Techmeme
March 22, 2023, 4:50 PM

Top News

Dina Bass / Bloomberg:
GitHub announces Copilot X, a new Copilot version with chat and voice features using OpenAI's GPT-4 to help with certain coding tasks, available via a waitlist  —  Microsoft Corp.'s GitHub unit created one of the first widely deployed programs using OpenAI's language-generation tools …
Alex Barinka / Bloomberg:
The US House Committee on Energy and Commerce posts TikTok CEO Shou Chew's prepared testimony, which says the company has spent ~$1.5B to safeguard US user data  —  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 150M+ US users, political ramifications for Biden including losing 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's 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
Nikhilesh De / CoinDesk:
The US SEC sues Tron founder Justin Sun and his companies for the alleged “unregistered offer and sale of crypto asset securities” TRX and BTT, fraud, and more  —  The SEC alleged TRX, BTT are unregistered securities, and claimed Sun created an “extensive wash trading” program to boost their trading volume.
Luke Plunkett / Kotaku:
Ubisoft unveils Ghostwriter, an internal AI tool saving its scriptwriters time by creating first drafts and more realistic non-player character interactions  —  Ubisoft Ghostwriter is described by the company as ‘an AI tool’  —  Ubisoft, the publishers behind Assassin's Creed …
Chris Stokel-Walker / BuzzFeed News:
Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins says Midjourney banned him after he made images of a Donald Trump arrest; the company banned the word “arrested” in its tool  —  “I suspect it was pushing my luck when I did the [Twitter] thread,” Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins said.
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Mozilla announces Mozilla.ai, an AI-focused startup with a $30M seed from the Mozilla Foundation to create a “trustworthy”, independent open-source AI stack  —  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 1 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.
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.
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 …
Sean Endicott / Windows Central:
Microsoft launches Loop, its Notion and Asana competitor, in preview, letting users collaborate in shared Microsoft 365 workspaces on the web, Android, and iOS  —  You can now try out Microsoft's new collaboration tool Loop.  —  What you need to know  — Microsoft Loop is now available in preview.
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 …
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.

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