Techmeme
February 17, 2025, 6:40 PM

Top News

Reuters:
South Korea's data protection authority says DeepSeek app downloads have been suspended in the country after DeepSeek failed to follow its personal data rules  —  South Korea's data protection authority on Monday said it had temporarily suspended the domestic service of Chinese AI app DeepSeek since Saturday.
Matt Binder / disruptionist:
X shows error messages when trying to share Signal's Signal.me links in DMs, posts, and profile pages, and a warning page if users click on already posted links  —  Signal has been a primary method of communication for federal workers looking to blow the whistle on DOGE.
Bloomberg:
President Xi meets Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma, Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei, and others, signaling Beijing's support for the long-marginalized private sector  —  - Meeting signals a more supportive stance toward private firms  — Xi promises relief from excessive fines, level playing field
Max Tani / Semafor:
Documents: the NYT greenlights using select internal and external AI tools for editorial and product staff, including from OpenAI, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft  —  The Scoop  —  The New York Times is greenlighting the use of AI for its product and editorial staff, saying that internal tools …
Kate Clark / Bloomberg:
Source: Ilya Sutskever's startup Safe Superintelligence is raising $1B+ led by Greenoaks Capital Partners, which plans to invest $500M, at a valuation of $30B+  —  - SSI raising more than $1 billion, including from Greenoaks  — Former OpenAI chief scientist left the company last year
More: SiliconANGLE
Namanyay Goel / N's Blog:
New junior developers are reliant on Copilot, Claude, and other AI tools, meaning foundational coding knowledge is missing, potentially creating future problems  —  100k+ views 70+ votes 50+ votes  —  Something's been bugging me about how new devs and I need to talk about it.
Romain Dillet / TechCrunch:
Mistral debuts Mistral Saba, a 24B-parameter custom-trained model for Arabic language and culture, via its API; Saba bests Mistral Small 3 for Arabic content  —  The next frontier for large language models (LLMs), one of the key technologies underpinning the boom in generative AI tools, might be geographical.
Financial Times:
Surj, the sporting arm of Saudi Arabia's PIF, plans to invest $1B in DAZN and a new joint venture with the sports streamer; source: Surj will take a <5% stake  —  Surj Sports Investment will take stake in DAZN and help fund a Middle East broadcasting joint venture
Politico:
X challenges a German court ordering it to share metrics such as likes and shares with researchers before the February 23 election, in a test of the EU's DSA  —  Elon Musk's X has challenged a German court decision that instructed the platform to share data with researchers, the court confirmed to POLITICO.

Sponsor Posts

TELUS Digital:
What you need to know about fine-tuning LLMs  —  Success with generative AI hinges on honing a pretrained LLM to be a specialist at your intended domain or application.  Learn how to fine-tune for four key characteristics.
Intel:
Intel Delivers powerful CPUs for AI and Networking  —  With the onset of AI, businesses demand powerful and efficient CPUs.  Explore new Intel Xeon 6 processors, for the broadest set of workloads with leadership performance and lower TCO.
Zoho:
The final word on Zoho Desk and Zoho Analytics: Everything you need to know  —  Bringing it all togetherIn the last few months, we've explored how Zoho Desk and Zoho Analytics work hand in hand to transform customer support data into actionable insights.
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Box data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Featured Podcasts

Lenny's Podcast:
How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions)
Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.
Subscribe to Lenny's Podcast.
Techmeme Ride Home:
The Day Of AI Announces
The day's tech news, every day at 5pm ET. Fifteen minutes and you're up to date.
Subscribe to Techmeme Ride Home.
The Social Radars:
Drew Houston, Founder & CEO, Dropbox
Come be a fly on the wall as Y Combinator's Jessica Livingston and Carolynn Levy talk to some of the most successful founders in Silicon Valley about how they did it.
Subscribe to The Social Radars.
Channels with Peter Kafka:
How long can sports keep TV alive?
Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.
Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.
Spotlight On:
G2's Godard Abel on How the "Yelp for Software" is Adapting to AI Buying and Discovery
A podcast from Accel about how companies are built, from the people doing the building.
Subscribe to Spotlight On.
Invest Like the Best:
Gili Raanan - Cybersecurity Investment Playbook
The leading destination to learn about business and investing. We do this by showcasing exceptional talent and ideas.
Subscribe to Invest Like the Best.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 6:40 PM ET, February 17, 2025.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

More News

David Barnett / The Guardian:

Earlier Picks

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: