Techmeme
May 12, 2023, 12:35 AM

Top News

Elon Musk / @elonmusk:
Elon Musk says he hired a CEO for X/Twitter and “she will be starting in ~6 weeks”; Musk will become “exec chair & CTO” overseeing “product, software, & sysops”  —  Excited to announce that I've hired a new CEO for X/Twitter. She will be starting in ~6 weeks! My role will transition to being exec chair & CTO, overseeing product, software & sysops. https://twitter.com/...
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: NBCUniversal's head of advertising Linda Yaccarino is in talks to become the new CEO of Twitter  —  Twitter owner Elon Musk said earlier he had picked a new chief executive, without naming the person  —  NBCUniversal's head of advertising Linda Yaccarino is in talks to become …
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Anthropic expands Claude's context window from 9K to 100K tokens, or ~75K words it can digest and analyze; OpenAI's GPT-4 has a context window of ~32K tokens  —  Historically and even today, poor memory has been an impediment to the usefulness of text-generating AI.
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch:
Meta announces AI Sandbox, with generative AI tools to help select advertisers create text variations, background images from text, and cropped images  —  Meta today announced an AI Sandbox for advertisers to help them create alternative copies, background generation through text prompts …
James Cirrone / Blockworks:
Coinbase apologizes for its newsletter calling Pepe the Frog a “hate symbol”, saying its overview “did not provide the whole picture of the history of the meme”  —  Coinbase has come out with an apology for its recent newsletter suggesting Pepe the Frog was a “hate symbol.”
Ryan Dinsdale / IGN:
Riot Games names its global president A. Dylan Jadeja as the company's new CEO starting later in 2023, succeeding Nicolo Laurent, who will stay on as an advisor  —  Succeeding Nicolo Laurent.  —  IGN can reveal that Riot Games global president A. Dylan Jadeja will succeed Nicolo Laurent as the company's CEO later this year.
Reuters:
EU lawmakers agree to ban facial recognition use in public and predictive policing tools, and set transparency rules on generative AI; details must be finalized  —  European lawmakers came a step closer to passing new rules regulating artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT …
Matthew Gault / VICE:
Twitter appears to disable autocomplete in its search bar after users pointed out that the feature was recommending gory videos of animal abuse and war footage  —  Searching for dog and cat videos returned horrifying results.  —  Matthew Gault  —  Twitter has disabled autocomplete …
Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch:
WhatsApp rolls out back-end updates to tackle spam calls, particularly prevalent in India, using its AI and ML systems, hoping to reduce the spam calls by 50%+  —  WhatsApp has announced that it has introduced back-end updates to tackle spam calls, which are particularly prevalent in India right now.
Alvise Armellini / Reuters:
Italy's AGCM opens an investigation into Apple over exempting its own apps from ATT, a day after the EU confirmed sending Apple Pay questionnaires to retailers  —  Italy's antitrust agency AGCM said on Thursday it had opened a probe into U.S. technology giant Apple (AAPL.O) for alleged abuse of its dominant position in the apps market.
Sean Hollister / The Verge:
Review of the $700 Asus ROG Ally: fast performance and a smooth variable refresh screen, but Windows is hard to use on a handheld and the UI has major glitches  —  A big step forward for Windows handhelds — but is Windows the way forward at all? … Windows handheld gaming PCs existed before the Deck …
Tom Mitchelhill / Cointelegraph:
The US Chamber of Commerce filed an amicus brief on May 9 in the Coinbase v. SEC case, slamming the regulator for its “haphazard, enforcement-based approach”  —  The largest business organization in the world has thrown its weight behind Coinbase in its fight against the SEC.
CNBC:
Sensor Tower: Bluesky had 628K mobile downloads in April 2023, up 606% from March, when its Android app launched, in addition to iOS; Mastodon had 90K downloads  —  - Bluesky has exploded in popularity over the past few months as measured by the number of mobile app downloads on both iOS and Android platforms.

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More News

Ryan Gallagher / Bloomberg:
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Earlier Picks

Ted Chiang / New Yorker:
Dylan Tokar / Wall Street Journal:
Bloomberg:
Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer:
Karissa Bell / Engadget: