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Techmeme
March 26, 2025, 12:55 PM

Top News

Simon Willison / Simon Willison's Weblog:
Gemini 2.5 Pro hands-on: a very strong model with 1M input tokens, 64K output tokens, a January 2025 knowledge cut-off, and very, very impressive coding skills  —  There's a new release from Google Gemini this morning: the first in the Gemini 2.5 series.  Google call it “a thinking model …
Benj Edwards / Ars Technica:
Developers say aggressive AI crawlers are overwhelming open-source infrastructure; LibreNews: up to 97% of some projects' traffic comes from AI companies' bots  —  Software developer Xe Iaso reached a breaking point earlier this year when aggressive AI crawler traffic from Amazon overwhelmed …
Richard Lawler / The Verge:
Microsoft unveils AI “deep reasoning” agents for 365 Copilot: Researcher, based on OpenAI's deep research model, and Analyst, based on o3-mini, coming in April  —  Multi-step reasoning AI is coming to Microsoft Copilot. … After Google and OpenAI offered up AI news on Tuesday …
Simon Willison / Simon Willison's Weblog:
In an addendum to the GPT-4o System Card, OpenAI says it is “not blocking the capability to generate adult public figures” and that public figures can opt out  —  Introducing 4o Image Generation.  When OpenAI first announced GPT-4o back in May 2024 one of the most exciting features …
Kylie Robison / The Verge:
Philip Stafford / Financial Times:
Sources: Fidelity Investments is in the advanced stages of testing its own stablecoin, managed by its digital assets arm; Trump pledged to back USD stablecoins  —  Asset manager is in advanced stages of testing token as the Trump administration prepares to overhaul crypto oversight
Ana Swanson / New York Times:
The US adds export restrictions to 80 organizations, primarily targeting Chinese companies, including server maker Nettrix and clients of Nvidia, Intel, and AMD  —  The additions included companies that are customers of Intel and Nvidia, and one firm that was the focus of a New York Times investigation last year.
TechCrunch:
Leaked email: Block lays off 931 employees, or ~8% of staff, and moves 193 managers to individual contributor roles, after cutting ~1,000 roles in January 2024  —  Fintech Block laid off 931 people, roughly 8% of the company's staff, on Tuesday, according to a leaked message from the company seen by TechCrunch.
Kurt Wagner / Bloomberg:
eMarketer expects X to generate $1.31B in US ad sales in 2025, up 17.5%, and $2.26B in global ad sales, up 16.5%, its first year of ad revenue growth since 2022  —  - Projections from Emarketer show sales up 17.5% this year  — Sales remain significantly lower than before Musk's purchase
Blake Brittain / Reuters:
Anthropic convinced a California federal judge to reject a preliminary bid to block it from using lyrics owned by UMG and other music publishers to train Claude  —  Artificial intelligence company Anthropic convinced a California federal judge on Tuesday to reject a preliminary bid to block …
Reuters:
Sources: Italy hands tax demands to Meta, X, and LinkedIn in the last step in its VAT case, seeking €887.6M from Meta, €12.5M from X, and ~€140M from LinkedIn  —  Italy has handed tax demands to Meta (META.O), X and LinkedIn in the last formal step in an unprecedented VAT claim …
Jason Kehe / Wired:
A look at RISC architecture's origins, the Arm vs. RISC-V war, and how RISCites beat the CISCites, as RISC's increasing adoption risks US companies' dominance  —  “RISC architecture is gonna change everything.”  Those absurdly geeky, incredibly prophetic words were spoken 30 years ago.

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State of AI: Adoption, Challenges and Recommendations  —  Examining the current state of AI, the key challenges organizations face, and practical recommendations for utilizing AI integration alongside other best practices.
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Earlier Picks

Erin Brodwin / Axios:
Bloomberg:
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