Techmeme
March 29, 2023, 11:40 PM

Top News

Juli Clover / MacRumors:
Apple schedules WWDC 2023 for June 5 to June 9 as a virtual event with a June 5 keynote, where iOS 17, iPadOS 17, tvOS 17, watchOS 10, and macOS 14 are expected  —  Apple today announced that its 34th annual Worldwide Developers Conference will take place from Monday, June 5 to Friday, June 9.
Sarah E. Needleman / Wall Street Journal:
EA plans to lay off ~6% of its workforce and cut its office space, incurring $170M to $200M in restructuring charges; EA had nearly 13,000 employees in mid-2022  —  Publisher of ‘Madden NFL’ and other videogame series is also making office-space reductions  —  White-Collar Recession: Why Job Cuts Are Hitting Professional Workers
Scott Chipolina / Financial Times:
Wall Street Journal:
Forbes:
Sources: Sam Bankman-Fried is paying his mounting legal fees from a $10M+ tax-free gift he gave his father with money borrowed from Alameda in 2021  —  While still CEO of now-collapsed FTX, Bankman-Fried transferred millions of dollars to his father.  Some of those funds have since been used …
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch:
Google launches an Ads Transparency Center, showing all the ads from verified advertisers on its platforms, in the formats, the regions, and the dates they ran  —  Google is launching a new ad transparency center that will let users search for verified advertisers and their campaigns across …
Meghan Bobrowsky / Wall Street Journal:
WeMeta: the median price per square meter of land in Decentraland has dropped from ~$45 in 2022 to $5 in 2023, as the hype around the metaverse has receded  —  Disney and Microsoft both closed projects tied to the digital realm this month  —  Watch: What's the Future of the Metaverse?
New York Times:
How NetEase and Activision's 14-year partnership fell apart, in part due to China's tech crackdown, as filings show the deal was worth ~$750M in annual revenue  —  Activision Blizzard and NetEase could not agree on a new deal to distribute video games in China, cutting millions of players from the games in January.
Jon Victor / The Information:
Sources: Google Brain and DeepMind have been forced to work together on a project known as Gemini to compete with OpenAI's GPT-4, after Bard's stumble  —  OpenAI's success in overtaking Google with an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot has achieved what seemed impossible in the past …
Financial Times:
As Microsoft, Meta, Google, Amazon, Twitter, and others cut their responsible AI teams, experts worry about potential abuses, disinformation, and hallucination  —  Microsoft, Amazon and Google among those to cut ‘responsible AI’ teams as part of broader reductions
Justin Ling / Wired:
Docs: investments in 4chan include $800K from owner Hiroyuki Nishimura, $4.8M from his company, and $2.4M from Tokyo-based Good Smile, which makes Disney toys  —  Documents obtained by WIRED confirm that Good Smile, which licenses toy production for Disney, was an investor in the controversial image board.
James Reddick / The Record:
The FDA says approval for medical devices now requires meeting certain cybersecurity standards issued in the omnibus spending bill signed in December 2022  —  The Food and Drug Administration affirmed Wednesday that medical device manufacturers must now prove their products meet certain …
Delphine Strauss / Financial Times:
Goldman Sachs research finds generative AI could increase annual global GDP by 7% over a 10-year period and expose 300M full-time jobs to automation globally  —  Technology could boost global GDP by 7% but also risks creating ‘significant disruption’  —  The latest breakthroughs …
Christopher M. Matthews / Wall Street Journal:
Court records and messages from alleged hackers reveal a massive hacking campaign targeting thousands of environmental activists, dating back to at least 2017  —  Charity of Rockefeller heirs among groups targeted by hackers; oil giant not accused of wrongdoing
Karissa Bell / Engadget:
Twitter details new API access tiers: Free with 1.5K tweets/month at app level, Basic for $100/month, and Enterprise; old APIs will stop working in 30 days  —  Twitter has finally confirmed some of the details and pricing for the new version of its API.  The company had previously delayed …
Sarah Wynn / The Block:
The SEC sues shuttered crypto exchange Beaxy and its execs for allegedly not registering and Beaxy Digital's founder for raising $8M via unregistered token BXY  —  - The SEC brought charges against crypto platform Beaxy on Wednesday for allegedly not registering as an exchange, broker or a clearing agency.
Nilay Patel / The Verge:
Q&A with Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko on open-source governance, business models, rejecting VC firms, running instances, ActivityPub, content moderation, and more  —  CEO Eugen Rochko on running — and growing — a decentralized social network. … Eugen Rochko is the CEO of Mastodon …

Sponsor Posts

Tribe AI:
Build AI products that matter  —  Tribe AI helps organizations rapidly deploy AI solutions that have real business impact.  We bring together world class AI talent and tooling to drive differentiated results.
Zoho:
CIO challenge 6: Can we find an effective solution that also minimizes operational costs?  —  Welcome to the next and final installment of our CIO series!  After what feels like a thousand cups of coffee …
Hamming:
Make AI Voice Agents trustworthy  —  Hamming AI automatically tests AI voice agents and continuously monitors them in production.
Techmeme Leaderboards:
Discover the top reporters on AI, VR, policy, and much more  —  We've analyzed Techmeme's news crawl to identify the most influential and prolific writers on 48 news topics.  Download reports immediately for just $100.
Techmeme Ride Home:
Fri. 11/15 - Crypto Ascendant
The day's tech news, every day at 5pm ET. Fifteen minutes and you're up to date.
Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or RSS.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 11:40 PM ET, March 29, 2023.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

More News

Akash Pasricha / The Information:
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:

Earlier Picks

Indu Bhan / The Economic Times:
Ryan Browne / CNBC:
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Max Goldbart / Deadline:
Emma Roth / The Verge:
Reuters: