Techmeme
February 27, 2024, 5:45 AM

Top News

Bloomberg:
During oral arguments, SCOTUS justices seemed reluctant to strike down Texas' and Florida's social media laws, but raised concerns about companies' 1A rights  —  - Justices wary of entirely striking down Texas, Florida laws  — But court voices concern about impact on company speech rights
Washington Post:
Reuters:
Sources: the BlackCat ransomware gang is behind the outage at UnitedHealth's technology unit that has disrupted services at pharmacies in the US for six days  —  Figurines with computers and smartphones are seen in front of the words “Cyber Attack” in this illustration taken, February 19, 2024.
Romain Dillet / TechCrunch:
Mistral AI releases Mistral Large, a cheaper GPT-4 rival that supports 32K-token context windows, and Le Chat, a ChatGPT-like chat assistant in public beta  —  Paris-based AI startup Mistral AI is gradually building an alternative to OpenAI and Anthropic as its latest announcement shows.
Madhumita Murgia / Financial Times:
Katrina Manson / Bloomberg:
The CTO for US Central Command says AI developed for Project Maven was used to narrow down targets for 85+ air strikes in the Middle East on February 2  —  - Algorithms were developed under the Pentagon's Project Maven  — AI isn't ready to recommend the order of attack, official says
Javier Espinoza / Financial Times:
The EU is asking developers about the impact of Apple's decision to disable PWAs in the EU, seen as a precursor to a formal investigation into the company  —  Competition regulators in Brussels send questions to developers over iPhone maker's decision  —  The EU has taken the first steps towards …
Ryan Gallagher / Bloomberg:
The US adds Sandvine to its entity list, banning the networking equipment company from obtaining US tech, for supplying Egypt with equipment used for censorship  —  - Commerce Department largely bans tech firm from US purchases  — Egypt was one of numerous countries where content was blocked
Samuel Stolton / Bloomberg:
Microsoft says its investment in Mistral AI amounts to €15M; EU regulators plan to analyze the investment, which could eventually lead to a formal investigation  —  - Partnership amounts to €15 million investment, Microsoft says  — EU analysis could lead to future formal investigation
Manish Singh / TechCrunch:
Shadowfax, which operates a B2B logistics network in 2,500 Indian cities, raised a $100M Series E, bringing its total funding to $220M  —  Shadowfax, one of the largest logistics service providers to hyper-local and on-demand delivery businesses in India, has raised $100 million …
Ben Thompson / Stratechery:
While Google paused Gemini's image generation, its text generation tool also offers some absurd responses, highlighting the need for flourishing open source AI  —  Last Wednesday, when the questions about Gemini's political viewpoint were still limited to its image creation capabilities, I accused the company of being timid:
Sean Hollister / The Verge:
Nvidia plans to start showing free-tier users of GeForce Now “up to two minutes” of video ads while waiting in queue to start a cloud gaming session  —  Nvidia's completely free, no-strings attached trial of its cloud gaming service GeForce Now is about to be very slightly less of a deal …

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