Techmeme
March 19, 2024, 11:50 PM

Top News

Dina Bass / Bloomberg:
Microsoft hires DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman to run consumer AI, reporting to Satya Nadella, and brings on most staff from his Inflection AI startup  —  Suleyman and his team will join from OpenAI rival Inflection AI  —  Microsoft Corp. has named Mustafa Suleyman head …
Inflection:
Inflection AI names Sean White as CEO and plans to host Inflection-2.5 on Azure, after co-founders Karén Simonyan and Mustafa Suleyman depart for Microsoft AI  —  From day one at Inflection, we've been driven by a simple mission: to create a personal intelligence for everyone.
Satya Nadella / The Official Microsoft Blog:
Microsoft announces Microsoft AI, focused on Copilot and other consumer AI products; Mustafa Suleyman will be its CEO and Karén Simonyan its chief scientist  —  Satya Nadella, Chief Executive Officer, shared the below communication today with Microsoft employees.
Shirin Ghaffary / Bloomberg:
Emma Roth / The Verge:
In a brief demo, Meta shows how Threads could handle fediverse sharing, including waiting five minutes before sending a Threads post to the fediverse  —  Threads is coming to the fediverse — and we just got our first official look at how that might work from Meta itself.
Ashley Belanger / Ars Technica:
Users complain after Glassdoor started adding real names to profiles without explicit user consent; Glassdoor says it cross-populates data between its services  —  Anonymous review site Glassdoor now consults public sources to identify users.  —  Glassdoor, where employees go to leave anonymous reviews …
Kamila Wojciechowska / Android Authority:
Source: Google's Pixel 8a will have a 6.1" 120Hz OLED display, Tensor G3 chip, DisplayPort output support, and the same camera sensor as the Pixel 7a  —  The Pixel 8a's major upgrades will make it even more competitive, but raise further questions over the vanilla Pixel 8.
Harry McCracken / Fast Company:
An interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on how the company's early decisions led to its AI boom, why Nvidia's ubiquity will not be easy to replicate, and more  —  Nvidia's chips sparked the AI revolution.  Now it's in the business of putting the technology to work in an array of industries.
Alex Koller / CNBC:
Kate Irwin / PCMag:
Fitbit is working with Google Research to create an LLM based on Gemini to provide Fitbit mobile app users with personalized data and health recommendations  —  Google is training Gemini on health data, and it's creating a new AI model for the Fitbit app that can give advice tailored to your needs.
New York Times:
Sources: Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund discussed a potential partnership with a16z and others to create a fund of about $40B to invest in AI in H2 2024  —  The Middle Eastern country is creating a gigantic fund to invest in A.I. technology, potentially becoming the largest player in the hot market.
Mike Rogoway / Oregonian:
PE firm Francisco Partners agrees to acquire Portland, Oregon-based Jama Software, which helps companies develop complex tech products, for $1.2B  —  Jama Software, which helped lead a brief renaissance in Portland technology in the decade after the dot-com bust, sold Monday to a private equity firm for $1.2 billion.
Business Insider:
Sources: OpenAI plans to release GPT-5 in mid-2024, likely during summer, and some enterprise customers have recently received demos of the latest model  —  - OpenAI's main product is the popular generative AI tool ChatGPT.  — Since its last major model upgrade to GPT-4, the tool has run into performance issues.
Michael Peel / Financial Times:
Google DeepMind debuts TacticAI, a prototype AI soccer tactician built with Premier League club Liverpool, using geometric deep learning on 7,176 corner kicks  —  Human experts prefer TacticAI's suggested positional improvements at corner kicks  —  Google DeepMind has developed …
Cate Lawrence / Tech.eu:
Solaris, which lets companies offer their own financial services via APIs, raised a €96M Series F led by SBI Group, bringing its total funding to €450M+  —  Solarisbank is a Banking-as-a-Service platform that enables other companies to offer their own financial services via APIs.
Foo Yun Chee / Reuters:
EU DMA hearing: a Meta lawyer says Meta offered to cut its EU monthly subscription for Facebook and Instagram from €9.99 to €5.99 to address regulatory concerns  —  Meta Platforms (META.O) has offered to almost halve its monthly subscription fee for Facebook and Instagram to 5.99 euros …
Echo Wang / Reuters:
Sources: Israeli cybersecurity company Cato Networks has hired underwriters for a US IPO as soon as early 2025; source: Cato is looking to raise more than $500M  —  Israeli cybersecurity firm Cato Networks, which was valued at more than $3 billion in a private funding round last year …
Adam James / The Block:
The US SEC says Genesis Global Capital agreed to a $21M civil penalty as part of a settlement over charges of offering unregistered securities via Gemini Earn  —  - Genesis Global Capital agreed to pay a $21 million civil penalty as part of a settlement over SEC charges.
Maxwell Zeff / Gizmodo:
Mark Zuckerberg says Threads is rolling out a “Trending now” page for users in the US, under the search bar in the mobile app  —  Threads users in the U.S. will start seeing a “Trending now” page on the platform starting Tuesday.  —  Threads users in the United States …

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Earlier Picks

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