Techmeme
March 30, 2023, 3:25 PM

Top News

Washington Post:
Midjourney halts free trials, citing “extraordinary demand” and “abuse”, after fake images of Trump getting arrested and Pope Francis wearing a coat went viral  —  Midjourney, the year-old firm behind recent fake visuals of Trump and the pope, illustrates the lack …
Chloe Xiang / VICE:
Some signatories of the open letter to pause AI training walk back their positions, others turned out to be fake, and many experts disagree with its proposal  —  The letter has been signed by Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Andrew Yang, and leading AI researchers, but many experts and even signatories disagreed.
Matt Novak / Forbes:
As his companies lag OpenAI in the AI race, Musk launders his “concerns” about AI through the Future of Life Institute, primarily funded by the Musk Foundation  —  Elon Musk signed an open letter on Tuesday calling for a six-month pause in the development of artificial intelligence tools …
Jay Peters / The Verge:
Microsoft is exploring expanding ads in Bing Chat and sharing the ad revenue with partners whose content contributed to the chat response  —  It was inevitable, but Microsoft has confirmed that more ads are coming to Bing's AI-powered chatbot.  Microsoft corporate vice president Yusuf Mehdi …
Hartley Charlton / MacRumors:
Kuo: Apple's mixed reality headset may not appear at WWDC as mass production is pushed back to Q3, amid doubts about the device creating an “iPhone moment”  —  Apple has again pushed back mass production of its mixed-reality headset and the device may not appear …
Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer:
Researchers say hackers have compromised the 3CX VoIP IPBX desktop app, used by 600K+ companies and 12M+ daily users, in an ongoing supply chain attack  —  A digitally signed and trojanized version of the 3CX Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) desktop client is reportedly being used to target …
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 …
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: to comply with EU privacy rulings, Meta plans to let users opt out of some highly personalized ads via an online form that Meta must review and approve  —  Facebook, Instagram parent hopes plans to alter a privacy approach that would limit the impact from EU orders
Financial Times:
Jonathan Greig / The Record:
Google's Threat Analysis Group details two “limited and highly targeted” spyware campaigns using several zero-day exploits for Android, iOS, and mobile Chrome  —  Two targeted spyware campaigns involving several zero-day exploits for Android, iOS and mobile versions of the Chrome browser …
Adi Robertson / The Verge:
An AI tech ethics group asks the FTC to investigate OpenAI, saying its AI text generation tool rollout has been “biased, deceptive, and a risk to public safety”  —  An artificial intelligence-focused tech ethics group has asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate OpenAI …
Futurism:
BuzzFeed quietly started publishing fully AI-generated SEO-driven travel posts by non-editorial staff on March 14; a spokesperson calls the posts an experiment  —  Earlier this year, when BuzzFeed announced plans to start publishing AI-assisted content, its CEO Jonah Peretti promised the tech would be held to a high standard.
The Guardian:
Leaked documents from Moscow-based NTC Vulkan reveal the company helps the GRU, FSB, and SVR with hacking operations, national infrastructure attacks, and more  —  Documents leaked by whistleblower angry over Ukraine war  —  Private Moscow consultancy bolstering Russian cyberwarfare
Oliver Darcy / @oliverdarcy:
[Thread] The New York Times and Los Angeles Times don't plan to buy Twitter Blue for their accounts; NYT, LAT, and BuzzFeed won't reimburse reporters for Blue  —  New: The New York Times says it is not planning to pay for Twitter verification: “We aren't planning to pay the monthly fee for verification of our institutional Twitter accounts,” a spokesperson tells me.
Karissa Bell / Engadget:
Reed Albergotti / Semafor:
Q&A with Vinod Khosla on how AI could “free humanity from the need to work”, seeing the AI future early, his OpenAI investment, AI and geopolitics, and more  —  At nearly 70, Vinod Khosla is an elder statesman in Silicon Valley but he's been on top of the most cutting-edge trends, including artificial intelligence.
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Netflix's iOS app code suggests the company is planning to expand its video game service to TVs for the first time, letting players use phones as controllers  —  Netflix Inc. is working to bring its nascent video-game service to television sets for the first time, moving beyond smartphones …

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Earlier Picks

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