Techmeme
February 14, 2024, 1:40 PM

Top News

Alex Heath / The Verge:
In a video, Mark Zuckerberg shares his thoughts on the Vision Pro, saying Quest 3 “is the better product, period”, highlighting Apple's tradeoffs, and more  —  Now that it can be strapped to our faces and worn in strange places, opinions about Apple's Vision Pro are flying left and right.
More: Thurrott, Club386, The Independent, ExtremeTech, Dexerto, Deadline, Android Central, KnowTechie, Inc.com, Sandhill Report, TipRanks Financial, Raleigh News & Observer, New York Post, Silicon UK, CNBC, TechRadar, Wait But Why, Marques Brownlee on YouTube, PhoneArena, Cult of Mac, BeInCrypto, MIXED Reality News, BroBible, Gizchina, Türkiye Newspaper, Android Headlines, TechSpot, Wccftech, Business Insider, and UploadVR
M.G. Siegler / Spyglass:
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Microsoft and OpenAI say hackers, including Russian, North Korean, Iranian, and Chinese-backed groups, are already using LLMs to refine and improve cyberattacks  —  Microsoft and OpenAI are revealing today that hackers are already using large language models like ChatGPT to refine and improve their existing cyberattacks.
Bloomberg:
Sony reports Q3 revenue up 22% YoY to ~$25.11B, operating income up 10% YoY to ~$3.1B, both meeting est., and 8.2M PS5 units sold, roughly 1M lower than est.  —  - Company reversing course after taking the unit private in 2020  — Underwhelming PlayStation 5 sales led to outlook cut
Thomas Germain / Gizmodo:
A Mozilla study of 11 AI romance chatbots finds that they harvest shockingly personal information, and that 10 of them may sell or share the data they collect  —  The privacy mess is troubling because the chatbots actively encourage you to share details that are far more personal than in a typical app.
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: Bart Andre, Apple's longest-serving senior industrial designer, told colleagues in February that he's retiring; Andre joined in 1992 alongside Jony Ive  —  - Bart Andre retiring after three decades on design team  — Departure marks near-complete turnover of group since Ive era
Emma Roth / The Verge:
Slack rolls out AI features that summarize threads, offer channel recaps, let users ask questions, and more to Enterprise users, after testing Slack AI in 2023  —  Slack is launching a suite of built-in AI features that serve up summaries of threads and channel recaps, while also allowing …
Harish Jonnalagadda / Windows Central:
Nvidia Chat with RTX hands-on: 35GB installer, Mistral 7B and Llama 2 are 70GB, great at summarizing details and targeted questions, but no follow-up questions  —  NVIDIA's AI chatbot runs locally on your PC, and it works with the data you provide.  —  NVIDIA does a lot of interesting things around AI …
Aamir Siddiqui / Android Authority:
Samsung announces an upcoming Galaxy S24 series update that adds a Vividness display slider, after users complained that the more natural color tuning is dull  —  - Samsung has announced that the upcoming February update for the Galaxy S24 series will improve its display and camera experiences.
Sean Michael Kerner / VentureBeat:
Stability AI details Stable Cascade, a new image generation model built on a different architecture to SDXL to improve performance and accuracy, now in preview  —  Stability AI, the company behind the popular Stable Diffusion text-to-image generative AI technology is now previewing a new image generation model called Stable Cascade.
Aggi Cantrill / Bloomberg:
Google's TAG details how pro-Palestinian hacking group Blackatom tried to dupe Israeli software engineers into downloading malware weeks ahead of October 7  —  Apple's Longest-Serving Designer to Depart Company, Adding to Exodus  —  Apple iMessage, Microsoft Bing Dodge EU's Big Tech Crackdown
Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat:
In a research paper, Apple researchers detail Keyframer, an AI animation prototyping tool that uses LLMs to animate static images via natural language prompts  —  Apple researchers have unveiled a new AI tool called “Keyframer,” which harnesses the power of large language models (LLMs) …
Wes Davis / The Verge:
DuckDuckGo adds a Sync & Backup tool to its browser that syncs passwords, bookmarks, and favorites without requiring an account, and says the data is E2EE  —  DuckDuckGo has added a new “Sync & Backup” feature to its privacy-first browser that will keep passwords, bookmarks …
The Information:
AI researcher Andrej Karpathy, one of OpenAI's founding members, leaves the startup; Karpathy was developing a product that he had described as an AI assistant  —  Andrej Karpathy, one of the founding members of OpenAI, has left the company, a spokesperson confirmed.
Paayal Zaveri / Bloomberg:
Y Combinator releases a new list of 20 types of startups the accelerator wants to join its program, the biggest overhaul of its Request for Startups since 2018  —  The prominent Silicon Valley startup accelerator overhauled its list of promising startup sectors.
Foo Yun Chee / Reuters:
TikTok plans to launch an in-app local language Election Centre in March 2024 in all 27 EU countries, to fight misinformation ahead of the Parliament elections  —  ByteDance-owned social media platform TikTok said on Wednesday it will ramp up its fight against fake news and covert influence operations …
Bloomberg:
Google partners with the Environmental Defense Fund to help track and attribute methane emissions observed by the MethaneSAT satellite, set to launch in March  —  The tech company will work with the Environmental Defense Fund to track some of the world's most devastating and avoidable emissions observed by the nonprofit's satellite.
Alistair Barr / Business Insider:
A typo in Lyft's Q4 release mistakenly forecast a 500 BPS of EBITDA margin improvement for 2024, causing a stock surge, before the error was corrected to 50 BPS  —  - Lyft mistakenly forecast 500 basis points of margin improvement for 2024, causing a stock surge.
Antonia Mufarech / Bloomberg:
Lauren Kaori Gurley / Washington Post:
Uber and Lyft drivers in at least 17 US cities, including Los Angeles and Chicago, hold a one-day strike over pay; UK-based food app couriers are also on strike  —  Thousands of drivers for ride-share platforms Uber and Lyft, as well as the food delivery service DoorDash are expected to strike on Wednesday …
Mike Wheatley / SiliconANGLE:
Sydney-based quantum computing startup Diraq extends its Series A to $35M led by Quantonation, taking its total funding to $120M+, to build quantum processors  —  Australian quantum computing startup Diraq Pty Ltd. said today it has closed on a $15 million capital raise that will be used …
More: Diraq

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