Techmeme
July 31, 2024, 9:05 PM

Top News

Meta:
Meta Q2: revenue up 22% YoY to $39.07B, net income up 73% to $13.47B, family daily active people up 7% to 3.27B on average for June; META jumps 5%+ after hours  —  Meta Platforms, Inc. (Nasdaq: META) today reported financial results for the quarter ended June 30, 2024.
Jonathan Vanian / CNBC:
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.
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.
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 …
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 …
Alex Heath / The Verge:
Reddit CEO says Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity need to pay to scrape the site's data, and it has been “a real pain in the ass to block these companies”  —  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.
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge:
Google rolls out online safety features to make removing explicit deepfakes from Search at scale easier and to prevent them from appearing high up in results  —  Google is rolling out new online safety features that make it easier to remove explicit deepfakes from Search at scale and prevent …
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.
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.
Aaron Holmes / The Information:
Source: TikTok was paying Microsoft ~$20M/mo. to use OpenAI's models in Azure OpenAI Service as of March, ~25% of the total revenue that 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.
Krisztian Sandor / CoinDesk:
Tether reports “record” net profit of $5.2B in H1 2024, net operating profit of $1.3B in Q2, and US debt holdings of $97.6B, more than countries like Germany  —  The company said its $97 billion exposure to U.S. Treasuries would put it 18th in the ranking among countries.
CNBC:
Nvidia shares closed up 12.81% after Microsoft and AMD signaled no slowdown in the buildout of AI servers built around GPUs; Microsoft spent $19B on capex in Q4  —  Nvidia shares popped 13% Wednesday after remarks from top customer Microsoft and rival chipmaker AMD signaled there wouldn't be a slowdown …
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.
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 …
Emma Roth / The Verge:
District of Columbia AG Brian Schwalb sues StubHub, alleging the company uses a “bait-and-switch” technique where it advertises “deceptively low” ticket prices  —  StubHub is facing a new lawsuit that accuses the ticketing service of hiding fees from customers until the very end of the purchasing process.
Emma Hinchliffe / Fortune:
New York-based Spring Health, which offers a mental health app that matches patients with care providers, raised a $100M Series E at a $3.3B valuation  —  Mental health company Spring Health, cofounded by CEO April Koh and Adam Chekroud, is now valued at $3.3 billion after raising a $100 million Series E round.
Billy Steele / Engadget:
Spotify plans to expand the availability of lyrics for Spotify Free users in the “coming weeks”; paid subscribers could access unlimited lyrics since May 2024  —  The company capped access at three songs per month in May.  —  Spotify users who don't pay for a subscription …

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:
5 common accounting mistakes  —  This is a guest post by Yaali Bizappln Solutions.  A lot of businesses manage their customers and finances on separate platforms.  This disconnect often leads to missed invoices …
Hamming:
Make AI Voice Agents trustworthy  —  Hamming AI automatically tests AI voice agents and continuously monitors them in production.
Techmeme Ride Home:
(BNS) Brian's Appearance On Daily Detroit
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 9:05 PM ET, July 31, 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

Salvador Rodriguez / Wall Street Journal:

Earlier Picks

Chris Miller / Financial Times:
Steve Smith / SlashGear:
Alex Heath / The Verge: