Techmeme
December 12, 2024, 7:45 AM

Top News

Bloomberg:
Google debuts Gemini 2.0 and plans to test the model in search and AI Overviews, saying it enables “agents that can think, remember, plan, and even take action”  —  Company expects AI assistants will follow its users around the web  —  Google debuted a new version …
Simon Willison / Simon Willison's Weblog:
Gemini 2.0 Flash LLM early impressions: spatial reasoning performance is impressive, and its new streaming API is one of those “we live in the future” moments  —  Huge announcment from Google this morning: Introducing Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era.
Ina Fried / Axios:
Wall Street Journal:
Meta donates $1M to President-elect Trump's inaugural fund; sources say Mark Zuckerberg gifted Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses to Trump at Mar-a-Lago on November 27  —  President-elect had blasted the tech tycoon during the presidential campaign, but ties have been improving
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai / TechCrunch:
Microsoft says Russia-backed hacking group Secret Blizzard targeted Ukraine's military using other cybercriminals' tools, “to make attribution more difficult”  —  A Russian-government backed hacking group targeted Ukraine's military using tools and infrastructure developed by cybercriminals, according to new research.
Wes Davis / The Verge:
visionOS 2.2's ultrawide Mac display option is probably the closest thing to a killer app and makes the Vision Pro's $3,499 price feel a little closer to right  —  Since its release, I've mostly used Apple's Vision Pro like a movie theater. … Today, that's finally starting to change.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Joe Rossignol / MacRumors:
Zaheer Kachwala / Reuters:
SemiAnalysis:
A deep dive into AI scaling laws, including an outline of the old pre-training trends as well as the new scaling trends for post-training and inference time  —  In our pursuit of becoming a better full service research firm, we've moved off Substack.  For any questions please read https://semianalysis.com/faq/ #substack
Lawrence Abrams / BleepingComputer:
Meta says it is “99% of the way” to resolving a global outage that hit Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp, starting at approximately 12:40pm ET  —  Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp suffered a massive worldwide Wednesday afternoon, with services impacted in varying degrees based on user's region.
Nic Fildes / Financial Times:
Australia plans a new levy on tech companies like Meta with $250M+ in revenue to force them to pay publishers for journalism, after Meta quit the previous deal  —  Move is designed to close loophole after Meta walked away from existing deal to use media content
Sheena Vasani / The Verge:
Google rolls out two updates to Android's unknown tracker alerts feature, letting users pause location updates from their phone and pinpoint unfamiliar trackers  —  Google is rolling out two new updates to its unknown tracker alerts feature that should make it easier for Android device owners …
Muyao Shen / Bloomberg:
Binance and Circle partner to promote USDC; Binance plans to list more crypto trading pairs denominated in USDC and hold USDC for its own corporate treasury  —  - Circle faces increased challenges in the stablecoin market  — Binance will support more USDC usage on its platform
Brody Ford / Bloomberg:
Adobe reports Q4 revenue up 11% YoY to $5.61B, vs. $5.54B est., Digital Media revenue up 12%, forecasts FY 2025 revenue below est.; ADBE drops 8%+  —  - Fiscal year sales, profit forecasts fall short of estimates  — Software maker plans a new higher-priced tier for AI tools
Sean Hollister / The Verge:
Telefónica, one of the world's largest carriers, plans to preinstall the Epic Games Store on every new compatible Android phone it sells, including Samsung's  —  Telefónica, one of the largest carriers in the world serving the UK, Spain, Germany, and Latin America with the O2 …
George Winslow / Tv Technology:
The FCC opens all 1,200 megahertz of the 6GHz band for unlicensed use by very-low-power devices, citing growth in wearables, AR/VR, and other cutting-edge tech  —  The move, which the agency says will spur innovation, had been opposed by the NAB for its potential impact on newsgathering
Katie Robertson / New York Times:
The NYT Tech Guild and its 600+ members reach a tentative deal with management on a contract enhancing job security, setting flexible hybrid schedules, and more  —  The union, which represents some 600 tech workers at the publication, had been negotiating for a contract for more than two years.
Bloomberg:
Sources: Xiaohongshu, the Instagram-style app popular with younger Chinese users, tells investors it will cross $1B in 2024 profit ahead of a potential IPO  —  - The social media phenom is projecting record 2024 net profits  — Xiaohongshu expected to explore an IPO after scrapping listing
More: TechNode

Sponsor Posts

Meta:
Open Source AI: Available to all, not just the few  —  Meta's open source AI enables small businesses, start-ups, students, researchers and more to download and build with our models at no cost.
Zoho:
Expanding horizons and growing better together with Zoho Books  —  Since its launch in 2011, Zoho Books has evolved in response to the growing demand from businesses and accountants across different regions.
Genesys:
Executive Insights: The Era of Contact Center AI Copilots  —  How AI copilots are transforming customer experience and agent performance.
Tribe AI:
Build AI products that matter  —  Tribe AI helps organizations rapidly deploy AI solutions that have real business impact.  We bring together world class AI talent and tooling to drive differentiated results.
Techmeme Ride Home:
Wed. 12/11 - Gemini 2.0
The day's tech news, every day at 5pm ET. Fifteen minutes and you're up to date.
Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or RSS.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 7:45 AM ET, December 12, 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

John Gruber / Daring Fireball:

Earlier Picks

Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch:
Ari Levy / CNBC:
Jane Lanhee Lee / Bloomberg:
Alexander Maxham / Android Headlines:
Greg Stohr / Bloomberg: