Techmeme
December 12, 2024, 4:45 AM

Top News

Bloomberg:
Google debuts Gemini 2.0 and plans to test the model in search and AI Overviews, saying it enables “agents that can think, remember, plan, and even take action”  —  Company expects AI assistants will follow its users around the web  —  Google debuted a new version …
Emma Roth / The Verge:
Ina Fried / Axios:
Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat:
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Joe Rossignol / MacRumors:
Apple launches Apple Intelligence outside of the US for the first time, making it available in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, the UK, and South Africa  —  Apple Intelligence is officially launching outside of the U.S. for the first time today, as a result of the features gaining expanded language support.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Apple adds Layered Recordings to the Voice Memos app in iOS 18.2 for the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max, after bringing audio transcriptions to Voice Memos in iOS 18  —  Alongside the release of a host of new AI features, Apple is also updating the Voice Memos app in iOS 18.2.
Wes Davis / The Verge:
Igor Bonifacic / Engadget:
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai / TechCrunch:
Microsoft says Russia-backed hacking group Secret Blizzard targeted Ukraine's military using other cybercriminals' tools, in order to make attribution harder  —  A Russian-government backed hacking group targeted Ukraine's military using tools and infrastructure developed by cybercriminals, according to new research.
Wall Street Journal:
Meta donates $1M to president-elect Trump's inaugural fund; sources: Mark Zuckerberg gifted Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses to Trump at Mar-a-Lago on November 27  —  President-elect had blasted the tech tycoon during the presidential campaign, but ties have been improving
Lawrence Abrams / BleepingComputer:
Meta says it is “99% of the way” to resolving a global outage that hit Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp, starting at approximately 12:40pm ET  —  Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp suffered a massive worldwide Wednesday afternoon, with services impacted in varying degrees based on user's region.
Sheena Vasani / The Verge:
Google rolls out two updates to Android's unknown tracker alerts feature, letting users pause location updates from their phone and pinpoint unfamiliar trackers  —  Google is rolling out two new updates to its unknown tracker alerts feature that should make it easier for Android device owners …
Muyao Shen / Bloomberg:
Binance and Circle partner to promote USDC; Binance plans to list more crypto trading pairs denominated in USDC and hold USDC for its own corporate treasury  —  - Circle faces increased challenges in the stablecoin market  — Binance will support more USDC usage on its platform
Shoya Okinaga / Nikkei Asia:
Honda plans to dissolve a self-driving vehicle partnership with GM after GM announced plans to exit robotaxi development; Honda had invested $852M in Cruise  —  TOKYO — Honda Motor will dissolve a self-driving vehicle partnership with General Motors after the U.S. automaker said it would pull …
More: TechCrunch
Zaheer Kachwala / Reuters:
Brody Ford / Bloomberg:
Adobe reports Q4 revenue up 11% YoY to $5.61B, vs. $5.54B est., Digital Media revenue up 12%, forecasts FY 2025 revenue below est.; ADBE drops 8%+  —  - Fiscal year sales, profit forecasts fall short of estimates  — Software maker plans a new higher-priced tier for AI tools
The Information:
Kate Knibbs / Wired:
Harvard releases a high-quality dataset of ~1M public-domain books, created with funding from Microsoft and OpenAI, to help train LLMs and AI tools  —  The project's leader says that allowing everyone to access the collection of public-domain books will help “level the playing field” in the AI industry.
Forums: Slashdot
Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch:
OpenAI says ChatGPT, API, and Sora traffic has largely recovered after a multi-hour outage, and that it is monitoring the situation to ensure full resolution  —  OpenAI says ChatGPT, Sora, and its developer-facing API experienced a major outage starting at around 3pm PT on Wednesday, according to the company's status page.

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Google:
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Earlier Picks

Ari Levy / CNBC:
Katie Robertson / New York Times:
Jane Lanhee Lee / Bloomberg:
Alexander Maxham / Android Headlines:
Greg Stohr / Bloomberg: