Techmeme
December 4, 2023, 8:55 AM

Top News

Manish Singh / TechCrunch:
Spotify plans to lay off ~17% of its workforce, or ~1,500 staff, to “rightsize” its costs, citing slow growth and rising capital costs, after cutting 6% in June  —  Spotify is eliminating about 17% jobs, its third round of layoffs, as the music streaming looks to become “both productive and efficient.”
New York Times:
A deep dive into the founding of DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic, as many of their backers feared the risks of advanced AI but wanted the power to shape it  —  The people who were most afraid of the risks of artificial intelligence decided they should be the ones to build it.
Joseph Menn / Washington Post:
Disinformation scholar Joan Donovan claims in a whistleblower filing that her superiors soured on her as Harvard got the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative's $500M gift  —  In a whistleblower complaint, she breaks her silence over events that unsettled other misinformation researchers
Peter Martin / Bloomberg:
US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo says her department needs more money to stop China on chips and calls out Nvidia for redesigning for the Chinese market  —  - US commerce secretary cites Nvidia designs as case in point  — Tells chip CEOs ‘such is life’ as US security trumps revenue
Paresh Dave / Wired:
Documents: OpenAI signed a letter of intent in 2019 to spend $51M on brain-inspired chips developed by startup Rain AI, in which Sam Altman had invested $1M+  —  Documents show that OpenAI signed a letter of intent to spend $51 million on brain-inspired chips developed by startup Rain.
Bloomberg:
Bitcoin trades above $40K for the first time since May 2022, as the digital asset extends its 2023 rebound on expectations of interest-rate cuts and ETF demand  —  - Crypto rally has been driven by ETF hopes, rate-cut bets  — Bitcoin is on track for biggest annual gain since 2020
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Chase Bank could be an ideal Goldman Sachs replacement for Apple Card, as it uses the same Mastercard network and already has a strong relationship with Apple  —  Apple and Goldman Sachs are on the verge of splitting up, and Chase is the ideal partner to step in.
Hayden Field / CNBC:
Q&A with OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap on ChatGPT's launch, GPT-4, DALL-E, overhyping AI, the business of generative AI, ChatGPT Enterprise, multimodal AI, and more  —  - CNBC conducted an exclusive interview with the COO of the hottest startup in tech after its recent Dev Day, then followed up after the Sam Altman kerfuffle.
WABetaInfo:
WhatsApp updates its iOS app to let users send photos and videos in their original quality  —  WhatsApp has just submitted a new stable update for iOS, available on the App Store: the build number is 23.24.73.  —  What's new in this update?  WhatsApp is widely rolling out a feature to send original quality media as a file!

Sponsor Posts

Meta:
Open Source AI: Available to all, not just the few  —  Meta's open source AI enables small businesses, start-ups, students, researchers and more to download and build with our models at no cost.
Tribe AI:
Build AI products that matter  —  Tribe AI helps organizations rapidly deploy AI solutions that have real business impact.  We bring together world class AI talent and tooling to drive differentiated results.
Zoho:
Passkeys Week for a passwordless future: Learn how Zoho is embracing passkeys  —  Passkeys are the modern-day alternative authentication method that was introduced to replace traditional passwords for enhanced security and convenience.
Hamming:
Make AI Voice Agents trustworthy  —  Hamming AI automatically tests AI voice agents and continuously monitors them in production.
Techmeme Ride Home:
Tue. 11/19 - Microsoft Ignite
The day's tech news, every day at 5pm ET. Fifteen minutes and you're up to date.
Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or RSS.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 8:55 AM ET, December 4, 2023.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

More News

Matt Levine / Bloomberg:
Christopher Mims / Wall Street Journal:

Earlier Picks

Maria Sherman / Associated Press:
Tara García Mathewson / The Markup:
Jon Victor / The Information:
Jaron Schneider / PetaPixel: