Open Links In New Tab
Mobile Archives Site News
Techmeme
May 21, 2024, 6:40 PM
Mediagazer memeorandum WeSmirch
Home River Leaderboards About Sponsor Events Newsletter

Top News

Ken Yeung / VentureBeat:
Microsoft announces the general availability of its Phi-3 models, including Phi-3-Silica, a 3.3B parameter model that will be embedded on all Copilot+ PCs  —  Microsoft is making more investments in the development of small language models.  At its Build developer conference …
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Microsoft will soon let businesses build custom Copilot AI agents to automate tasks, and unveils Team Copilot to help with tasks in Teams, Loop, and Planner  —  Microsoft will soon allow businesses and developers to build AI-powered Copilots that can work like virtual employees and perform tasks automatically.
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
Microsoft launches Copilot Extension for GitHub, letting developers build third-party skills into Copilot, starting with DataStax, Stripe, MongoDB, and more  —  Build is Microsoft's largest developer conference and of course, it's all about AI this year.  So it's no surprise that GitHub's Copilot …
Ken Yeung / VentureBeat:
Microsoft partners with Khan Academy, moving the Khanmigo agent, used by 65K+ students, to its Azure OpenAI Service and making it free for US K-12 teachers  —  Microsoft is partnering with Khan Academy in a multifaceted deal to demonstrate how AI can transform the way we learn.
Sean Hollister / The Verge:
Microsoft announces the developer preview of Windows Volumetric Apps, giving access to an API that lets devs put Windows apps in 3D space on Meta Quest headsets  —  You can already beam your flat Windows desktop and its VR games onto your Meta Quest headset — but what if Windows could send HoloLens …
Kevin Okemwa / Windows Central:
Microsoft ships Azure AI Studio in broad availability, adds support for OpenAI's GPT-4o, and announces a new multimodal model in its lightweight Phi-3 family  —  Azure AI will now ship with GPT-4o and Microsoft's Phi-3 family of small AI models to help developers build custom Copilot apps responsibly and safely.
Bloomberg:
Sources: ASML and TSMC have ways to disable their machines if China invades Taiwan; ASML reassured Dutch officials about its ability to remotely disable them  —  - Firms can remotely shut off advanced EUV chip-making machines  — US officials concerned over risk of conflict to chip industry
Glenn Rifkin / New York Times:
Gordon Bell, who helped design several influential minicomputers at Digital Equipment Corporation, including the 12-bit PDP-8, died on May 17 at age 89  —  It cost $18,000 when it was introduced in 1965, but it bridged the world between room-size mainframes and the modern desktop.
Steven Levy / Wired:
Anthropic researchers detail attempts to peer inside the “black box” of LLMs, learning which combinations of neurons evoke specific concepts  —  What goes on in artificial neural networks work is largely a mystery, even to their creators.  But researchers from Anthropic have caught a glimpse.
Paresh Dave / Wired:
Google plans to test search and shopping ads in its AI Overviews, drawing from advertisers' existing campaigns; AI Overviews rolled out to US users last week  —  Google is set to start mixing ads into its new AI-generated search answers.  It's a test of how the company's biggest revenue stream can adapt to the age of generative AI.
Bradley Keoun / CoinDesk:
Farcaster, a blockchain-based social media project built on Ethereum, raised $150M in a round led by Paradigm and says it has 350K paid sign-ups  —  Dan Romero's Farcaster made waves earlier this year with the introduction of “Frames,” a feature allowing apps to run within posts, so users don't have to click off to another site.
Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat:
Generative AI music startup Suno raised $125M from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, Matrix, Founder Collective, and others  —  Suno, a trailblazing music AI startup, announced today that it has raised a staggering $125 million in its latest funding round …
Financial Times:
AI data labeling startup Scale AI raised $1B led by Accel at a ~$14B valuation, up from $7.3B in April 2021; a source says Scale AI had ~$700M in 2023 revenue  —  Alexandr Wang's company brings in $1bn in latest fundraising round as investors bet that data is the new oil
Ben Thompson / Stratechery:
Microsoft's Copilot+ PCs event was compelling, the culmination of years of work, and Windows feels revitalized while its hardware is meaningfully differentiated  —  Full disclosure: I didn't have any plans to write this Article; I had various reasons to be in the U.S. this week …
Kris Holt / Engadget:
Microsoft unveils Copilot+ PCs as a new class of AI-capable Windows PCs that have at least 40 TOPs of NPU performance, with several OEMs and chipmakers on board
Joyce Lee / Reuters:
Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Amazon, IBM, and 10 other companies commit to safe AI development at the AI Seoul Summit 2024, hosted by South Korea and the UK  —  Sixteen companies involved in AI including Alphabet's Google (GOOGL.O), Meta (META.O), Microsoft (MSFT.O) and OpenAI …
Jeff John Roberts / Fortune:
Tech Against Scams, a coalition to fight “pig butchering” ploys with better industry coordination, launches with Meta, Coinbase, Match, Kraken, others on board  —  Bad people who prey on those looking for love, or hoping to make a quick buck, have been around since biblical times.
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge:
Adobe adds generative AI tools to Lightroom, including Firefly-powered Generative Remove to let users “paint” over unwanted objects, available in early access  —  Adobe is adding some new generative AI tools to Lightroom that aim to make the photo editing platform easier to use …
Reuters:
EU countries vote to approve the landmark EU AI Act, agreed in December 2023, to ensure “trust, transparency, and accountability”, taking effect in June 2024  —  Europe's landmark rules on artificial intelligence will enter into force next month after EU countries endorsed …
Financial Times:
AWS says it has “fully transitioned” its previous orders for Nvidia's Grace Hopper chips to the successor Grace Blackwell chips, announced in March 2024  —  Delay from the world's biggest cloud computing provider gives investors jitters over potential ‘air pocket’ in demand for AI chips
Samuel Stolton / Bloomberg:
Sources: Apple files a lawsuit at the EU's General Court to challenge a March 2024 decision to impose a €1.8B fine for thwarting competition in music streaming  —  - Company files suit at EU's General Court to topple penalty  — Fine was sparked by long-running dispute with top music rival

Sponsor Posts

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:
CIO challenge 6: Can we find an effective solution that also minimizes operational costs?  —  Welcome to the next and final installment of our CIO series!  After what feels like a thousand cups of coffee …
Hamming:
Make AI Voice Agents trustworthy  —  Hamming AI automatically tests AI voice agents and continuously monitors them in production.
Techmeme Leaderboards:
Discover the top reporters on AI, VR, policy, and much more  —  We've analyzed Techmeme's news crawl to identify the most influential and prolific writers on 48 news topics.  Download reports immediately for just $100.
Sponsor Techmeme
Techmeme Ride Home:
 Fri. 11/15 - Crypto Ascendant
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.
Sponsor this podcast
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 6:40 PM ET, May 21, 2024.

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.

From Mediagazer

Michael Gold / New York Times:
President-elect Donald Trump announces he has chosen Karoline Leavitt, who served as his campaign's press secretary, to be his White House press secretary

John Koblin / New York Times:
NBC names Craig Melvin as Hoda Kotb's successor on Today, teaming up with Savannah Guthrie, starting January 13; Melvin has been Today's news anchor since 2018

Katie Kilkenny / The Hollywood Reporter:
On Fox News, LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong discussed his new approach to publish “views from both sides”, and said the paper had conflated news and opinion

More News

Earlier Picks

Wired:
How Indian politicians are using deepfakes for voter outreach; an estimated 50M+ AI voice calls were made in the two months before the elections in April 2024
Business Insider:
Inside Oracle's Cerner acquisition, including issues with Cerner's EHR system, which Oracle says it wasn't aware of, and its rollout at the US Veterans Affairs
Los Angeles Times:
A look at challenges LA faces as it tries to remain a major tech hub; CB Insights says VC funding of LA-based startups totaled $6.9B in 2023, down 73% from 2021
Mike Scarcella / Reuters:
US v. Google: Google has preemptively paid damages to the US government, an unusual move aimed at avoiding a jury trial in the DOJ's antitrust lawsuit
Bloomberg:
OpenAI pulls ChatGPT's Sky voice after users compared the sound to Scarlett Johansson, saying Sky is an actress' voice and wasn't chosen to be an “imitation”
Mediagazer memeorandum WeSmirch
Home River Leaderboards About Sponsor Events Newsletter