 security fixes, patching three actively exploited zero-day flaws in Windows and Office, and nine critical RCE vulnerabilities  —  Today is Microsoft's February 2023 Patch Tuesday, and security updates fix three actively exploited zero-day vulnerabilities and a total of 77 flaws.

Sponsor Posts

Google:
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UiPath:
UiPath Unveils 10 Innovations that Will Shape the Agentic Future  —  Orchestration engine, API workflows and agentic testing among key features of new UiPath Platform™ for agentic automation, launched at UiPath DevCon 2025
Zoho:
Sandbox testing: Create Mail Agents in sandbox mode  —  Email is considered the backbone for any organization's communication.  That's even more true for transactional emails, which are operation-critical for any business.
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Box data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

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More News

Levi Sumagaysay / MarketWatch:
Nicole Farley / Search Engine Land:
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:

Earlier Picks

Shubham Agarwal / Wired:
Yogita Khatri / The Block:
Chloe Xiang / VICE:
Bloomberg: