Techmeme
August 1, 2024, 4:05 AM

Top News

Meta:
Meta reports Q2 revenue up 22% YoY to $39.07B, net income up 73% to $13.47B, and family daily active people up 7% to 3.27B on average for June 2024  —  Meta Platforms, Inc. (Nasdaq: META) today reported financial results for the quarter ended June 30, 2024.
Alex Heath / The Verge:
Jonathan Vanian / CNBC:
Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer:
Microsoft says that a nine-hour outage on July 30, which disrupted multiple Microsoft 365 and Azure services worldwide, was triggered by a DDoS attack  —  Microsoft confirmed today that a nine-hour outage on Tuesday that took down and disrupted multiple Microsoft 365 and Azure services worldwide …
CNBC:
Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian says the CrowdStrike-caused outage will cost the company $500M, after canceling 6,000+ flights, and Delta will seek damages  —  WATCH NOW  —  Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said Wednesday that the massive IT outage earlier this month that stranded thousands of customers will cost it $500 million.
Alex Heath / The Verge:
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity need to pay to scrape Reddit's data, and blocking them has been “a real pain in the ass”  —  After striking deals with Google and OpenAI, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is calling on Microsoft and others to pay if they want to continue scraping the site's data.
Ian King / Bloomberg:
Qualcomm reports Q3 revenue up 11% YoY to $9.39B, vs. $9.21B est., handset chip sales up 12% YoY to $5.9B, and forecasts Q4 revenue above estimates  —  - Company says phone units will be ‘flattish’ this year  — Upbeat revenue forecast had buoyed stock after earnings report
Wesley Yin-Poole / IGN:
Bungie says it will lay off 220 employees, or 17% of its workforce, and integrate an additional 155 roles into its parent company Sony Interactive Entertainment  —  “Today is a difficult and painful day.”  —  Destiny developer Bungie has today announced significant cuts at the studio …
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Discord on Xbox adds the ability to watch friends' Discord streams whether they're sharing from a PC, mobile phone, or Xbox, rolling out over the coming weeks  —  Microsoft and Discord are greatly improving the integration of the communication platform into Xbox consoles.
Jonathan Kemper / The Decoder:
Google unveils updates to its Gemma family of open models, including Gemma 2 2B, which it claims surpasses GPT-3.5 and Mixtral 8x7B on the LMSYS Chatbot Arena  —  Google has unveiled updates to its Gemma 2 family of open-source language models, focusing on improved performance, safety, and transparency.
Sean Lyngaas / CNN:
A ransomware attack hits blood donation nonprofit OneBlood, which has asked over 250 hospitals in the US to activate their critical blood shortage protocols  —  A cyberattack has hit a blood-donation nonprofit that serves hundreds of hospitals in the southeastern US.
Anna Washenko / Engadget:
US senators unveil the bipartisan NO FAKES Act, which would make individuals and companies liable for producing, hosting, or sharing unauthorized AI deepfakes  —  OpenAI joined several entertainment industry groups in backing the NO FAKES Act.  —  Today, a group of senators introduced the NO FAKES Act …
Krisztian Sandor / CoinDesk:
Tether reports a “record” $5.2B net profit in H1 2024, net operating profit of $1.3B in Q2, and $97.6B US debt holdings, more than Germany and other countries  —  The company said its $97 billion exposure to U.S. Treasuries would put it 18th in the ranking among countries.
Aaron Holmes / The Information:
Source: TikTok was paying Microsoft ~$20M/month to use OpenAI's models in Azure OpenAI Service as of March, ~25% of the total revenue the service was generating  —  Microsoft has had success reselling OpenAI's artificial intelligence to its cloud customers, a core part of its plan to build a new multibillion-dollar profit machine.
Akash Sriram / Reuters:
eBay reports Q2 revenue up 1% YoY to $2.57B, vs. $2.53B est., GMV up 1% to $18.4B, net income up 31% to $226M, and forecasts Q3 revenue below estimates  —  EBay (EBAY.O) forecast third-quarter revenue below Wall Street estimates on Wednesday, a sign that demand is slowing down for collectible items, luxury handbags and watches.
More: Bloomberg and eBay Inc.
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
OpenSecrets: the number of groups lobbying the US government on AI grew from 459 in 2023 to 556 in H1 2024; OpenAI spent $800K in H1 2024, up from $260K in 2023  —  AI lobbying at the U.S. federal level is intensifying in the midst of a continued generative AI boom and an election year that could influence future AI regulation.
New York Times:
Reid Hoffman, Vinod Khosla, Mark Cuban, Ron Conway, Chris Sacca, and 100+ other VCs pledge to vote for Kamala Harris and solicit donations for her campaign  —  The group, including Democratic donors such as Reid Hoffman and Vinod Khosla, has been organized under an effort called VCsForKamala.
Bloomberg:
A look at Baidu's experiment with driverless taxis in Wuhan, which became China's biggest proving ground for Baidu's taxis due to a relaxed regulatory approach  —  Wuhan's experiment with driverless taxis could help China lead the world on the emerging technology.  It also risks putting thousands of people out of work.
Michael Hennessey / Bloomberg:
Delivery Hero plans to merge two of its European businesses, Foodora and Yemeksepeti, with its Asian business, Foodpanda, and cut fewer than 200 employees  —  - Fewer than 200 employees will be affected by the merger  — A previous deal to sell some of the Asian business fell apart

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.
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 5: 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 Ride Home:
Thu. 11/21 - What The DOJ Wants Google To Do
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 4:05 AM ET, August 1, 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

CNBC:

Earlier Picks

Jess Weatherbed / The Verge:
Billy Steele / Engadget:
Emma Roth / The Verge: