Techmeme
July 12, 2023, 7:15 PM

Top News

Rachel Metz / Bloomberg:
Elon Musk forms xAI, a startup he will lead to “understand the true nature of the universe”; the staff has worked at Google, Microsoft, Tesla, OpenAI, and more  —  Elon Musk, who has hinted for months that he wants to build an alternative to the popular ChatGPT artificial intelligence chatbot …
Colin Lecher / The Markup:
New York Times:
Microsoft says Chinese hackers gained access to US government email accounts and had access to at least some accounts for a month before the breach was detected  —  The hack, by a Chinese group that the company said was intent on conducting espionage, went undetected for a month.  —  Reporting from Washington
Reuters:
The UK CMA will not accept new Microsoft and Activision Blizzard remedies but says a restructured deal may satisfy its concerns, subject to a new investigation  —  Britain's competition regulator said on Wednesday that a new restructured Microsoft-Activision deal could require a fresh merger investigation.
Mike Scarcella / Reuters:
Experts: the FTC faces hurdles in any Activision ruling appeal as the facts work in Microsoft's favor; some question the judge's standard on harming competition  —  The U.S. Federal Trade Commission would face hurdles in any appeal of a court's order on Tuesday that said Microsoft (MSFT.O) …
Cecilia Kang / New York Times:
Toby Bochan / CoinDesk:
In a major policy shift, Google Play now lets developers incorporate tokenized digital assets, such as NFTs, into their Android apps and games  —  The company is opening up the ability for developers to let users buy, sell or earn digital assets in apps as long as they maintain transparency and adhere to other rules.
Ash Parrish / The Verge:
Xbox tests reactive voice chat moderation, letting Xbox Insiders report 60-second audio clips of inappropriate voice messages for the Xbox safety team to review  —  Rolling out today to Xbox Insiders, the new reporting feature will allow players to capture and submit 60-second audio clips …
Jay Peters / The Verge:
Meta says Roblox is coming to Meta's Quest 2, Quest Pro, and Quest 3, starting with an open beta on App Lab “in the coming weeks”, with cross-platform support  —  / It's launching in open beta in the ‘coming weeks.’  —  Roblox will be coming to Meta's Quest VR headsets starting …
Richard MacManus / The New Stack:
A look at Meta's plan to adopt ActivityPub for Threads, how ActivityPub suits Meta's goals, and the technical challenges and social pressure facing the company  —  From a developer point of view, the fact that Meta's Threads app has quickly gone over 100 million sign-ups isn't the most interesting part of this latest Twitter clone.
Andrew Deck / Rest of World:
A look at the global freelancer labor force on sites like 99designs, some of whom are early generative AI adopters and are most at risk of being replaced by AI  —  The global labor force of outsourced and contract workers are early adopters of generative AI — and the most at risk.  —  R
Chainalysis:
Crypto crime in H1 2023 vs. H1 2022: inflows to known illicit entities fell 65% YoY, scammers took nearly $3.3B less, and ransomware attackers made $175.8M more  —  2023 so far has been a year of recovery for cryptocurrency after a chaotic 2022, with prices of digital assets like Bitcoin up over 80% on the year as of June 30.
Jack Schickler / CoinDesk:
The European Securities and Markets Authority issues detailed proposals on crypto companies under the EU's MiCA law; more are due in October 2023 and early 2024  —  Consultations cover authorization and conflict-of-interest rules for crypto companies under the landmark digital assets regulation
Ben Thompson / Stratechery:
Twitter's best defense against Threads may be to refocus on news and reactions from people users follow, leaving user growth via an algorithmic feed to Threads  —  If you're only going to tweet once every 11 years, then you better make it count; the best way to do just that is to pull off a well-executed meme:
Davey Alba / Bloomberg:
Sources reveal how contractors audit Bard's answers in subjects ranging from medication doses to state laws, sometimes with deadlines as short as three minutes  —  Google's Bard artificial intelligence chatbot will answer a question about how many pandas live in zoos quickly, and with a surfeit of confidence.
Reuters:
Recursion, which uses AI models for drug discovery, plans to use its 23K+ TB datasets to train its models on Nvidia's cloud platform and raised $50M from Nvidia  —  Nvidia (NVDA.O) invested $50 million to speed up training of biotech firm Recursion's (RXRX.O) artificial intelligence models …
David Kirton / Reuters:
Research: Huawei is plotting a return to the 5G smartphone market by the end of 2023 using its own 14nm+ chip design tools and SMIC's 7nm chipmaking process  —  - US-sanctioned giant likely to produce 5G chips domestically  — Chips expected to use Huawei EDA tools and SMIC production
Catherine Thorbecke / CNN:
A California law firm hits Google with a proposed class-action lawsuit, alleging data scraping for AI training without user consent, after a similar OpenAI case  —  Google was hit with a wide-ranging lawsuit on Tuesday alleging the tech giant scraped data from millions of users without …
Heather Haddon / Wall Street Journal:
Domino's Pizza partners with Uber Eats in the US, the UK, Canada, and 25 other markets, reversing its long-held stance against working with food delivery apps  —  Pizza chain hopes to generate $1 billion in sales after losing business to apps  —  Domino's Pizza, hungry to claw back pizza sales …

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