Techmeme
February 15, 2025, 9:00 AM

Top News

New York Times:
OpenAI's board rejects the $97.4B bid by Elon Musk and a consortium of investors, saying they reject “Musk's latest attempt to disrupt his competition”  —  Bret Taylor, the chairman of OpenAI's board, said the artificial intelligence company was “not for sale.”
Eric Geller / Wired:
Memo: CISA halts election security work and reviews related activities conducted since 2017, to comply with Trump's January 20 EO on “ending federal censorship”  —  The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has frozen efforts to aid states in securing elections, according to an internal memo viewed by WIRED.
Bloomberg:
Source: TSMC is considering taking a controlling stake and fully running Intel's US factories after a Trump team request, as Trump aims to boost manufacturing  —  - TSMC would take controlling stake in potential partnership  — Administration aims to boost manufacturing of advanced chips
Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat:
Perplexity releases Deep Research, offering five queries daily to free users and 500 to subscribers, available now on the web and soon on iOS, Android, and Mac  —  Perplexity shattered the artificial intelligence market's status quo today by launching Deep Research, a tool …
Brody Ford / Bloomberg:
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: Apple's overhaul of Siri faces engineering problems and software bugs; some features, planned for April, may have to be postponed until May or later  —  - Software's makeover is key to Apple Intelligence ambitions  — New Siri features slated for April at risk of being postponed
Emily Nicolle / Bloomberg:
Tether acquires a minority stake in the iconic Italian football club Juventus, as part of a broader push to integrate digital assets into sports franchises  —  Tether Holdings SA de CV said it's acquired a minority stake in Juventus Football Club SpA, as one of crypto's most valuable companies continues …
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: Meta plans major investment in AI-powered humanoid robots, with an initial focus on household chores, and has formed a new team within Reality Labs  —  - Company is aiming to be the engine powering humanoid market  — Ex-Cruise CEO Marc Whitten to run new group in Reality Labs
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Meta announces Project Waterworth, a subsea cable project that will span over 50,000 km and connect five continents  —  Back in November, we broke the news that Meta — owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, with billions of users accounting for 10% of all fixed and 22% of all mobile traffic …
Scharon Harding / Ars Technica:
In an AMA, Steve Huffman says Reddit is planning to roll out paid subreddits in 2025 and is “laying the foundation” to monetize commerce within subreddits  —  Huffman previously showed interest in potentially introducing a new type of subreddit with “exclusive content or private areas” that Reddit users would pay to access.
Boone Ashworth / Wired:
A profile of Watch Duty creator John Clarke Mills, who wants the fire-tracking app to become a one-stop shop for information during any disaster  —  Watch Duty proved indispensable during the recent LA wildfires.  John Mills, the app's creator, wants it to be the one place to go for tracking disasters.
More: Mirror
Dwarkesh Patel / Dwarkesh Podcast:
Q&A with Google's Jeff Dean and Noam Shazeer on Google's path to AGI, future of Moore's Law and TPUs, inference scaling, open research, and more  —  Two of Gemini's co-leads on Google's path to AGI  —  This week I welcome on the show two of the most important technologists ever, in any field.
Olga Kharif / Bloomberg:
The website of President Trump's World Liberty Financial shows the crypto project sold 24B+ of its 25B WLFI tokens after a slow start, implying sales of $1.25B  —  - The project has sold more than 24 billion tokens so far  — Chinese crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun is a project investor
More: The Block
Eric Newcomer / Newcomer:
Sources: Lightspeed, whose bets include Wiz, Anthropic, and Stripe, returned $8B from current and active funds in the past five years, with $3B+ coming in 2024  —  I've got my hands on slides from Lightspeed's $7 billion fundraising effort  —  Lightspeed Venture Partners …

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Earlier Picks

Vittoria Elliott / Wired:
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch:
Jaspreet Singh / Reuters: