Techmeme
May 31, 2023, 1:00 PM

Top News

Bloomberg:
Filing: Fidelity marks down its Twitter stake, estimating that Twitter is now worth about 33% of the $44B that Elon Musk paid, down from 44% in November 2022  —  Twitter is now worth just one-third of what Elon Musk paid for the social-media platform, according to Fidelity …
Cynthia Littleton / Variety:
Activision CEO Bobby Kotick says he was humbled and outraged by toxic workplace claims and blames “outside forces” for most of Activision's image issues  —  Bobby Kotick has a secret: He was ready to buy Time Warner a few years ago.The CEO of Activision Blizzard drops this nugget early …
Andy Greenberg / Wired:
Eclypsium: a firmware flaw in 271 Gigabyte motherboards could let hackers install malware when the PC restarts; Gigabyte plans a fix, but problems could persist  —  Hidden code in hundreds of models of Gigabyte motherboards invisibly and insecurely downloads programs—a feature ripe for abuse, researchers say.
Oliver Whang / New York Times:
A look at the BabyLM Challenge, which aims to create language models with datasets that are less than one-ten-thousandth the size of those used by advanced LLMs  —  Teaching fewer words to large language models might help them sound more human.  —  When it comes to artificial intelligence chatbots, bigger is typically better.
Mia Sato / The Verge:
Priya Anand / Bloomberg:
An investigation into Papa, a TaskRabbit-like service for seniors that has raised $240M, finds dozens of allegations of harassment, assault, theft, and more  —  If you've been to an annual open enrollment fair in the past few years, you may have noticed a new eldercare benefit with the unusual name of Papa.
Kevin Roose / New York Times:
How the Shoggoth, a character from a 1936 H.P. Lovecraft novella, became a meme among AI workers as a metaphor for not fully understanding LLMs' inner workings  —  The Shoggoth, a character from a science fiction story, captures the essential weirdness of the A.I. moment.
James Vincent / The Verge:
While OpenAI has become more upfront about ChatGPT's limitations, the company should do more to make clear the bot can't reliably distinguish fact from fiction  —  “May occasionally generate incorrect information.”  —  This is the warning OpenAI pins to the homepage of its AI chatbot ChatGPT …
David Kirton / Reuters:
Abner Li / 9to5Google:
Sources: Google plans to launch the Pixel Watch 2 in fall 2023 with a Snapdragon W5 series chip and Fitbit Sense 2-like sensors, alongside the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro  —  We revealed at the start of May that Google is planning to announce the Pixel Watch 2 alongside the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro …
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge:
Amazon Echo Pop review: a $40 bargain, nice design, good sound, and speedy responses, but fewer hardware features and less voice sensitive than the Dot  —  As the latest entry-level Alexa smart speaker, the $40 Echo Pop packs a lot of value into a small package.  It's not as good as the Echo Dot, but it's got looks on its side.
Nadia Asparouhova / Wired:
As GitHub prepares to close its San Francisco HQ, a look back at the living testament to tech culture, with its conflicts presaging a decade of tech backlash  —  The code-hosting platform's headquarters was a living testament to tech values and one of its first disputed territories.

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