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Techmeme
July 16, 2024, 12:35 PM

Top News

Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Elon Musk plans to commit ~$45M per month to America PAC, a new pro-Trump super PAC; other backers include 8VC's Joe Lonsdale and the Winklevoss twins  —  Other backers of America PAC include Palantir Technologies co-founder Joe Lonsdale and the Winklevoss twins
The Information:
Sources: Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz have told a16z staff in recent days that they plan to make large donations to PACs supporting Donald Trump's campaign  —  Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who run one of Silicon Valley's most prominent venture capital firms, have told the firm's employees …
Vittoria Elliott / Wired:
A look at Trump VP pick JD Vance's tech ties, like working at Peter Thiel's Mithril Capital and investing in Rumble; Vance advocated for repealing Section 230  —  Vance has long had connections to Silicon Valley through his former life as a venture capitalist, including to long-time Donald Trump supporter and investor Peter Thiel.
Sara Fischer / Axios:
Taboola CEO Adam Singolda says the company has struck a deal with Apple to power native advertising in the Apple News and Apple Stocks apps; TBLA jumps ~5%  —  - Taboola's effort to build trust with Apple across its various teams and stakeholders was “a multiyear process,'” Singolda said.
Proof:
Investigation: Apple, Nvidia, Anthropic, and others trained their AI on a dataset that contained YouTube video transcripts, including from the WSJ, MrBeast, MIT  —  Creators claim their videos were used without their knowledge  —  AI companies are generally secretive about their sources of training data …
Katharine Gemmell / Bloomberg:
The UK CMA opens a formal investigation into Microsoft's Inflection AI investment, and sets a September 11 deadline on whether to open an in-depth investigation  —  - CMA said it needs to look further at the firm's partnership  — Watchdog is taking closer order of Big Tech investment into AI
Samuel Stolton / Bloomberg:
Sources: Google offered CISPE ~€455M worth of Google Cloud licenses and €14M in cash on condition that CISPE maintain its antitrust complaint against Microsoft  —  - Cloud group rejected Google package to keep their EU case  — CISPE eventually reached antitrust settlement with Microsoft
Wall Street Journal:
Nullbulge, a hacktivist group critical of AI art, leaks Disney's alleged Slack messages over “how it handles artist contracts” and AI; Disney is investigating  —  ‘Hacktivist’ group critical of AI-generated art says it has obtained swaths of data from Disney's Slack channels, some of which it has published online
Jon Brodkin / Ars Technica:
UMG, Sony, and other record labels sue Verizon for $2.6B+ over allegations of violating copyright law by continuing to serve customers accused of pirating music  —  Lawsuit: One user's IP address was identified in 4,450 infringement notices.  —  Major record labels sued Verizon on Friday …
Wes Davis / The Verge:
Apple launches the first public betas of iOS 18, iPadOS 18, macOS Sequoia, tvOS 18, and watchOS 11, but without any Apple Intelligence features  —  You can now download the public betas for iOS 18, iPadOS 18, macOS Sequoia, and watchOS 11.  Apple's updated operating systems …
Chance Miller / 9to5Mac:
Damien Wilde / 9to5Google:
OnePlus unveils the $550 OnePlus Pad 2 with a 12.1-inch 3K LCD display, Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, 12GB RAM, 256GB storage, and a 6.49mm thin design, shipping August 1  —  The OnePlus Pad 2 has officially launched alongside a number of other Nord-series devices at the OnePlus Summer Launch event in Milan, Italy.
Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat:
Microsoft researchers unveil SpreadsheetLLM, an encoding method designed to enable LLMs to efficiently understand and analyze complex spreadsheet data  —  Microsoft researchers have unveiled “SpreadsheetLLM,” a new AI model designed to understand and work with spreadsheets, in a significant development for the world of enterprise AI.

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Earlier Picks

The Information:
Brian Krebs / Krebs on Security:
Kim Zetter / ZERO DAY: