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Techmeme
March 11, 2025, 8:15 PM

Top News

Devindra Hardawar / Engadget:
Apple MacBook Air M4 review: fast, thin and light, great keyboard and touchpad, and excellent battery life, but could use more ports and only a 60Hz screen  —  No surprises, but a lower $999 entry-level price is welcome.  —  At the risk of repeating myself from Engadget's MacBook Air M1 …
Brandon Hill / Tom's Hardware:
Apple Mac Studio review: M3 Ultra offers amazing performance, silent operation, and a variety of ports, but no user memory or SSD upgrades, which are expensive  —  Apple's new Mac Studio doesn't look different on the outside, but there are plenty of performance upgrades under the hood
Reuters:
Sources: Meta is testing its first in-house AI training chip and is working with TSMC to produce it, as part of a long-term plan to lower infrastructure costs  —  Facebook owner Meta (META.O) is testing its first in-house chip for training artificial intelligence systems …
Emma Roth / The Verge:
OpenAI debuts a Responses API to help devs build agents that search the web, scan for files, and perform tasks on computers, and an Agents SDK for orchestration  —  OpenAI's new Responses API comes with web search, the ability to look through files, and computer use out of the box.
Reuters:
Manus partners with Alibaba's Qwen to integrate Manus' AI agent functions with AI models and computing platforms in China and to collaborate on Qwen's AI models  —  China's Manus AI announced on Tuesday a strategic partnership with the team behind tech giant Alibaba's Qwen AI models …
Sam Altman / @sama:
Sam Altman says OpenAI trained an AI model that is good at creative writing and shares a short story it wrote; he's “not sure yet how/when it will get released”  —  we trained a new model that is good at creative writing (not sure yet how/when it will get released). this is the first time i have been really struck by something written by AI; it got the vibe of metafiction so right. PROMPT: Please write a metafictional literary short story
Sam Sabin / Axios:
President Trump nominates Sean Plankey, the director of cyber policy at the White House during the first Trump administration, to run CISA  —  President Trump has nominated Sean Plankey, a veteran cyber official from his first administration, to run the lead U.S. cyber agency, according to a list of nominations sent to Congress.
The Information:
Source: Anthropic's annualized revenue grew from $1B at the end of 2024 to $1.4B in early March; Manus uses tools including Claude 3.7 Sonnet to power its agent  —  Anthropic's year is off to a good start.  —  Its annualized revenue—a measure of the past month's revenue multiplied by 12 …
Andrew J. Hawkins / The Verge:
Waymo expands its operating area around Silicon Valley to a 27 square-mile region, including Mountain View, Palo Alto, Los Altos, and parts of Sunnyvale  —  The company is operating in a 27 square-mile service area that includes Mountain View, Palo Alto, Los Altos, and parts of Sunnyvale.
David McCabe / New York Times:
The Senate approves Gail Slater, President Trump's pick to lead the DOJ's antitrust unit, by a 78-19 vote; she has been critical of power in the tech industry  —  Slater, a longtime Washington lawyer, has been particularly critical of power in the tech industry.
Reuters:
India's Airtel signs a deal with SpaceX to launch Starlink in the country, subject to Starlink obtaining government approval to begin operations  —  India's Bharti Airtel (BRTI.NS) said on Tuesday it had signed a deal with Elon Musk's SpaceX for the highly anticipated launch …
Counterpoint Research:
Global smartwatch shipments fell 7% YoY in 2024, the market's first ever decline; Apple fell 19% while Huawei grew 35%, Xiaomi grew 135%, and Samsung grew 3%  —  - The global smartwatch market fell 7% in 2024, the first ever decline in the overall market.  — Apple retained its top position …
Emma Roth / The Verge:
Sander Lutz / Decrypt:
Sen. Lummis unveils the Bitcoin Act in the US Senate, with five Republican cosponsors, to codify a strategic Bitcoin reserve and let the US buy up to 1M BTC  —  Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) introduced a bill in the U.S. Senate Tuesday that would authorize the U.S. government to buy …
Krisztian Sandor / CoinDesk:
Mesh raised an $82M Series B, settled mostly in PayPal's PYUSD stablecoin and led by Paradigm, to expand its stablecoin-based payments settlement network  —  The fundraising was completed using PayPal's PYUSD stablecoin and was led by Paradigm.  —  What to know:
Richard Milne / Financial Times:
Lego CEO Niels Christiansen says the toymaker plans to make video games in-house, after 2024 revenue rose 13% YoY to ~$10B; its Fortnite tie-up has 87M players  —  Danish toymaker beefs up digital capabilities after success with externally developed games  —  Lego is building up its capability …
Andrew Cunningham / Ars Technica:
AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D review: great gaming and general performance and AMD removed overclocking limitations, but a niche CPU, some software issues, and pricey  —  Not a lot of people actually need this thing, but if you do, it's very good.  —  Even three years later, AMD's high-end X3D-series processors still …
Ryan Weeks / Bloomberg:
Sources: VCs with “locked” tokens are working with market makers to hedge their positions; Tokenomist: 2024's largest unlocks brought $5.4B+ into circulation  —  - Venture funds have accumulated large sums of locked tokens  — Firms including Wintermute help investors hedge their holdings
Columbia Journalism Review:
A study of eight AI search engines found they provided incorrect citations of news articles in 60%+ of queries; Grok 3 answered 94% of the queries incorrectly  —  We Compared Eight AI Search Engines.  They're All Bad at Citing News.  —  AI search tools are rapidly gaining in popularity …

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Earlier Picks

New York Times:
Richard Leadbetter / Eurogamer.net:
Jaspreet Singh / Reuters: