Techmeme
December 12, 2024, 11:05 AM

Top News

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
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.
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 …
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.
Nic Fildes / Financial Times:
Australia plans a levy on tech companies like Meta with $250M+ in local revenue to force them to pay publishers for journalism, after Meta quit the prior deal  —  Move is designed to close loophole after Meta walked away from existing deal to use media content
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 …
Zaheer Kachwala / Reuters:
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
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 …
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
Matt Day / Bloomberg:
Amazon delayed the deployment of Microsoft 365 for its 1.5M employees for a year to resolve security concerns about Microsoft's Midnight Blizzard hack  —  - Companies teamed up to make sure cloud-based product is secure  — Amazon employees were expected to receive software this year
Forums: Slashdot
SemiAnalysis:
A deep dive into AI scaling laws, including an outline of the old pre-training scaling trend and 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
John Gruber / Daring Fireball:
The Information: Apple this past summer canceled the development of a high-performance Mac chip to let some engineers in Israel work on its first AI server chip  —  Wayne Ma and Qianer Liu, in a piece today for The Information (paywalled up the wazoo, sadly), “Apple Is Working on AI Chip With Broadcom”:
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.
Brody Ford / Bloomberg:
Adobe reports Q4 revenue up 11% YoY to $5.61B, vs. $5.54B est., Digital Media revenue up 12% YoY, and forecasts FY 2025 earnings 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

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:
Introducing AI Forms: Create optimized forms with AI in Zoho Forms  —  The future of form creation isn't coming, it's here.  Forget everything you thought you knew about building online forms.
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.
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Earlier Picks

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