Techmeme
November 21, 2023, 12:35 PM

Top News

Financial Times:
Sources: 97%+ of OpenAI staff have signed the letter threatening to quit in board standoff; investors explore legal measures to force board to reverse course  —  More than 95% of employees have threatened to quit and join Microsoft if board refuses to resign
CNBC:
The Verge:
Matthew Prince / @eastdakota:
Adi Robertson / The Verge:
Texas' AG, “troubled” by Elon Musk's claims, probes Media Matters, which calls X's suit “frivolous”; X avoids anti-SLAPP statutes by filing in the 5th Circuit  —  X, formerly Twitter, has followed through with owner Elon Musk's threat to sue the left-leaning nonprofit Media Matters.
Sharon Knolle / The Wrap:
Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch:
The Verge:
Epic v. Google: a Google exec confirms that Spotify pays no commission when users buy subscriptions via Spotify's payment system and 4% when they pay via Google  —  Music streaming service Spotify struck a seemingly unique and highly generous deal with Google for Android-based payments …
Malathi Nayak / Bloomberg:
Epic v. Google: Tim Sweeney says Android is a “fake open platform”; under cross-examination, Sweeney admitted to paying a 30% cut to Sony, Xbox, and Nintendo  —  - Fortnite maker's CEO testifies at high-stakes antitrust trial  — Google has denied abusing power in app distribution market
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Changpeng Zhao plans to step down and plead guilty in US court to breaking money laundering laws, part of a $4.3B deal; CZ can keep Binance ownership  —  Zhao's crypto exchange will also admit wrongdoing and agree to pay $4.3 billion in fines  —  The chief executive of Binance …
Stephanie Palazzolo / The Information:
Source: OpenAI's board approached Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei about a potential merger as part of an effort to persuade Amodei to replace Sam Altman as CEO  —  OpenAI's board of directors approached Dario Amodei, the co-founder and CEO of rival large-language model developer Anthropic …
Kate Clark / The Information:
Sources: OpenAI's board offered the interim CEO role to former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Scale AI CEO Alex Wang, before Emmett Shear accepted  —  Before Emmett Shear accepted the Interim CEO role at OpenAI, the board offered it to Nat Friedman, the former CEO of Microsoft-owned GitHub …
Olivia Solon / Bloomberg:
Lauren Goode / Wired:
Q&A with Del Harvey, who led Twitter's trust and safety team for 13 years until 2021, on the X rebrand, her role, Gamergate, Donald Trump, January 6, and more  —  From Israel vs. Hamas threats to Donald Trump's “wild” posts, Del Harvey helped make the platform's hardest content moderation calls for 13 years.
Nikhilesh De / CoinDesk:
In a lawsuit, the US SEC accuses Kraken of commingling customer and corporate funds while operating as an unregistered broker, clearing agency, and dealer  —  The U.S. crypto exchange is the latest targeted by the Securities and Exchange Commission in a series of similar actions being fought in court by other companies.
Kristi Hines / Search Engine Journal:
Anthropic debuts Claude 2.1, offering a context window of up to 200K tokens, or ~150K words, a claimed 50%+ increase in accuracy, new API integrations, and more  —  Claude 2.1 boasts a 150K word context window to parse long documents, 50%+ accuracy gains, early support for tool integration, and more.
Financial Times:
Filings: Tether deposited $1B+ with Britannia Financial, founded by a Tory donor later charged by the US with bribery, a rare look at its banking relationships  —  Funds from the world's largest stablecoin issuer are at the centre of a High Court battle  —  Tether deposited more than $1bn …
Aamir Siddiqui / Android Authority:
YouTube confirms that “users who have ad blockers installed may experience suboptimal viewing”, after users reported five-second delays on non-Chrome browsers  —  - Users are reportedly seeing a five-second delay when loading YouTube videos in non-Chrome browsers …
Olivia Solon / Bloomberg:
Palantir and Accenture win a £480M NHS contract to overhaul the UK's patient data system; some worry about privacy as patients can't opt out of data sharing  —  - Platform will help hospitals detect patterns in medical data  — Palantir's software managed UK's Covid vaccine rollout
Washington Post:
Investigation: as Amazon and Netflix back down on daring films, self-censorship pervades the Indian streaming industry due to pressure from Modi's ruling BJP  —  MUMBAI — Over a three-decade career, the filmmaker Anurag Kashyap often trained a critical eye on his native India as he wove tales …

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Cristiano Lima / Washington Post: