Techmeme
July 25, 2024, 8:15 PM

Top News

Kylie Robison / The Verge:
OpenAI unveils SearchGPT, a search tool powered by GPT-4 that can organize links and summarize its findings, available as a prototype to 10,000 users at launch  —  OpenAI is announcing its much-anticipated entry into the search market, SearchGPT, an AI-powered search engine with real-time access to information across the internet.
Deepa Seetharaman / Wall Street Journal:
Sarah Parvini / Associated Press:
SAG-AFTRA announces a strike starting Friday against major video game companies, including EA, after talks for a new contract broke down over AI protections  —  Hollywood's video game performers voted to go on strike Thursday, throwing part of the entertainment industry into another work stoppage …
Samantha Cole / 404 Media:
Source and doc: Runway scraped thousands of videos from YouTube creators and brands, including Disney and VICE News, to train its Gen-3 AI video generation tool  —  A leaked internal document shows Runway's celebrated Gen-3 AI video generator collected thousands of YouTube videos and pirated movies for training data.
Bloomberg:
Google DeepMind rolls out AlphaProof AI model, which specializes in math reasoning, and AlphaGeometry 2, an updated version of a model focused on geometry  —  AI models, trained on text, have historically struggled with math reasoning  —  Google DeepMind, Alphabet Inc.'s artificial …
Maia Spoto / Bloomberg:
California's Supreme Court upholds Prop 22, allowing Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and other companies to keep classifying California drivers as independent contractors  —  The unanimous ruling upholding California's Proposition 22 was released Thursday.  —  The favorable ruling …
G.S Vasan / 91mobiles:
Leaked promo material reveals Pixel 9 series specs: all phones powered by Tensor G4, Pixel 9 Pro in 6.3-inch and 6.8-inch models with 16GB of RAM, and more  —  - Google Pixel 9 Pro will come in a 6.3-inch model and a 6.8-inch model.  — Google boasts a 24-hour battery and seven years of security updates with the Pixel 9 Pro.
Epic Games:
Epic plans to bring its mobile games to AltStore on iOS in the EU, and remove its games from the Galaxy Store due to Samsung blocking sideloading by default  —  We are fast approaching a quantum leap in Epic's efforts to bring our games to players on mobile devices.
Jay Peters / The Verge:
Google updates its Gemini chatbot with Gemini 1.5 Flash and a 32K-token context window in its free tier, links to related content for some prompts, and more  —  Google's Gemini AI chatbot will be able to respond to you more quickly and process more content in prompts thanks to an upgrade to the company's Gemini 1.5 Flash AI model.
Chris Welch / The Verge:
Sonos CEO Patrick Spence apologizes for Sonos' redesigned app, which launched in May to widespread criticism, and promises biweekly app updates through the fall  —  The big Sonos app redesign was intended to make the company's software more modern, customizable, and easier to use.
Nick Robins-Early / The Guardian:
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch:
Meta says WhatsApp now has more than 100M MAUs in the US and that more than 50% of WhatsApp users in the country have an iPhone; WhatsApp has 2B+ MAUs globally  —  Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Thursday on his channel that WhatsApp now has more than 100 million monthly active users in the U.S. …
Todd Spangler / Variety:
The new Disney+, Hulu, and Max streaming bundle goes on sale in the US for $16.99 per month with ads and $29.99 per month without ads  —  Dragons, Jedis, Marvel and DC superheroes, Harry Potter, Disney princesses — and more from Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery — are now available to stream for a reduced monthly price.
Sam Altman / Washington Post:
We need a US-led global coalition of like-minded countries and a new strategy to ensure that a democratic vision for AI prevails over an authoritarian one  —  Sam Altman is co-founder and CEO of OpenAI.  —  Who will control the future of AI?  —  That is the urgent question of our time.
Julie Bort / TechCrunch:
A decade-old drama between David Sacks and Parker Conrad has blown up into a fight on X over VC behavior, drawing in Paul Graham and other Silicon Valley names  —  A decade-old drama involving VC David Sacks and Rippling founder Parker Conrad over their previous company Zenefits has blown …
Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Land:
Microsoft says “Bing stopped crawling Reddit” after Reddit updated its robots.txt file on July 1 to prohibit “all crawling of their site”  —  Reddit has updated its robots.txt file, preventing Bing and many other search engines from crawling the site.
Financial Times:
Ashley Gold / Axios:
Anthropic says it does not support California's AI safety bill and suggests changes, including a shift from “pre-harm enforcement” to “outcome-based deterrence”  —  - The bill, which many startups and tech companies have come out against, would make AI developers legally liable …
More: Mercury News
Akila Quinio / Financial Times:
Revolut secures a UK banking license, ending a more-than-three-year-long regulatory battle; the London-based fintech has ~9M UK customers and 45M+ globally  —  London-based fintech receives approval from regulators in boost to expansion plans  —  Revolut has secured a UK banking licence …
Reuters:
Canalys: China's smartphone shipments rose 10% YoY in Q2, with Huawei's shipments up 41%; Apple's market share in China dropped to 14%, down from 16% in Q2 2023  —  Apple's smartphone shipments in China fell by 6.7% in the second quarter of 2024, as the tech giant faced intensifying competition …

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:
Zoho Sign is a “high growth performer” in the Frost & Sullivan's Frost Radar™ for electronic signature software, 2024  —  We are happy to announce that Zoho Sign has clinched a position as a high growth performer …
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.
Techmeme Ride Home:
Thu. 11/07 - More Election Stuff
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 8:15 PM ET, July 25, 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

Omkar Godbole / CoinDesk:

Earlier Picks

Justine Calma / The Verge:
Brody Ford / Bloomberg:
Olivia Carville / Bloomberg:
Dana Hull / Bloomberg:
Zac Bowden / Windows Central: