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Techmeme
November 1, 2023, 5:35 PM

Top News

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
At the UK's AI Safety Summit, the UK releases the Bletchley Declaration, signed by 29 countries, and the US Commerce Secretary announces an AI Safety Institute  —  The world is locked in a race, and competition, over dominance in AI, but today, a few of them appeared to come together …
Financial Times:
CoinDesk:
The US SEC charges SafeMoon and its executives for selling unregistered crypto securities and misappropriating investors' funds the team promised were “locked”  —  Crypto company SafeMoon's CEO and chief technology officer were arrested, accused of withdrawing more than $200M …
Bloomberg:
A look at Apple's ambition to revolutionize health care: some breakthroughs marred by philosophical disagreements, a culture of conservatism, and tech realities  —  The company is working on big things, but employees disagree over whether they should be serving people who are healthy or sick.
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: Apple plans new health features for 2024's Apple Watch, like an elevated blood pressure sensor, and a paid health coaching service, possibly using AI  —  - AirPods will get hearing-aid capability and hearing tests  — AI health coach in the works, as are Vision Pro health tools
David Pierce / The Verge:
US v. Google offers a rare look at Google's top 20 queries by revenue for a week in September 2018: iPhone, insurance, cheap flights, online colleges, and more  —  Not all Google searches make Google money.  Google often says that it only shows ads on about 20 percent of queries, the ones it calls “commercial queries.”
Brian Steinberg / Variety:
Shareholder letter: Netflix says its ad tier has 15M+ MAUs globally, accounting for ~30% of new sign-ups where it's available, and plans new ad formats for 2024  —  Netflix is ready to use “The Crown,” “Squid Game” and other signature series to take ad dollars from rival streamers.
Filipe Espósito / 9to5Mac:
Apple quietly discontinued Apple Music's $4.99/month Voice Plan, which was introduced in 2021 and let users access the Apple Music catalog exclusively via Siri  —  Apple this week held a special event to announce new Macs, but what the company didn't tell is that it has just quietly discontinued the …
Ben Thompson / Stratechery:
AI Snake Oil:
What Biden's EO means for AI openness, and why a compute threshold is unlikely to effectively anticipate individual models' riskiness, but may work in aggregate  —  Good news on paper, but the devil is in the details  —  The Biden-Harris administration has issued an executive order on artificial intelligence.
The Walt Disney Company:
Disney plans to acquire the 33% stake in Hulu held by Comcast's NBCUniversal, giving Disney full ownership; Disney expects to pay NBCU ~$8.61B by December 1  —  The Walt Disney Company (NYSE: DIS) announced today that it will acquire the 33% stake in Hulu, LLC held by Comcast Corp.'s (NASDAQ …
Sam Tobin / Reuters:
Apple loses a bid to block a UK lawsuit over allegedly hiding defective iPhone batteries and “throttling” them via updates; Apple calls the lawsuit “baseless”  —  Apple Inc (AAPL.O) on Wednesday lost a bid to block a mass London lawsuit accusing it of hiding defective batteries …
Ron Miller / TechCrunch:
Snowflake unveils Snowflake Cortex, a fully managed service designed to help business users and developers work with AI-powered apps on its Data Cloud platform  —  Companies use Snowflake to store their data in the cloud.  With the ever growing interest in generative AI and large language models …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
CRM platform HubSpot announces it's acquiring the B2B data provider Clearbit, which has 400K+ users and was valued at $250M as of January 2019, per PitchBook  —  HubSpot, the Boston-based marketing software maker and CRM platform, announced today it's acquiring the B2B data provider Clearbit …
Joshua Oliver / Financial Times:
A look back at testimony from Caroline Ellison, Gary Wang, and Nishad Singh and SBF's counterclaims, as the jury prepares to deliberate which version to believe  —  Former crypto tycoon will soon learn whether he was able to successfully counter his former colleagues' testimony  —  Four people were in the room.
RT Watson / The Block:
After securing regulatory approval, Coinbase says that eligible US retail customers can now access BTC and ETH futures contracts via Coinbase Financial Markets  —  - Coinbase's service offering crypto futures trading to eligible retail U.S. customers is now active and includes “nano” bitcoin contracts.
New York Times:
Check Point details Iran's monthslong hacking espionage campaign targeting the country's rivals, like Israel, underscoring Iran's improved hacking capabilities  —  A monthslong hacking campaign targeted the governments of regional rivals, including Israel, and marked a turn, a new report says …
Hayden Field / CNBC:
LinkedIn announces a GPT-4-powered AI chatbot that the company calls a “job seeker coach”, available to Premium users, and says the platform now has 1B+ members  —  - LinkedIn said it surpassed 1 billion members and debuted an AI chatbot billed as a “job seeker coach” and other generative AI tools for Premium members.

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More News

Tim Wu / The Atlantic:

Earlier Picks

Nilesh Christopher / Rest of World:
Jason Schreier / Bloomberg: