Techmeme
December 14, 2023, 7:50 PM

Top News

Paul Alcorn / Tom's Hardware:
Gavin Bonshor / AnandTech:
Kif Leswing / CNBC:
Emma Roth / The Verge:
Kirsten Korosec / TechCrunch:
Email: Cruise lays off 900 staff, or ~24% of its workforce, targeting non-engineering jobs, as part of a plan to slash costs and attempt to revamp the company  —  Cruise, the embattled GM self-driving car subsidiary, is laying off 900 employees, or about 24% of its workforce …
Jon Porter / The Verge:
Meta launches Threads in the European Union, following the US, the UK, and 100+ other countries, and adds a way for EU users to browse Threads without a profile  —  Meta's Twitter competitor, Threads, is now available in the European Union, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced.
Rohan Goswami / CNBC:
The US DOJ announces an indictment for four people, two of whom have been arrested, in an alleged international pig butchering crypto scam costing victims $80M+  —  - Los Angeles federal prosecutors said four indictments and two arrests had been made in an international “pig butchering” scheme.
Will Douglas Heaven / MIT Technology Review:
Google DeepMind's FunSearch model cracks the unsolved cap set problem in pure mathematics, the first time an LLM has solved a long-standing scientific puzzle  —  They had to throw away most of what it produced but there was gold among the garbage.  —  Google DeepMind has used a large language model …
Umar Shakir / The Verge:
Google plans to test Tracking Protection and blocking third-party cookies on January 4 for ~1% of Chrome users globally, ahead of a phased rollout in H2 2024  —  Google is about to launch its grand plan to block third-party cookies in Chrome that many websites use to track your activity across the web for profit.
Jon Victor / The Information:
Sources: Google plans to use Gemini across nearly its entire line of products and in Pixie, an upcoming AI assistant that will be exclusive to its Pixel devices  —  For Google, it was a moment to savor its apparent triumph over the doomsayers.  —  Last week, the company released the first version …
Simon Willison / Simon Willison's Weblog:
The confusion around Dropbox's AI toggle highlights an AI trust crisis where many users don't believe OpenAI's claims that their data won't be used for training  —  Dropbox added some new AI features.  In the past couple of days these have attracted a firestorm of criticism.
Threads: @jinaMastodon: @zarfeblong@mastodon …X: @simonw, @rstankov, @bengoldhaber, and @iethicsForums: Hacker News
Benj Edwards / Ars Technica:
Aria Alamalhodaei / TechCrunch:
Amazon validates Project Kuiper's optical inter-satellite links, which use infrared lasers to move data around 30% faster than terrestrial fiber optical cables  —  Amazon's Project Kuiper successfully validated key technology that will increase throughput and reduce latency for customers using …
Jordan Novet / CNBC:
Sources: LinkedIn shelves its effort, announced in 2019, to relocate its data centers out of its physical facilities and into Azure, a setback for Microsoft  —  - LinkedIn called off a plan to move technology to Microsoft Azure, a setback for its parent company, which is chasing Amazon Web Services.
Ben Horowitz / Andreessen Horowitz:
Andreessen Horowitz says “we will, for the first time, get involved with politics by supporting candidates who align with our vision and values” for technology  —  As software has eaten the world, it has become integral to every industry and nearly every endeavor in our society.
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch:
Instagram launches a generative AI background editing tool in the US, letting users change the background for their Stories using text prompts  —  Instagram introduced its generative AI-powered background editing tool to U.S.-based users Wednesday.  —  Meta's lead for generative AI Ahmad Al-Dahle posted …
Malak Saleh / Engadget:
Guthrie Scrimgeour / Wired:
A look at Koolau Ranch, Mark Zuckerberg's 1,400-acre, $270M+ compound in Kauai, Hawaii, with a 5,000 sq. ft. underground shelter, a project shrouded in secrecy  —  Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is building a sprawling, $100 million compound in Hawaii—complete with plans for a huge underground bunker.
Jason Koebler / 404 Media:
Three Polish hackers say they fixed trains allegedly bricked by manufacturer Newag because an independent repair shop worked on them; Newag denies bricking them  —  Join the newsletter to get the latest updates.  —  Success  —  Great!  Check your inbox and click the link.  —  Error
Subrat Patnaik / Bloomberg:
Apple's stock rose 1.7% to close at $197.96 on December 13, surpassing its previous record close in July 2023, for a ~$3.08T market cap; AAPL is up 57% in 2023  —  - Shares surpass July high, putting market cap at $3.08 trillion  — Revenue seen growing again in 2024 after falling this year
Will Knight / Wired:
OpenAI details how its Superalignment research team is exploring ways to control stronger AI models like GPT-4 using weaker supervisor models like GPT-2  —  The “superalignment” team led by OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever has devised a way to guide the behavior of AI models as they get ever smarter.

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More News

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Earlier Picks

Chris Welch / The Verge:
Natasha Singer / New York Times:
AJ Vicens / CyberScoop: