Techmeme
August 24, 2023, 11:00 PM

Top News

Yueqi Yang / Bloomberg:
Mastercard and Binance plan to end their card partnership in Latin America and Middle East on September 22; Visa stopped issuing Binance cards in Europe in July  —  - Visa halts issuing new Binance Card while Mastercard ends pact  — Crypto exchange under legal and regulatory challenges globally
Emilia David / The Verge:
Meta debuts Code Llama, which can generate code and debug human-written work, under the same community license as Llama 2, free for research and commercial use  —  Meta has released a tool called Code Llama, built on top of its Llama 2 large language model, to generate new code and debug human-written work, the company said.
Brendan Case / Bloomberg:
Walmart partners with Alphabet's Wing to test drone deliveries of up to six miles at two stores in the Dallas area, dropping off food and household essentials  —  - Project boosts aerial range capabilities for the retailer  — Service will be offered at two stores in the Dallas area
Suzanne Kapner / Wall Street Journal:
Shein acquires ~33% of Forever 21 parent company Sparc and Sparc takes a Shein minority stake, letting Shein sell Forever 21 items and operate inside its stores  —  Online fashion giant invests in company that operates retailer, paving way to sell its products  —  Shein and Forever 21 may soon be fast-fashion friends.
Brody Ford / Bloomberg:
Dropbox ends its unlimited option, capping its “all the space you need” storage plan to 5TB, after some abused the tier by pooling storage, reselling, and more  —  - Company says some abused ‘all the space you need’ policy  — Majority of users will see storage capped at 5 terabytes
Charlize Alcaraz / BetaKit:
Toronto-based Ideogram raised a $16.5M seed led by a16z and Index Ventures and launches a public beta of its generative AI-based text-to-image product  —  a16z, Canadian AI expert Raquel Urtasun, Github co-founder Tom Preston-Werner invested.  —  Toronto-based artificial intelligence (AI) …
Abner Li / 9to5Google:
Meta rolls out its Threads web app to all users, featuring an app bar at the top with the same five tabs as in the mobile app; tapping Home refreshes the Feed  —  Following Tuesday's announcement, Meta is widely rolling out the Threads web app, and it offers a pretty straightforward translation of the mobile experience.
Foo Yun Chee / Reuters:
To comply with the EU's DSA, Google plans to expand its Ads Transparency Center and offer more info on EU targeted ads, give researchers more access, and more  —  Google will provide more information on targeted advertisements and give researchers more access to data on how its products work …
Morgan Sung / TechCrunch:
Reddit launches the “Mod Helper Program”, a tiered system that rewards moderators with trophies and flairs for helping other moderators in r/ModSupport  —  Reddit is launching the “Mod Helper Program” to reward moderators who offer helpful advice to other moderators, along with an updated moderator help center.
Forums: r/ModSupport
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Hugging Face confirms raising a $235M Series D from Salesforce, Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, and others, bringing its total funding to $395.2M  —  As first reported by The Information, then seemingly verified by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff on X (formerly known as Twitter) …
VideoCardz.com:
MSI shares an unlisted video confirming Intel's upcoming 14th Gen CPUs will see no major core count upgrades and will be 3% faster on average than 13th Gen CPUs  —  MSI unimpressed with 14th Gen Core series  —  MSI made a mistake of sharing an unlisted video which has now leaked out.
Katherine Ross / Blockworks:
The US DOJ charges Tornado Cash co-founders Roman Storm, of Washington, and Roman Semenov, a Russian national, with money laundering and sanctions violations  —  The inclusion of the Tornado Cash co-founder on the list marks an escalation of the US government's previous investigations into the crypto mixer
Emily Bary / MarketWatch:
Affirm reports Q4 revenue up 22% YoY to $446M, vs. $406M est., net loss up 11% YoY to $206M, and GMV up 25% YoY to $5.5B, vs. $5.3B est.; AFRM jumps 5%+  —  Company ‘demonstrated that the business can continue to expand profitably even in a high interest rate environment,’ CFO says
Tom Phillips / Eurogamer.net:
Q&A with Phil Spencer on Game Pass, Microsoft's mobile focus, streaming story-based games like Starfield on mobile, Xbox generations, console prices, and more  —  Phil Spencer on new hardware, price drops, mid-gen refreshes - and why the company won't ditch Series S.  —  Interview by Tom Phillips Editor-in-Chief
Scott Moritz / Bloomberg:
Filing: T-Mobile plans to cut 7% of its global staff, or ~5,000 jobs, mostly in corporate and tech; AT&T has cut 74,130 jobs, or 32% of its staff, since 2021  —  T-Mobile USA Inc. is cutting 7% of its staff, part of an effort to rein in costs as the company spends heavily to attract …
Kris Holt / Engadget:
Epic Games debuts the Epic First Run program, offering developers 100% of net revenue for six months if they launch PC games exclusively on the Epic Games Store  —  Games and apps in the Epic First Run program will also benefit from extra exposure on the storefront.
Irregular Ideas:
We are at the tail end of the first wave of LLM-based AI, which outperforms the average human in some tasks but is not good enough and is expensive to train  —  On a recent cross-country trip—I (Paul) drove from California to Illinois and back again.  On the drive, I saw a sign I had never seen before …

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More News

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Jack Schickler / CoinDesk:

Earlier Picks

Erin Woo / The Information:
Mat Di Salvo / Decrypt:
David Gewirtz / ZDNet:
Brian Heater / TechCrunch:
Andrew E. Freedman / Tom's Hardware: