Techmeme
November 8, 2023, 12:45 PM

Top News

Jason Schreier / Bloomberg:
Rockstar plans to begin promoting Grand Theft Auto VI, expected to be one of the decade's biggest video games, in December, coinciding with its 25th anniversary  —  The company plans to release a trailer for the game in December, according to a blog post by Rockstar's president Sam Houser.
Salvador Rodriguez / Wall Street Journal:
Meta plans to require advertisers to disclose running political ads with media altered by AI or other software, starting in early 2024, ahead of the US election  —  Facebook parent said new policy to go into effect beginning next year, ahead of U.S. presidential primaries
Margi Murphy / Bloomberg:
Ahead of the 2024 US election, Microsoft plans to offer a new free tool to help US politicians fight deepfakes by authenticating their videos and photos  —  - Tool offering comes as concerns grow over fake photos, videos  — Microsoft says Russia is ‘huge’ cyber, disinformation threat
Javier Espinoza / Financial Times:
In a letter, Google and EU telcos called on the European Commission to designate iMessage as a “core” service to make the chat app fully compatible with rivals  —  Companies want chat app designated a ‘core’ service that would require it to be fully compatible with rivals
Gearoid Reidy / Bloomberg:
A look at Nintendo's movie push, as the company partners with Sony to work on a live-action Zelda movie, after the huge success of The Super Mario Bros. Movie  —  It's dangerous to go alone, and in teaming up with Sony and the man who made Marvel successful, Nintendo shows it has learned from past mistakes.
Cho Mu-Hyun / ZDNet:
Samsung unveils Gauss, a generative AI model developed by Samsung Research, currently used for staff productivity with plans to expand to product applications  —  Samsung has for the first time publicly unveiled its own generative AI model dubbed Samsung Gauss on Wednesday.
Anissa Gardizy / The Information:
Source: Amazon is developing a new LLM, codenamed Olympus, which could be announced by December and may power new features for the online store, Alexa, and AWS  —  Uber is finally on the right road.  That could be Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi's motto today, as the ride-hailing …
Caroline O'Donovan / Washington Post:
Amazon cuts the price of an annual One Medical membership from $199 to $99 for Prime users, part of its plans to significantly expand its health care footprint  —  The tech giant will offer cheaper health care to Prime members via One Medical, a long-expected integration that could significantly expand its health care footprint
Tom Krisher / Associated Press:
Cruise recalls all 950 of its autonomous cars to update their software after one dragged a pedestrian to the side of a San Francisco street on October 2  —  General Motors' Cruise autonomous vehicle unit is recalling all 950 of its cars to update software after one of them dragged a pedestrian …
Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer:
WhatsApp now lets iOS and Android users hide their location during calls by relaying the connection through its servers to obfuscate IP address metadata  —  WhatsApp is rolling out a new privacy feature that helps Android and iOS users hide their location during calls by relaying the connection through WhatsApp servers.
Anna Irrera / Bloomberg:
HSBC partners with Ripple to offer institutional clients a custody service for digital assets, set to launch in 2024, complementing its digital assets issuance  —  - Latest blockchain offering is expected to go live in 2024  —  HSBC Holdings Plc plans to offer institutional clients …
Matt Growcoot / PetaPixel:
Adobe's site for stock images lists AI-generated images of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and some small outlets have used them without labeling them as AI  —  As fears rise over fake imagery generated by artificial intelligence flooding the internet, one of the world's leading stock photo websites …
Caitlin Huston / Hollywood Reporter:
Spotify now offers US paid subscribers 15 hours of free access to 200K+ audiobooks per month, after launching the service in the UK and Australia on October 3  —  The podcast and music platform will offer U.S. paid subscribers 15 hours of free listening to audiobooks as it continues its rollout of the new offering.
Tobias Mann / The Register:
Microsoft and Oracle sign a multiyear deal to “support the explosive growth of AI services”, letting Microsoft use Nvidia A100s and H100 GPUs via Oracle's cloud  —  Frenemies in multi-year deal to offload AI inference to Big Red super-cluster  —  Demand for Microsoft's AI services …
Lauren Smiley / Wired:
How San Francisco's citizen surveillance culture, with incidents often posted to X, turned the story of a bloody street attack inside out, causing viral outrage  —  When a homeless man attacked a former city official, footage of the onslaught became a rallying cry.
Jacob Judah / MIT Technology Review:
How .tk, the ccTLD for New Zealand's Tokelau territory, gained 25M users, more than any other ccTLD until recently, by becoming cybercriminals' domain of choice  —  Tokelau, a necklace of three isolated atolls strung out across the Pacific, is so remote that it was the last place on Earth to be connected to the telephone—only in 1997.
Bloomberg:
Sources: USDC stablecoin issuer Circle is weighing an IPO in early 2024; Circle was valued at $9B when the startup tried to go public via a SPAC merger in 2022  —  - Backers include Goldman Sachs, General Catalyst and BlackRock  — Circle had tried to go public via blank-check deal in 2022
Matt G. Southern / Search Engine Journal:
Google adds generative AI text and image features to its Performance Max ad platform, rolling out in beta to US advertisers in 2023 and more countries in 2024  —  Google launches generative AI in Performance Max to help marketers easily create customized text and image ads at scale.
Bloomberg:
Anthropic will use Google's Cloud TPU v5e chips to help power its LLM Claude; sources: Anthropic agreed to spend $3B+ on Google's cloud services over four years  —  Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic will be one of the first companies to use new chips from Alphabet Inc.'s Google …
Kate Clark / The Information:
Document: Coatue cut the value of its $120M OpenSea stake to $13M as of Q2 2023, implying a $1.4B valuation or less on paper, down from $13.3B in January 2022  —  One of OpenSea's biggest investors has marked down by 90% its stake in the struggling non-fungible-token marketplace …

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