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Techmeme
November 13, 2024, 5:15 AM

Top News

Eric Beech / Reuters:
Donald Trump says Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will lead the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to provide “guidance from outside of Government”  —  U.S. President-elect Donald Trump said on Tuesday Elon Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy …
Dan Merica / Associated Press:
Source: Elon Musk's America PAC spent ~$200M to help elect Trump; Musk says the PAC is gearing up for midterms as well as judicial and DA elections  —  Elon Musk's super PAC spent around $200 million to help elect Donald Trump, according to a person familiar with the group's spending …
Tanaya Macheel / CNBC:
Dogecoin spikes ~20% after Donald Trump announced the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE; Dogecoin is up 153% since Election Day  —  Dogecoin shot higher on Tuesday night, extending its postelection surge after President-elect Donald Trump formally announced …
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: Apple is making a 6" wall-mounted display to control appliances, videoconference, and use AI to navigate apps, and may unveil it as early as March 2025  —  - Product will spotlight the new Siri and Apple Intelligence  — Device will tap into cameras, doorbells and run Apple's apps
Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat:
Google DeepMind releases AlphaFold 3's source code and model weights for academic use, which could accelerate scientific discovery and drug development  —  Google DeepMind has unexpectedly released the source code and model weights of AlphaFold 3 for academic use, marking a significant advance …
Todd Spangler / Variety:
Amazon is shutting down Freevee, its free, ad-supported streaming service launched in 2019 under the IMDb brand, and plans to move the content to Prime Video  —  Amazon is officially shutting down Freevee, its free, ad-supported video streaming service originally launched under the IMDb brand nearly five years ago.
Simon Willison / Simon Willison's Weblog:
A look at Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct, which Alibaba claims can match GPT-4o coding capabilities and is small enough to run on a MacBook Pro M2 with 64GB of RAM  —  There's a whole lot of buzz around the new Qwen2.5-Coder Series of open source (Apache 2.0 licensed) LLM releases from Alibaba's Qwen research team.
Lim Hui Jie / CNBC:
Swiggy opened up ~8% on its trading debut after the company raised $1.34B in an Indian IPO, which became the second largest IPO in India in 2024  —  Shares of Indian food delivery giant Swiggy rose nearly 8% on their trading debut Wednesday after its IPO became the country's second largest this year.
Shirin Ghaffary / Bloomberg:
Greg Brockman returns to OpenAI after taking a leave from his role as president in August 2024; a memo says he is working with Sam Altman on creating a new role  —  OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman has returned to the artificial intelligence startup three months after taking a leave from his role …
NBC News:
The US sentences Air National guardsman Jack Teixeira to 15 years for stealing classified Pentagon information and sharing it on Discord in 2022 and 2023  —  The former Massachusetts Air National Guard member pleaded guilty in March to leaking highly classified military documents online, including about the war in Ukraine.
TechCrunch:
Rivian and VW finalize a software development joint venture; VW has invested $1B of its planned up to $5.8B by 2027 in the JV designed to be a 50-50 partnership  —  Rivian and Volkswagen Group have finalized a multi-billion-dollar joint venture to develop software, paving …
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:
Modern Times Group agrees to acquire Tel Aviv-based mobile game maker Plarium for $620M and up to $200M more if Plarium hits financial targets over 2025 to 2028  —  Modern Times Group has agreed to buy Plarium, the maker of RPG Raid: Shadow Legends, from Aristocrat Leisure for $620 million.
Bloomberg:
SoftBank's telecom unit plans to build an AI supercomputer in Japan using Nvidia's DGX B200 platform, and a follow-up effort featuring the Grace Blackwell chip  —  - Japanese investor secures coveted chips ahead of next big bet  — Jensen Huang joins Masayoshi Son on stage during Nvidia event
Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat:
FrontierMath, a new benchmark for evaluating AI model's advanced mathematical reasoning, shows current AI systems solve less than 2% of its challenging problems  —  Artificial intelligence systems may be good at generating text, recognizing images, and even solving basic math problems …
Muyao Shen / Bloomberg:
PitchBook: Q3 2024 crypto VC funding fell 31.3% YoY to $1.7B and VC deals fell 25.3% YoY to 392, as infrastructure startups continued to draw investors' focus  —  - VC investment dropped 31% to $1.7 billion in the third quarter  — Infrastructure startups continued to draw the focus of backers
Ben Jiang / South China Morning Post:
Aicpb.com: ByteDance's Doubao had 51M MAUs in China, the highest for AI chatbots in China, ahead of 12.5M for Baidu's Wenxiaoyan and 10M for Moonshot AI's Kimi  —  Its popularity has been enabled by ByteDance's deep pockets, strong product team, and a design philosophy that brings the human touch to AI

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UiPath:
UiPath Unveils 10 Innovations that Will Shape the Agentic Future  —  Orchestration engine, API workflows and agentic testing among key features of new UiPath Platform™ for agentic automation, launched at UiPath DevCon 2025
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Earlier Picks

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