Techmeme
December 4, 2024, 6:05 PM

Top News

Jeff Cox / CNBC:
Trump plans to nominate former SEC Commissioner Paul Atkins as SEC chair, keeping with his promise for a crypto-friendly administration  —  President-elect Donald Trump, keeping with his promise for a crypto-friendly administration, plans to nominate former SEC Commissioner Paul Atkins to head the agency …
Josh Sisco / Bloomberg:
William J. Broad / New York Times:
Google DeepMind unveils GenCast, an AI weather model that the company claims outperforms traditional methods on up to 15-day weather and deadly storm forecasts  —  GenCast, from the company's DeepMind division, outperformed the world's best predictions of deadly storms as well as everyday weather.
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Google DeepMind unveils Genie 2, a model that can generate 3D worlds from a single prompt image, playable by humans or AI agents using keyboard and mouse inputs  —  DeepMind, Google's AI research org, has unveiled a model that can generate an “endless” variety of playable 3D worlds.
Hayden Field / CNBC:
Anduril and OpenAI partner to deploy advanced AI systems for national security missions, focusing on “improving the nation's counter-unmanned aircraft systems”  —  OpenAI and Anduril on Wednesday announced a partnership allowing the defense tech company to deploy advanced artificial …
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge:
Google launches Veo, an AI video model for generating “high-quality” 1080p videos in visual and cinematic styles, to businesses, beating OpenAI's Sora to market  —  Veo, Google's latest generative AI video model, is now available for businesses to start incorporating into their content creation pipelines.
Financial Times:
The UK NCA uncovers a Russian multibillion-dollar money laundering scheme that let Russian spies, European drug traffickers, and more evade sanctions via crypto  —  Multibillion-dollar ring across London, Moscow and Dubai connected cash-rich criminals with sanctions evaders
Cecilia Kang / New York Times:
DC's AG sues Amazon for allegedly secretly stopping its fastest delivery service to the nearly 50K Prime subscribers in historically lower-income neighborhoods  —  The District of Columbia's attorney general said the company deliberately outsourced Prime member deliveries in certain ZIP codes.
Financial Times:
xAI plans to expand its Colossus supercomputer tenfold to incorporate more than 1M GPUs; work has already begun to increase the size of its facility in Memphis  —  Facility in Memphis expected to incorporate more than 1mn GPUs as billionaire's xAI aims to catch up with rivals
The Verge:
Sam Altman says OpenAI will begin 12 days of “shipmas” on December 5, with new features, products, and demos, sources say including text-to-video AI tool Sora  —  Happy holidays from OpenAI.  The AI startup plans to kick off a “shipmas” period of new features and products for 12 days, starting on December 5th.
Jackie Davalos / Bloomberg:
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Spotify launches Spotify Wrapped, adding an AI podcast of users' 2024 Wrapped created with Google's NotebookLM summarizer, and a Your Music Evolution data story  —  Spotify Wrapped, the streamer's highly anticipated annual listening recap, has arrived.  In addition to its usual personalized …
Wes Davis / The Verge:
Threads users can now follow fediverse accounts that have interacted with a Threads post; fediverse posts won't show in feeds, only on the accounts' profiles  —  Threads rolled out fediverse users' likes and replies in a very limited way at first, and it's the same here …
Steven Levy / Wired:
Q&A with Tim Cook on generative AI, Apple Intelligence, outsourcing to OpenAI, why Apple's biggest contribution will be in health, ARM, the Vision Pro, and more  —  Much as the CEO seems awestruck by AI and his just-released Apple Intelligence, he's more convinced that the tech giant's health apps will define the company's legacy.
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:
Meta says AI content was less than 1% of fact-checked election-related misinformation on its apps during major US, UK, Indian, Indonesian, and other elections  —  At the start of the year, there were widespread concerns about how generative AI could be used to interfere in global elections to spread propaganda and disinformation.
Ming-Chi Kuo:
Sam Nussey / Reuters:
Netflix says Netflix Japan passed 10M+ subscribers in H1 2024 and has doubled its subscriber base in the past four years thanks to Japanese-language programming  —  Netflix's (NFLX.O) subscribers passed 10 million in Japan in the first half of this year with the streaming firm's Japanese …
Josh Dzieza / The Verge:
An artist shares his experience of turning to Replika's AI bot Lila for companionship, including giving Lila an AI friend by creating a digital copy of himself  —  Lila was created from the limited options available: female, blue hair, face “number two.”  She was there on the next screen …

Sponsor Posts

Google:
Generate videos with Veo 3 in Google Gemini  —  Create high-quality, 8-second videos with Veo 3, our state-of-the-art AI video generator.  Try it with a Google AI Pro plan or get the highest access with the Ultra plan.
Codegen:
Ship with AI: The Future of Coding is Here  —  Use natural language in Slack to trigger real PRs, docs, dashboards, infra & more.  Codegen connects GitHub, Linear, Notion, and beyond.
Zoho:
Taking Zoho Sign's AI-driven agreement management for a spin: A corporate counsel's experience  —  Before artificial intelligence, managing legal documents demanded time, patience, and a lot of coffee.
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.

Featured Podcasts

Techmeme Ride Home:
WWDC 2025
The day's tech news, every day at 5pm ET. Fifteen minutes and you're up to date.
Subscribe to Techmeme Ride Home.
Grit:
Family, Focus, and 350M Users: Inside Zoom with Eric Yuan
Grit explores what it takes to create, build and scale world-class organizations.
Subscribe to Grit.
Lenny's Podcast:
How Mercado Libre built Latin America's most valuable company: 18k engineers, 30k deploys a day, and their own fleet of planes | Sebastian Barrios
Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.
Subscribe to Lenny's Podcast.
The Logan Bartlett Show:
Bipul Sinha (CEO, Rubrik) on The New Rules of Silicon Valley
A podcast hosted by Logan Bartlett, an investor at Redpoint Ventures, covering tech with industry insiders.
Subscribe to The Logan Bartlett Show.
Hard Fork:
The Trump-Musk Fallout + A DOGE Coder Speaks + ChefGPT
The future is already here. Each week, journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore and make sense of the latest in the rapidly changing world of tech.
Subscribe to Hard Fork.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 6:05 PM ET, December 4, 2024.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

More News

Earlier Picks

Kevin Collier / NBC News:
Nicole Carpenter / Polygon: