Techmeme
August 6, 2024, 8:25 AM

Top News

Leah Nylen / Bloomberg:
US v. Google: a federal judge rules that Google illegally monopolized the search market, including through deals to be the default option on phones and browsers  —  Google's payments to make its search engine the default on smartphone web browsers violates US antitrust law, a federal judge ruled Monday …
More: BBC, Platformer, Ars Technica, Reuters, United States District Court for the District of Columbia, CNBC, 9to5Mac, The Mirror, Wired, CNN, ITPro, Yahoo Finance, Tech.co, Washington Post, Silicon Republic, WinBuzzer, TechCrunch, One Man & His Blog, Bloomberg Law, Politico, Proactive, News/Media Alliance, GSMArena.com, Interesting Engineering, The Stack, iClarified, PaymentExpert.com, TipRanks Financial, B&T, AdExchanger, WAtoday, The Information, Constellation Research, Reclaim The Net, Search Engine Roundtable, The Week, SFist, SiliconANGLE, Investor's Business Daily, Cult of Mac, Patently Apple, The Register, GZERO, Hürriyet Daily News, W Media Research, Courthouse News Service, Computerworld, PCMag, Mashable, Adweek, Neowin, Sky News, 9to5Google, Fast Company, The Daily Signal, MacRumors, MarTech, and Philip Elmer‑DeWitt
Lauren Feiner / The Verge:
US v. Google: a judge says Google has a monopoly in “general search text advertising” and used exclusive agreements to raise prices without any competition  —  A federal judge ruled that Google violated US antitrust law by maintaining a monopoly in the search and advertising markets.
Jason Del Rey / Fortune:
Apple and Mozilla will take a big revenue hit if the Google search ruling is upheld; in 2021 to 2022, $510M of Mozilla's $593M revenue came from its Google deal  —  “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.”  —  With those words from United States District judge Amit Mehta …
Steve Lohr / New York Times:
Google losing its US antitrust case may have major ripple effects for Apple, Amazon, and Meta, just as Microsoft's loss in 2000 influenced the Google decision  —  Nearly a quarter-century after Microsoft lost a similar case, a judge's decision that Google abused a monopoly in internet search is likely to have major ripple effects.
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
John Schulman / @johnschulman2:
OpenAI co-founder John Schulman departs to join Anthropic and focus on AI alignment, and says “I'm not leaving due to lack of support for alignment research”  —  I shared the following note with my OpenAI colleagues today: I've made the difficult decision to leave OpenAI. This choice stems from my desire to deepen my focus on AI alignment, and to start a new chapter of my career where I can return to hands-on technical work. I've decided
The Information:
OpenAI President Greg Brockman says he's taking a sabbatical through the end of 2024; a source says OpenAI product leader Peter Deng, who joined in 2023, left  —  Greg Brockman, OpenAI's president and one of 11 cofounders of the artificial intelligence firm, is taking an extended leave of absence.
Wes Davis / The Verge:
A look at some of Apple's pre-prompt instructions for Apple Intelligence, including “do not hallucinate” for a text generation feature  —  Apple's latest developer betas launched last week with a handful of the generative AI features that were announced at WWDC and are headed to your iPhones …
Cherlynn Low / Engadget:
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.
Anton Shilov / Tom's Hardware:
Samsung starts mass production of the world's thinnest LPDDR5X DRAM, claiming it is 9% thinner than most LPDDR5X and improves devices' heat resistance by 21.2%  —  The new package frees additional space.  —  Samsung has started mass production of the world's thinnest LPDDR5X DRAM packages featuring 12 GB and 16 GB capacities.
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 …
Wall Street Journal:
How Google's Character.AI deal, which sources say had a $2B licensing fee, and other Big Tech AI deals show startups are seeking bailouts after raising billions  —  Amazon, Google and Microsoft are using a new type of deal to get employees and technology from artificial-intelligence firms
More: Sector 6
Washington Post:
Letter: the secretaries of state from PA, WA, MI, NM, and MN ask Elon Musk to change X's Grok to stop the AI assistant from spreading false election information  —  Grok, the AI search assistant on Musk's X platform, suggested that Kamala Harris had missed the ballot deadline in nine states.
Aditya Soni / Reuters:

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Earlier Picks

Lionel Laurent / Bloomberg:
X: @benthompson, @adamkovac, @dhh, and @adamkovacLinkedIn: Lionel LaurentForums: r/neoliberal
Todd Bishop / GeekWire:
Mihai Matei / SamMobile: