Techmeme
February 13, 2024, 11:00 PM

Top News

Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
Sources: Mozilla plans to scale back its investment in its VPN, Relay, its Online Footprint Scrubber, and mozilla.social, shut down Hubs, and cut ~60 employees  —  After installing a new interim CEO earlier this month, Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox browser …
Samuel Stolton / Bloomberg:
The EU ends its DMA investigation into iMessage and Microsoft Bing, Edge, and Advertising, deciding not to designate the services as gatekeepers  —  - Services not dominant enough to face Digital Markets Act … A probe concluded that the services don't hold a dominant enough position …
David Pierce / The Verge:
OpenAI starts testing a “memory” feature that is on by default and lets ChatGPT and custom GPTs remember info about users and their conversations over time  —  Talking to an AI chatbot can feel a bit like Groundhog Day after a while, as you tell it for the umpteenth …
The Information:
AI researcher Andrej Karpathy, one of the founding members of OpenAI, leaves the company; Karpathy was developing a product that he described as an AI assistant  —  Andrej Karpathy, one of the founding members of OpenAI, has left the company, a spokesperson confirmed.
Alex Heath / The Verge:
In a video, Mark Zuckerberg shares his thoughts on the Vision Pro, saying Quest 3 “is the better product, period”, highlighting Apple's tradeoffs, and more  —  Now that it can be strapped to our faces and worn in strange places, opinions about Apple's Vision Pro are flying left and right.
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Nvidia releases an early version of Chat with RTX, an app that lets users run an AI chatbot on a PC powered by an RTX 30- or 40-series GPU with 8GB+ of VRAM  —  Nvidia is releasing an early version of Chat with RTX today, a demo app that lets you run a personal AI chatbot on your PC.
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Walmart is in talks to buy smart TV manufacturer Vizio for more than $2B, as it looks to bolster its advertising business in its battle with Amazon  —  Retail giant discussing a more than $2 billion deal that would boost its advertising business in battle with Amazon
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Sources: Microsoft plans to launch select Xbox games on the PS5 and Switch, starting with Hi-Fi Rush, Pentiment, and Sea of Thieves, a seismic strategy shift  —  With rumors of some Xbox games coming to PS5 and Switch, Microsoft gets ready to lay out its vision for the future of Xbox.
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Alison Snyder / Axios:
Cohere's nonprofit research lab releases its open-source multilingual LLM Aya, which it says can follow instructions in more than 100 languages  —  A new open-source generative AI model can follow instructions in more than 100 languages. … - It covers more than twice as many languages …
Tom Dotan / Wall Street Journal:
Copilot for Microsoft 365 testers question the $30/seat price and find Copilot the most useful in Teams and the least in Excel; Dow and others plan big rollouts  —  Artificial-intelligence aide handles email, meetings and other things, but its price and limited use have some skeptical
Mary Ann Azevedo / TechCrunch:
Foundry Group, an 18-year-old VC firm with nearly $3.5B in assets under management, has quietly decided to wind down and not raise any more funds  —  Foundry Group, an 18-year-old venture firm with nearly $3.5 billion in assets under management, has quietly decided to shut down and not raise any more funds.
Hayden Field / CNBC:
Instacart reports Q4 revenue up 6% YoY to $803M vs. $804M est., plans to lay off ~250 workers, or ~7% of staff; three top execs are leaving for personal reasons  —  - Instacart on Tuesday announced it would lay off about 250 employees, or roughly 7% of the company, alongside reporting fourth-quarter earnings …
Kylie Robison / Fortune:
Sierra, an enterprise-focused conversational AI startup co-founded by Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor, launches with $110M in funding led by Sequoia and Benchmark  —  Bret Taylor, right, launches Sierra, a conversational AI platform for businesses, with former Google executive Clay Bavor, left.
Lucas Ropek / Gizmodo:
Flipper Zero multi-tool device maker Flipper Devices announces a $49 Video Game Module, powered by a Raspberry Pi RP2040, that turns a Flipper into a controller  —  The creators behind the popular Flipper device have teamed up with Raspberry Pi to expand its capabilities.
Zachary Small / New York Times:
GLAAD's first gaming industry survey featuring nearly 1,500 participants: <2% of console video games include LGBTQ characters, 17% of gamers are queer, and more  —  In its first survey of the video game industry, the advocacy group GLAAD determined that few console games include queer characters.
Reuters:
A US federal judge sets the trial date for an FTC antitrust lawsuit against Amazon for October 2026  —  A U.S. federal judge on Tuesday set an October 2026 trial date for a Federal Trade Commission antitrust lawsuit against Amazon.com (AMZN.O).  —  The consumer protection agency filed …
Antonia Mufarech / Bloomberg:
Lyft reports Q4 revenue up 4% YoY to $1.2B, net loss of $26.3M, vs. $588.1M YoY, active riders up 10% to 22.4M, and Q1 forecast above est.; LYFT jumps 10%+  —  - Uber rival said it had highest annual ridership ever in 2023  — Bookings in fourth quarter rose 17%, beating analyst estimates

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MK Manoylov / The Block:

Earlier Picks

Spencer Soper / Bloomberg:
Krystal Hu / Reuters:
Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:
Mia Sato / The Verge:
Threads: @miasato.2 and @knguyenMastodon: @annaecook@mstdn.socialBluesky: @djcentos7.bsky.social
Forums: r/technews and Slashdot
Rebekah Valentine / IGN: