Techmeme
March 27, 2024, 5:00 PM

Top News

CNBC:
Amazon plans to invest $2.75B in Anthropic, the second tranche of Amazon's planned $4B investment in the AI startup, after a $1.25B tranche in September 2023  —  Amazon is making its largest outside investment in its three-decade history as it looks to gain an edge in the artificial intelligence race.
Will Knight / Wired:
A look at Databricks' new open-source model DBRX, an LLM that cost ~$10M to train over several months and, Databricks says, outshines Llama 2, Mixtral, and Grok  —  Startup Databricks just released DBRX, the most powerful open source large language model yet—eclipsing Meta's Llama 2.
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge:
Reuters:
A US judge rules that the SEC's lawsuit against Coinbase can proceed, but dismisses one claim that Coinbase acted as an unregistered broker via Coinbase Wallet  —  A federal judge in Manhattan on Wednesday said the U.S. securities regulator's lawsuit against Coinbase (COIN.O) can move forward …
Jonathan Greig / The Record:
Google researchers observed 97 zero-day exploits in the wild in 2023, up 50% from 62 in 2022; 48 were used by espionage actors and 10 were financially-motivated  —  Cybersecurity experts are warning that zero-day exploits, which can be used to compromise devices before anyone is aware they're vulnerable …
Samuel K. Moore / IEEE Spectrum:
MLCommons announces results from its MLPerf 4.0 inference benchmarks, which added Llama 2 70B and Stable Diffusion XL; systems with Nvidia GPUs came out on top  —  Times change, and so must benchmarks.  Now that we're firmly in the age of massive generative AI, it's time to add two such behemoths …
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge:
Google adds AI-generated trip itineraries to Search, translation to Circle to Search, and curated recommendations in Maps in 40+ cities across the US and Canada  —  Google is introducing a handful of updates that aim to take some of the stress out of planning trips and outings …
Alex Weprin / The Hollywood Reporter:
Disney adds Hulu to Disney+, after beta testing the integration since December 2023; Disney+ subscribers who don't pay for Hulu can still search for Hulu shows  —  “Content recommendations are going to be more relevant based on your usage,” says Joe Earley, president of direct-to-consumer for Disney Entertainment.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Elon Musk says X plans to make xAI's Grok available to all Premium subscribers “later this week”, expanding on Premium+ support; X Premium costs $8 per month  —  Following Elon Musk's xAI's move to open source its Grok large language model earlier in March, the X owner on Tuesday …
Michelle F Davis / Bloomberg:
Sources: blockchain AI companies SingularityNET, Fetch.ai, and Ocean Protocol are discussing merging their tokens into ASI, with a ~$7.5B fully diluted value  —  Three artificial intelligence companies that operate on blockchain are in talks to merge their crypto tokens, a move aimed at helping them develop a decentralized AI platform.
Wall Street Journal:
How Phil Schiller, now an Apple Fellow, emerged as Apple's most ardent public defender of its ecosystem, under attacks from the US DOJ, the EU, rivals, and more  —  Former Chief Marketing Officer Phil Schiller has frequently made it clear that Apple doesn't intend to yield to developer criticism
Marcia Sekhose / 91mobiles:
Source: the Google Pixel 9 will have three sizes, the Pixel 9, Pixel 9 Pro, and Pixel 9 Pro XL; alleged Pixel 9 renders show two rear cameras and a compact body  —  - New 5K renders give us a close look at the vanilla Google Pixel 9.  — In addition to Pixel 9 and Pixel 9 Pro, Google will also launch Pixel 9 Pro XL.
Paul Alcorn / Tom's Hardware:
At Intel's AI Summit in Taipei, executives say Copilot will soon run locally on PCs and that there will be a 40 TOPS requirement for NPUs on next-gen AI PCs  —  Let the TOPS wars begin.  —  We've previously reported on industry rumors that Microsoft's Copilot AI service will soon run locally …
Paul Alcorn / Tom's Hardware:
Ryan Weeks / Bloomberg:
Blockchain game Munchables, which offers rewards for looking after digital creatures, loses ~$63M in ETH in a hack; the hacker seems to have returned the funds  —  - Blockchain-based Munchables game confirmed a security incident  — Munchables declared all user funds safe later the same day
Nicola Agius / Search Engine Land:
Google says it blocked or removed 5.5B ads and 12.7M advertiser accounts for violating its policies in 2023, up from 5.2B and 6.7M respectively in 2022  —  The number of advertisers who were blocked or removed due to policy violations nearly doubled compared to the previous year.  —  Chat with SearchBot
Rashi Shrivastava / Forbes:
NY-based Hume, which is building a conversational AI that it claims can interpret emotions based on people's voices, raised a $50M Series B at a $219M valuation  —  Hume has raised $50 million in funding at a $219 million valuation to build “empathic” conversational AI.  —  Alan Cowen feigns a dejected expression.
Sheera Frenkel / New York Times:
Israeli officials detail an expansive and experimental facial recognition program in Gaza to catalog Palestinians without their knowledge, starting in late 2023  —  The experimental effort, which has not been disclosed, is being used to conduct mass surveillance of Palestinians in Gaza, according to military officials and others.
Katherine Bindley / Wall Street Journal:
How tech companies' search for AI experts, amid a shortage of candidates, led to million-dollar-a-year compensation packages, poaching entire teams, and more  —  The artificial-intelligence boom is sending Silicon Valley's talent wars to new extremes.  Tech companies are serving up million-dollar …

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Politico:
Zoe Denenberg / Wall Street Journal:
Brian Heater / TechCrunch: