Techmeme
October 21, 2024, 2:25 PM

Top News

Chris Welch / The Verge:
Hands-on with Apple's hearing health features for AirPods Pro 2, set for iOS 18.1: hearing aids work well, hearing protection in all modes, and a hearing test  —  The AirPods Pro 2 will soon offer more robust hearing protection and a new hearing aid feature.  But it's the hearing test that has really hooked me.
Todd Bishop / GeekWire:
Microsoft unveils 10 new AI agents for its enterprise-focused Dynamics 365 apps covering sales, finance, and more, ahead of Salesforce's Agentforce availability  —  AI agents are reigniting the competition between Microsoft and Salesforce.  —  Microsoft announced 10 new AI agents …
Ben Cohen / Wall Street Journal:
A profile of and interview with Tim Cook on being “perfectly fine with not being first”, running Apple, Vision Pro, AI, the Design Studio, group chats, and more  —  The CEO of the world's most valuable company led two of the biggest product launches of his tenure this year …
João da Silva / BBC:
ByteDance says it fired an intern in its ad tech team for “maliciously interfering” with AI training, and says operations were unaffected by their actions  —  TikTok owner, ByteDance, says it has sacked an intern for “maliciously interfering” with the training of one of its artificial intelligence (AI) models.
Jamie Crawley / CoinDesk:
Stripe announces it has finalized a deal to acquire stablecoin infrastructure company Bridge; Michael Arrington says the deal was worth $1.1B  —  Bridge, which has raised $54 million in funding, previously said it aspired to become the blockchain version of Stripe, operating a global system in which other developers could integrate
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
xAI launches an API for “grok-beta” priced at $5 per million input tokens or $15 per million output tokens; it is unclear which AI model “grok-beta” might be  —  In August, Elon Musk's xAI promised to make Grok, the company's flagship generative AI model powering a number of features on X, available via an API.
Forums: Hacker News
Sean Michael Kerner / VentureBeat:
IBM launches its open source Granite 3.0 models, including 2B and 8B general purpose versions and Mixture-of-Experts models, aimed at enterprise customers  —  Make no mistake about it, enterprise AI is big business, especially for IBM.  —  IBM already has a $2 billion book of business related …
Joe Warminsky / The Record:
UK-based Sophos plans to acquire Atlanta-based cybersecurity company Secureworks for ~$859M, expected to close in early 2025; Dell owns ~79% of Secureworks  —  Prominent cybersecurity company Sophos is acquiring another well-known firm in the industry, Secureworks, for about $859 million, the two companies announced Monday.
Tom Warren / The Verge:
AMD unveils Zen 5-based X3D desktop CPUs, arriving November 7, but offers few details and no price, ahead of Intel's Core Ultra 200-series launch on October 24  —  AMD is officially announcing its first next-generation X3D desktop processors today, based on its latest Zen 5 architecture.

Sponsor Posts

Google:
Gemini 2.5 Pro: Our most intelligent AI model  —  Gemini 2.5 Pro (experimental) is now available, with thinking capabilities, enhanced performance, and improved accuracy.  Try it at no cost in the Gemini app.
UiPath:
UiPath Unveils 10 Innovations that Will Shape the Agentic Future  —  Orchestration engine, API workflows and agentic testing among key features of new UiPath Platform™ for agentic automation, launched at UiPath DevCon 2025
Zoho:
How EQ plays a defining role in workplace communication  —  What if everyone you worked with had a psychic ability to understand how you're feeling and respond accordingly?  Wouldn't that be great?
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Box data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

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