Techmeme
March 22, 2023, 12:30 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,” said Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins.
Jaron Schneider / PetaPixel:
Digital photography site DPReview, owned by Amazon, is closing April 10; people can request downloads of photos or texts they 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.
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.
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.
Chris Welch / The Verge:
Amazon announces new Fire TVs, launches a cheaper TV lineup, says over 200M Fire TV devices have been sold, and rolls out Luna in 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 Turing Award for his work on Ethernet at the Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s  —  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 proposed $1M bitcoin bet, predicting one BTC will be worth $1M+ in 90 days, which makes little sense besides attracting 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, launched in February 2022 to promote diversity following the Joe Rogan controversy  —  Spotify Technology SA's $100 million Creator Equity Fund, designed to promote diversity in music and podcasts following controversial comments …
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:
Instagram plans to roll out ads in search result globally in the coming months after initial tests and launches Reminder Ads for opt-in reminders about events  —  Meta is introducing two new tools on Instagram designed to open up additional avenues for advertising as the company grapples with weak advertising demand.
AI Snake Oil:
OpenAI may have tested GPT-4 on its training data, violating the cardinal rule of ML, and GPT-4's exam performance says little about its real-world usefulness  —  OpenAI may have tested on the training data.  Besides, human benchmarks are meaningless for bots.
Paul Alcorn / Tom's Hardware:
Intel says Raja Koduri, who joined as Chief Architect in 2017, plans to leave to found a startup focused on generative AI for gaming, media, and entertainment  —  Raja moves on after six years.  —  Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger announced on Twitter today that Raja Koduri, the company's current Chief Architect …
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 …
Josh Ye / Reuters:
Tencent reports 2022 revenue down 1% YoY to ~$81B, the first-ever annual drop and below estimates, and Q4 revenue up 1% YoY to ~$21B, as China's economy slows  —  Tencent Holdings (0700.HK) reported a drop in annual revenue for the first time ever, as China's economic slowdown due to the pandemic …

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