Techmeme
June 25, 2024, 6:20 PM

Top News

Andrew J. Hawkins / The Verge:
Waymo drops its waitlist in San Francisco, letting anyone download its app and hail a robotaxi; in Phoenix, Waymo has been open to the public since October 2020  —  ‘Simply download the app and ride.’  —  The wait(list) is over.  —  Waymo is opening up its robotaxi service to anyone who wants to ride in San Francisco.
Javier Espinoza / Financial Times:
In preliminary findings, the EU charges Microsoft with antitrust violations over concerns that it gave Teams an “undue advantage” by bundling it with Office  —  Allegations that software giant is ‘tying’ its video app to Office are the first such case against it in more than a decade
Chance Miller / 9to5Mac:
OpenAI says the ChatGPT macOS app is now available to all users, after initially rolling it out to Plus subscribers  —  Over the last month, OpenAI has gradually been rolling out its first-ever ChatGPT app for Mac with Plus subscribers.  Starting today, however, OpenAI says that the ChatGPT app for macOS is now available to everyone.
Rachel Metz / Bloomberg:
Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat:
Anthropic debuts Projects, letting Claude.ai Pro and Team users work with chats, docs, code, and more in one place; each project includes a 200K context window  —  Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company backed by Amazon, Google, and Salesforce, has launched a suite …
Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch:
The RIAA's lawsuit against generative music startups will be the bloodbath AI needs and an object lesson in hubris for similarly unethical AI companies  —  Like many AI companies, Udio and Suno relied on large-scale theft to create their generative AI models.
Mia Sato / The Verge:
Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Land:
Google is dropping continuous scroll in Search, saying it didn't lead to significantly higher user satisfaction and pagination enables serving results faster  —  Google Search will stop its continuous scroll user experience where Google loads more results as you scroll past the first page of the search results.
Abner Li / 9to5Google:
Google will hold a Pixel event on August 13 at 10AM PT in Mountain View, where the Pixel 9, Pixel 9 Pro, Pixel 9 Pro Fold, and Pixel Watch 3 are expected  —  Google this morning announced that its annual Pixel hardware event will be taking place on August 13.
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Etched, which is building Sohu, an inferencing chip that only runs transformer AI models, raised a $120M Series A, bringing its total funding to $125.36M  —  As generative AI touches a growing number of industries, the companies producing chips to run the models are benefitting enormously.
Samantha Cole / 404 Media:
Users of the popular AI chatbot platform Character.AI are reporting that their bots' personalities changed a few days ago and aren't as fun as they once were  —  The company denied making “major changes,” but users report noticeable differences in the quality of their chatbot conversations.
Taras Buria / Neowin:
Windows 11 changed the initial setup process to enable the automatic backup of folders to OneDrive without asking permission, annoying and confusing many users  —  Microsoft has made OneDrive slightly more annoying for Windows 11 users.  Quietly and without any announcement …
David Heaney / UploadVR:
Meta's Quest v67 PTC update adds an experimental option to let users freely position and resize 2D windows as well as “take any window fullscreen”  —  Quest v67 will finally let you freely position 2D windows, the Public Test Channel build reveals.  —  What Is the Public Test Channel (PTC)?
Deepa Seetharaman / Wall Street Journal:
Stability AI says it closed a new funding round; sources: investors committed $80M to take over the company, and some suppliers have forgiven debt obligations  —  Stability AI raised $100 million-plus in 2022 but is being recapitalized and aims to build a business around image-generation tool
Jay Peters / The Verge:
Threads will let users like and see replies to their posts showing on federated social networks like Mastodon, and expands fediverse support to 100+ countries  —  Threads will now let people like and see replies to their Threads posts that appear on other federated social media platforms, the company announced on Monday.

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