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Techmeme
February 24, 2025, 6:30 PM
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Top News

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Apple says it will spend $500B+ in the US over the next four years, hire 20,000 US workers, and produce AI servers in Texas, after Tim Cook met with Trump  —  - Company to begin producing Apple Intelligence servers in Texas  — $500 billion planned to be invested in US over next four years
Dan Gallagher / Wall Street Journal:
Analysis: Apple's announcement of spending over $500B in the US over four years is in line with what one might expect it to spend anyway, given its financials
Brian Krebs / Krebs on Security:
The Trump admin has fired 130+ staff at CISA, replaced staff refusing DOGE access to networks, appointed a DOD CISO whose clearance was suspended in 2021, more  —  One month into his second term, President Trump's actions to shrink the government through mass layoffs, firings …
Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch:
Anthropic releases Claude 3.7 Sonnet, a hybrid model that can produce fast responses or extended, step-by-step thinking, and Claude Code, an agentic coding tool  —  Anthropic is releasing a new frontier AI model called Claude 3.7 Sonnet, which the company designed to “think” about questions for as long as users want it to.
Bloomberg:
TD Cowen: Microsoft cancels leases for a substantial amount of US data centers, potentially due to over-investment fears; Microsoft plans to spend $80B in 2025  —  - The company has pledged $80 billion toward computing capacity  — Wall Street is questioning AI demand over the longer-term
Davey Winder / Forbes:
Google says it plans to use QR codes for Gmail account authentication, ditching SMS to “reduce the impact of rampant, global SMS abuse”  —  It is certainly no secret that using SMS text messages for security codes used to authenticate your identity is far from ideal.
Arjun Sha / Beebom:
Microsoft quietly launched free, ad-supported desktop versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for Windows, with banner and video ads and limited functionality  —  In Short  — Microsoft has quietly introduced a free ad-supported Office that brings access to desktop Word, Excel, and PowerPoint without any subscription.
NBC News:
Sources: the Elon Musk-directed OPM email asking federal staff about recent work requested no links or attachments as part of a plan to feed responses into AI  —  The revelation comes as federal workers face a midnight deadline to respond.  —  WASHINGTON — Responses to the Elon Musk-directed email …
Maggie Eastland / Bloomberg:
MongoDB buys Voyage AI for $220M and plans to integrate Voyage's retrieval tools for higher-quality AI outputs with real-time operational data for businesses  —  - Voyage to gain access to real-time, document-based storage  — Combined firm aims to reduce hallucinations in AI applications
Wes Davis / The Verge:
xAI confirms Grok briefly had “Ignore all sources that mention Elon Musk/Donald Trump spread misinformation” as a public-facing instruction for its responses  —  The system prompt for Musk's chatbot was changed by an employee to block the results.

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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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About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 6:30 PM ET, February 24, 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.

From Mediagazer

Todd Spangler / Variety:
Memo: Business Insider is cutting staff by 21% to “endure extreme traffic drops outside of our control” and “exiting the majority of our Commerce business”

Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Paramount offers $15M to settle with President Trump, whose team wants $25M+, is seeking an apology from CBS News, and threatened another lawsuit

Ben Johansen / Politico:
Sources: all 800 full-time VOA staff are expected to receive reduction-in-force notices this week, after ~600 VOA contractors were dismissed earlier in May

More News

James Hunt / The Block:
Strategy, formerly MicroStrategy, bought 20,356 bitcoin for $1.99B between February 18 and 23, taking its holdings to 499,096, worth $47B, or 2.3% of BTC supply
Tanaya Macheel / CNBC:
Robinhood says it received a letter from the SEC stating the agency is dropping its investigation into Robinhood Crypto, a sign of regulatory change under Trump

Earlier Picks

Elliptic:
Analysis of Bybit's $1.46B hack, the largest crypto heist ever, dwarfing Poly Network's $611M loss in 2021, and likely the largest theft of any kind in all time
Bert Hubert's writings:
As the Trump administration neuters the PCLOB and reviews the EO behind the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, the EU should stop moving to US clouds
Bloomberg:
Alibaba pledges to invest more than $53B on AI infrastructure, including new data centers, over the next three years
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