Techmeme
January 28, 2023, 5:45 PM

Top News

Washington Post:
Sources detail the pressure inside Meta and Google to move faster on AI due to the surge of attention around ChatGPT, potentially sweeping safety concerns aside  —  Google, Facebook and Microsoft helped build the scaffolding of AI.  Smaller companies are taking it to the masses, forcing Big Tech to react.
New York Times:
Court filing: the US DOJ accuses Sam Bankman-Fried of messaging FTX US' general counsel and a potential witness, and asks a judge to limit his communications  —  The move followed the disgraced cryptocurrency executive's attempt to contact a potential witness in his criminal case, prosecutors said.
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Google researchers detail AI model MusicLM, which can generate high-fidelity music in any genre from text and was trained on a dataset of 280K hours of music  —  An impressive new AI system from Google can generate music in any genre given a text description.  But the company, fearing the risks, has no immediate plans to release it.
Kat Bailey / IGN:
Q&A with Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer on Xbox having no major 2022 releases, 2023 momentum, layoffs, the Activision deal amid the FTC lawsuit, and more  —  Xbox's CEO talks about the recent Developer Direct, 2022 struggles, layoffs, and what 2023 could hold.
Bloomberg:
Sources: the Biden administration has secured an agreement with the Netherlands and Japan to restrict exports of some advanced chipmaking machinery to China  —  President Joe Biden's administration secured an agreement with the Netherlands and Japan to restrict exports of some advanced chipmaking machinery …
Tim Harford / Financial Times:
What poet, playboy, and prophet of investment bubbles Charles Mackay, plagiarizing in 1841 on the Dutch tulip bubble, can tell us about crypto's rise and fall  —  One winter morning in early 1637, a sailor presented himself at the counting-house of a wealthy Dutch merchant and was offered a hearty breakfast of fine red herring.
Julia Angwin / The Markup:
Q&A with Princeton CS professor Arvind Narayanan on why he calls ChatGPT a “bullshit generator”, his worries over its boom, developing his AI taxonomy, and more  —  Hello, friends,  —  If you have been reading all the hype about the latest artificial intelligence chatbot …
Ben Jiang / South China Morning Post:
Counterpoint: China's smartphone sales fell 14% YoY in 2022, to their lowest level in a decade; iPhone sales fell 3% YoY as Apple took the country's No. 2 spot  —  Apple topped smartphone sales in China in the fourth quarter of 2022, enabling the US tech giant to rank as the country's …
Moneycontrol:
Some ShareChat employees and investors detail the company's leadership crisis and say revenue has not kept pace with cash burn and its ~$5B valuation in 2022  —  The company's top and middle management are hollowing out, revenue has not kept pace with cash burn and Sharechat's top-tier valuation …
Mitchell Clark / The Verge:
Twitter plans to take “less severe actions” against rule-breaking accounts, like limiting the reach of tweets, and reserve suspensions for severe violations  —  Twitter is promising that it'll take “less severe actions” when disciplining accounts that break its rules …

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More News

Mark Keierleber / The 74:
Kurt Schlosser / GeekWire:
Maureen Farrell / New York Times:
Semafor:

Earlier Picks

James Vincent / The Verge:
Wayne Ma / The Information:
Wall Street Journal:
Stuart A. Thompson / New York Times:
Dan Milmo / The Guardian: