Techmeme
August 5, 2024, 5:45 PM

Top News

Leah Nylen / Bloomberg:
US v. Google: a federal judge rules that Google's payments to make its search engine the default on smartphone web browsers violates antitrust law  —  Google's payments to make its search engine the default on smartphone web browsers violates US antitrust law, a federal judge ruled Monday …
Tanaya Macheel / CNBC:
Bitcoin dropped below $50,000, its lowest level since February 2024 and down 17% since August 3, and ether dropped 15% to ~$2,300, as global markets plummet  —  Cryptocurrencies tumbled amid a global market sell-off spurred by recession fears.  —  The price of bitcoin was last lower by 7% …
Aditya Soni / Reuters:
Apple, Alphabet, and Amazon shares fell 4%+, Nvidia fell 6%, and Microsoft and Meta fell ~3% amid worries about a potential US recession and massive AI spending  —  Apple (AAPL.O) and Nvidia (NVDA.O) led a sell-off in technology stocks on Monday as U.S. recession fears and Berkshire Hathaway's …
Financial Times:
Investor letter: Elliott Management says megacap tech stocks, particularly Nvidia, were in “bubble land”, and AI is “overhyped” and “not ready for prime time”  —  Hedge fund tells clients many supposed applications of the technology are ‘never going to actually work’
Samantha Cole / 404 Media:
Sources: Nvidia scraped sources like Netflix and YouTube to train an unreleased foundational model; concerned staff were told they had full clearance to do so  —  Nvidia scraped videos from Youtube and several other sources to compile training data for its AI products, internal Slack chats …
Cade Metz / New York Times:
Elon Musk revives his OpenAI lawsuit, filing a complaint in California to allege that OpenAI, Sam Altman, and Greg Brockman breached OpenAI's founding contract  —  The Tesla chief executive has renewed claims that the A.I. start-up put profits and commercial interests ahead of the public good.
Washington Post:
In a letter, the secretaries of state from PA, WA, MI, NM, and MN ask Elon Musk to change X's AI assistant Grok to stop it from spreading false election info  —  Grok, the AI search assistant on Musk's X platform, suggested that Kamala Harris had missed the ballot deadline in nine states.  She hasn't.
New York Times:
In an email to staff, Linda Yaccarino says X will close its San Francisco office and move workers to San Jose offices and a new Palo Alto office shared with xAI  —  Elon Musk, X's owner, has clashed with California's leaders and has said the social media platform would move its headquarters to Texas.
Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer:
Researchers discover a bug, exploited since 2018, in Windows Smart App Control and SmartScreen that lets attackers avoid security warnings for unsigned binaries  —  A design flaw in Windows Smart App Control and SmartScreen that enables attackers to launch programs without triggering security warnings …
Cherlynn Low / Engadget:
In a fifth dev beta for iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS 15, Safari gets Distraction Control, which lets users block distracting elements on the page like pop-ups  —  You'll get to choose which page element to block on a site, as long as it doesn't change.  —  Ahead of the full release of iOS 18 …
Bloomberg:
CrowdStrike says Delta CEO Ed Bastian failed to respond to an assistance offer from CEO George Kurtz; CrowdStrike hopes Delta will “agree to work cooperatively”  —  The allegation, in a letter Sunday from attorneys for the technology firm, builds upon CrowdStrike's claim last week …
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
OpenAI says it's changing the format of its DevDay conference this fall to a series of on-the-road developer sessions and GPT-5 will not be announced during it  —  Last year, OpenAI held a splashy press event in San Francisco during which the company announced a bevy of new products and tools …
Anne VanderMey / Bloomberg:
AI chip startup Groq raised a $640M Series D led by BlackRock at a $2.8B valuation, up from $1B after raising $300M in 2021, and adds an Intel executive as COO  —  Cisco and Samsung invested in the $640 million deal  —  Artificial intelligence startup Groq Inc. has raised $640 million in new funding …
Harshita Mary Varghese / Reuters:
Lumen, which sells data center networking and security products, says it secured new deals worth $5B from tech companies amid AI surge; LUMN up 35%+ after hours  —  Telecommunications firm Lumen Technologies (LUMN.N) has secured new deals worth $5 billion from cloud and tech companies …
Berber Jin / Wall Street Journal:
Investor letter: Josh Kushner says Thrive Capital raised a $1B early-stage fund and a $4B late-stage fund, its largest-ever pair, after backing OpenAI in 2023  —  The fundraising reflects optimism over artificial intelligence despite the startup sector's broader struggles
Bart Meijer / Reuters:
The European Commission says TikTok agreed to permanently withdraw and not replace TikTok Lite's “Task and Reward Programme” in the EU to comply with the DSA  —  ByteDance's TikTok has agreed to permanently withdraw its TikTok Lite rewards programme from the EU to comply …

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