Techmeme
August 5, 2024, 2:25 PM

Top News

Tanaya Macheel / CNBC:
Bitcoin dropped below $50,000, its lowest level since February 2024 and down 17% since August 3, and ether dropped 15% to ~$2,300, as global markets plummet  —  Cryptocurrencies tumbled amid a global market sell-off spurred by recession fears.  —  The price of bitcoin was last lower by 7% …
Financial Times:
Investor letter: Elliott Management says megacap tech stocks, particularly Nvidia, were in “bubble land”, and AI is “overhyped” and “not ready for prime time”  —  Hedge fund tells clients many supposed applications of the technology are ‘never going to actually work’
Aditya Soni / Reuters:
Apple, Nvidia, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft stocks led a tech stock sell-off amid US recession fears; AAPL drops 5%, NVDA drops 7%+, and MSFT drops 3%+  —  Apple (AAPL.O) and Nvidia (NVDA.O) led a sell-off in technology stocks on Monday as U.S. recession fears and Berkshire Hathaway's …
Samantha Cole / 404 Media:
Sources: Nvidia scraped sources like Netflix and YouTube to train an unreleased foundational model; concerned staff were told they had full clearance to do so  —  Nvidia scraped videos from Youtube and several other sources to compile training data for its AI products, internal Slack chats …
Cade Metz / New York Times:
Elon Musk revives his OpenAI lawsuit, filing a complaint in California to allege that OpenAI, Sam Altman, and Greg Brockman breached OpenAI's founding contract  —  The Tesla chief executive has renewed claims that the A.I. start-up put profits and commercial interests ahead of the public good.
Anne VanderMey / Bloomberg:
AI chip startup Groq raised a $640M Series D led by BlackRock at a $2.8B valuation, up from $1B after raising $300M in 2021, and adds an Intel executive as COO  —  Cisco and Samsung invested in the $640 million deal  —  Artificial intelligence startup Groq Inc. has raised $640 million in new funding …
Washington Post:
In a letter, the secretaries of state from PA, WA, MI, NM, and MN ask Elon Musk to change X's AI assistant Grok to stop it from spreading false election info  —  Grok, the AI search assistant on Musk's X platform, suggested that Kamala Harris had missed the ballot deadline in nine states.  She hasn't.
Bloomberg:
Michael Moritz / Financial Times:
Silicon Valley's Trump supporters are making the same mistake as all powerful people who back authoritarians: they can't control him, and he won't keep promises  —  The financiers who support him have made the same error as all powerful people who back authoritarians  —  The writer is senior adviser, Sequoia Heritage
Berber Jin / Wall Street Journal:
Investor letter: Josh Kushner says Thrive Capital raised a $1B early-stage fund and a $4B late-stage fund, its largest-ever pair, after backing OpenAI in 2023  —  The fundraising reflects optimism over artificial intelligence despite the startup sector's broader struggles
Bart Meijer / Reuters:
The European Commission says TikTok agreed to permanently withdraw and not replace TikTok Lite's “Task and Reward Programme” in the EU to comply with the DSA  —  ByteDance's TikTok has agreed to permanently withdraw its TikTok Lite rewards programme from the EU to comply …
Todd Bishop / GeekWire:
Memo from Microsoft's chief people officer: “everyone at Microsoft” now has “security” as a “Core Priority”, used in performance reviews  —  Microsoft will elevate security to the status of “core priority” for all employees as part of the process of focusing …
More: The Verge
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Source: Placer.ai, which provides AI-powered market research based on location data, raised $75M at a $1.45B valuation, up from $1B at its Series C  —  Location data, for better or worse, continues to be a part of the bedrock of how apps are built.  Now a startup developing AI market research based …
Rachael Levy / Reuters:
Elon Musk says Neuralink has implanted its device in a second trial patient, who had a spinal cord injury, and 400 of the implant's 1,024 electrodes are working  —  Neuralink has successfully implanted in a second patient its device designed to give paralyzed patients the ability …

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