Techmeme
July 10, 2024, 7:15 AM

Top News

Financial Times:
Source: Apple is not taking an OpenAI board observer role, as AI antitrust scrutiny mounts; OpenAI plans to host regular meetings with investors and partners  —  ChatGPT maker plans strategy to engage crucial partners as regulatory scrutiny of sector increases
Ina Fried / Axios:
Microsoft gives up an observer seat on OpenAI's board, citing the new board's “significant progress” and saying the company is “confident” in OpenAI's direction  —  - “We appreciate the support shown by OpenAI leadership and the OpenAI board as we made this decision,” Microsoft said.
Akshat Rathi / Bloomberg:
Environmental report: Google stops buying carbon offsets and no longer maintains operational carbon neutrality, but still aims to reach net-zero carbon by 2030  —  The tech giant, which has seen its planet-warming emissions rise because of artificial intelligence, has stopped buying cheap offsets behind the neutrality claim.
Financial Times:
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Microsoft hikes the price of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate by $3 to $19.99/month for new subscribers and plans a Standard tier for $14.99/month without day-one titles  —  Microsoft is planning to hike its Xbox Game Pass Ultimate pricing again in September, alongside launching a new “standard” …
Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:
Researchers detail the Blast-RADIUS MD5-based vulnerability affecting RADIUS, a widely-used network access authentication protocol first developed in 1991  —  Ubiquitous RADIUS scheme uses homegrown authentication based on MD5.  Yup, you heard right.  —  One of the most widely used network protocols …
Michael Kan / PCMag:
The US DOJ and its partners seized two domain names and 968 accounts on X used by Russian actors to create an AI-enhanced bot farm that spread disinformation  —  Russian media outlet RT ran the bot farm to pump out disinformation via 968 Twitter accounts, the US Justice Department says.
Kwanwoo Jun / Wall Street Journal:
Samsung Electronics's union workers declare an indefinite strike on the final day of a three-day walkout and say management showed no intention of holding talks  —  Union cites management's unwillingness to talk to union leaders  —  Samsung Electronics unionized workers have decided to launch …
Harshita Mary Varghese / Reuters:
IDC: global PC shipments rose 3% YoY to 64.9M units in Q2 2024; Apple's shipments rose 20.8% YoY, the biggest jump among global PC makers  —  Global shipments of personal computers rose by 3% in the second quarter, helped by demand for AI-capable devices, with Apple (AAPL.O) …
Wes Davis / The Verge:
Google now lets Advanced Protection Program users set up with a single passkey, using Android or iOS biometric authentication, instead of two physical keys  —  Google has made it a little easier for those at more risk of targeted online attacks to enroll in its Advanced Protection Program for Google accounts.
Damien Wilde / 9to5Google:
Google plans to make its dark web monitoring feature available to all users for free in late July, no longer requiring a Google One membership  —  After the Google One VPN shutdown in late June, the “Dark Web reports” function is now coming to all Google Account holders from late July 2024.
Rashi Shrivastava / Forbes:
Skild AI, which is building a foundational model for robotics, raised a $300M Series A at a $1.5B valuation led by Lightspeed, SoftBank, Coatue, and Jeff Bezos  —  Skild AI has raised $300 million to continue building its plug-and-play robotic intelligence with the hope of enabling companies to integrate it into robots of all kinds.
Anissa Gardizy / The Information:
Sources: xAI ends talks with Oracle to expand an existing arrangement to rent Nvidia chips; source: Oracle is not part of xAI's supercomputer project in Memphis  —  Larry Ellison may be a friend and backer of Elon Musk, but even the Oracle executive chair isn't immune from Musk's impatience.
Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch:
Anthropic now lets developers use Claude 3.5 Sonnet to generate, test, and evaluate their prompts, and adds new features, like generating automatic test cases  —  Prompt engineering became a hot job last year in the AI industry, but it seems Anthropic is now developing tools to at least partially automate it.
Kate Clark / The Information:
Source: a16z has secured thousands of AI chips, including Nvidia H100 GPUs, and is renting them to portfolio companies, with the aim of expanding to 20K+ GPUs  —  Andreessen Horowitz, one of the most active venture capital investors in generative artificial intelligence …
Carly Page / TechCrunch:
Filing: Evolve Bank & Trust says LockBit accessed the personal data of at least 7.6M people during a February 2024 ransomware attack  —  U.S.-based banking-as-a-service giant Evolve Bank & Trust said that cybercriminals accessed the personal data of millions of customers during a recent cyberattack.
CNN:
An investigation finds Airbnb fails to protect its guests from hidden cameras and moves swiftly to contain user complaints and resolve them out of court  —  Watch AC360 at 8pm ET tonight for more on this investigation, including where cameras can be hidden inside Airbnb rentals.  —  CNN —
Matthew Ball / MatthewBall.co:
Q&A with Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth on the company's metaverse strategy, barriers to MR/VR growth, Reality Labs spending, AR glasses, AI, and more  —  On June 20th, I interviewed Andrew Bosworth.  “Boz” joined Facebook in 2006 as the company's ~10th engineer, subsequently building the original News Feed …
Don Clark / New York Times:
The Biden administration plans to direct up to $1.6B in CHIPS Act funding towards R&D to accelerate domestic capacity for advanced chip packaging  —  The proposed funding, part of the CHIPS Act, is intended to stoke chip packaging, a process that helps drive progress in semiconductors but that takes place mostly in Asia.

Sponsor Posts

Meta:
Open Source AI: Available to all, not just the few  —  Meta's open source AI enables small businesses, start-ups, students, researchers and more to download and build with our models at no cost.
Zoho:
Introducing AI Forms: Create optimized forms with AI in Zoho Forms  —  The future of form creation isn't coming, it's here.  Forget everything you thought you knew about building online forms.
Genesys:
Executive Insights: The Era of Contact Center AI Copilots  —  How AI copilots are transforming customer experience and agent performance.
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.
Techmeme Ride Home:
Mon. 12/23 - The Revenge Of Google Glass?
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.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 7:15 AM ET, July 10, 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.

More News

Financial Times:
Kamila Wojciechowska / Android Authority:

Earlier Picks

Grace Kay / Business Insider:
Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch:
Cristiano Lima-Strong / Washington Post:
Jay Peters / The Verge:
Kurt Wagner / Bloomberg: