Techmeme
March 22, 2023, 2:15 PM

Top News

Alex Barinka / Bloomberg:
The House Committee on Energy and Commerce posts TikTok CEO Shou Chew's prepared testimony, outlining a ~$1.5B plan to host US data on Oracle servers and more  —  TikTok Chief Executive Officer Shou Chew plans to tell Congress his app does more to protect young users than rival social media platforms …
New York Times:
The US will find banning TikTok difficult due to its massive userbase, political ramifications, possible alienation of young voters, legal challenges, and more  —  The tensions over the Chinese-owned social media app will come to a head on Thursday, when the company's chief executive testifies on Capitol Hill.
Washington Post:
A look at ByteDance and TikTok's lobbying before Shou Zi Chew's hearing, including Axios ads and private lawmaker meetings, mirroring Meta's well-worn tactics  —  The app, owned by Beijing-headquartered ByteDance, is adopting the lobbying tactics of many of its American tech company peers
Dina Bass / Bloomberg:
GitHub announces Copilot X, adding chat and voice features to help coders with certain tasks, powered by OpenAI's GPT-4, available via a waitlist  —  Microsoft Corp.'s GitHub unit created one of the first widely deployed programs using OpenAI's language-generation tools …
Luke Plunkett / Kotaku:
Ubisoft unveils Ghostwriter and says the internal AI tool will help scriptwriters save time and create more realistic non-player character interactions  —  Ubisoft Ghostwriter is described by the company as ‘an AI tool’  —  Ubisoft, the publishers behind Assassin's Creed, Far Cry and Ghost Recon …
Chris Stokel-Walker / BuzzFeed News:
Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins says Midjourney seems to have banned him after he made images of Trump's arrest; the word “arrested” is now banned on the tool  —  “I suspect it was pushing my luck when I did the [Twitter] thread,” Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins said.
Jaron Schneider / PetaPixel:
Amazon-owned digital photography site DPReview is closing on April 10; people can request to download photos or texts they've uploaded to the site until April 6  —  DPReview, easily one of the most beloved publications among photography enthusiasts, will shut down and its content will be deleted.
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Mozilla announces Mozilla.ai, an AI-focused startup with $30M in seed funding from the Mozilla Foundation to work on open source and “trustworthy” AI  —  On the eve of its 25th anniversary, Mozilla, the not-for-profit behind the Firefox browser, is launching an AI-focused startup.
Virginia Heffernan / Wired:
Inside TSMC's facilities in Taiwan, where Fab 18 makes a quintillion transistors for Apple every six months, and an interview with Chairman Mark Liu  —  As the US boosts production of silicon chips, an American journalist goes inside TSMC, the mysterious Taiwanese company at the center of the global industry.
Chris Welch / The Verge:
Amazon introduces new Fire TVs and the cheaper TV lineup 2-Series, says 200M+ Fire TV devices have been sold, and expands Luna to the UK, Germany, and Canada  —  Amazon announced today that it has sold a total of over 200 million Fire TV devices.  That number is a combination of Fire TV streamers …
Cade Metz / New York Times:
The Association for Computing Machinery awards Bob Metcalfe the 2022 Turing Award for the invention, standardization, and commercialization of Ethernet  —  In the 1970s, Bob Metcalfe helped develop the primary technology that lets you send email or connect with a printer over an office network.
Matt Levine / Bloomberg:
A look at Balaji Srinivasan's weird $1M bitcoin bet, predicting one BTC will be worth $1M+ in 90 days, which is economically irrational but attracts attention  —  It is sometimes useful to think that the shareholders of a bank are not its owners; they are just renting it from its creditors.
Ashley Carman / Bloomberg:
Memo: Spotify has spent less than 10% of its $100M Creator Equity Fund, announced in February 2022 to promote diversity in music after the Joe Rogan controversy  —  Spotify Technology SA's $100 million Creator Equity Fund, designed to promote diversity in music and podcasts following controversial comments …
Theo Wayt / The Information:
Source: job listings site Indeed is laying off 2,200 people, or 15% of its headcount; Indeed was acquired in 2012 by Japan's Recruit, which also owns Glassdoor  —  Job listings site Indeed.com told employees on Wednesday that it's laying off 2,200 people, representing 15% of its headcount …
Bloomberg:
The US proposes banning CHIPS Act beneficiaries from expanding production capacity in “countries of concern” by 5% for advanced chips and 10% for legacy chips  —  The Biden administration unveiled tight restrictions on new operations in China by chipmakers that get federal funds …
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:
Instagram plans to roll out ads in search results globally in the coming months after initial tests and debuts Reminder Ads for opt-in upcoming event reminders  —  Meta is introducing two new tools on Instagram designed to open up additional avenues for advertising as the company grapples with weak advertising demand.

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