Techmeme
December 18, 2024, 8:10 PM

Top News

Melissa Quinn / CBS News:
SCOTUS says it will hear a challenge from TikTok, ByteDance, and TikTok users on January 10 to the law that could lead to the US banning the app on January 19  —  Washington — The Supreme Court on Wednesday said it will take up a challenge to a new law that could lead to a ban on TikTok in the U.S.
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: the US is investigating Chinese router maker TP-Link, which has a ~65% US market share in homes and SMBs, and could ban the sale of its routers in 2025  —  TP-Link is the bestselling router on Amazon—and has been linked to Chinese cyberattacks  —  U.S. authorities are investigating whether …
Hayden Field / CNBC:
OpenAI rolls out a way to talk to ChatGPT by dialing 1-800-CHATGPT for 15 minutes of free access per month in the US or messaging it via WhatsApp globally  —  OpenAI on Wednesday rolled out a new way to talk to its viral chatbot: 1-800-CHATGPT.  —  By dialing the U.S. number (1-800-242-8478) …
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
GitHub makes its Copilot free in VS Code, with 2,000 code completions and 50 chat messages per month; GitHub now has 150M developers, up from 100M in early 2023  —  Microsoft-owned GitHub today announced a free version of its popular Copilot code completion/AI pair programming tool …
Will Judd / Eurogamer.net:
Sony details PS5 Pro specs, including its GPU based on AMD RDNA 2 with 16.7TF of performance and ray tracing improvements, and announces a partnership with AMD  —  Plus: what this all means for future PlayStation hardware.  —  When Sony revealed the PlayStation 5 Pro …
Paul Alcorn / Tom's Hardware:
Intel announces the first updates to address Arrow Lake gaming performance issues, fixing four of five root causes, and plans a new update for January  —  Time to test.  —  Intel announced that its first wave of updates to address the gaming performance issues plaguing the Arrow Lake processors is now available.
Shirin Ghaffary / Bloomberg:
Source: Perplexity raised $500M led by Institutional Venture Partners at a $9B valuation earlier this month, up from a $3B valuation in June  —  The company's valuation has tripled since June. … The round was led by Institutional Venture Partners and completed earlier this month …
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: Apple has halted work on a project to build an iPhone hardware subscription service, which had been in development since around 2022  —  - Much-delayed program had been in development since around 2022  — Company also shut down Pay Later offering earlier this year
Harry McCracken / Fast Company:
Flipboard launches Surf, an app to create custom feeds from Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, RSS, podcasts, and YouTube, in beta on iOS, Android, and iPadOS  —  Fourteen years ago, when the iPad was new and bursting with unfulfilled promise, an app called Flipboard debuted.
Ian King / Bloomberg:
Micron reports Q1 revenue up 84% YoY to $8.71B, in line with est., Q2 revenue forecast below est. due to sluggish phone and PC demand; MU drops 13%+ after hours  —  - Strong AI growth isn't offsetting a slowdown elsewhere  — Micron CEO cites weakness in consumer-oriented markets
Bloomberg:
SandboxAQ, which aims to apply quantum tech and techniques to AI, raised $300M from Alger, Yann LeCun, and others at a $5.6B valuation to recruit more engineers  —  - Former Alphabet division focuses on quantum and AI tech  — CEO Jack Hidary staffing up with more Ph.D.s and engineers
Sean Hollister / The Verge:
After a rough year, Intel says its $250 Arc B580 “Battlemage” GPU, which received near-universal praise from reviewers, has already sold out in most retailers  —  While we haven't managed to review it ourselves due to a fluke issue, the $250 Arc B580 “Battlemage” …
Bloomberg:
Sources: Amazon recently pushed back RTO dates for some staff in Austin, Dallas, and Phoenix by as much as four months, citing a lack of office space  —  - Company is struggling to find space in at least seven cities  — Start dates are being pushed back as much as four months
Financial Times:
Omdia estimates Microsoft bought 485K of Nvidia's Hopper GPUs in 2024, ByteDance and Tencent bought ~230K each, Meta bought 225K, and Tesla/xAI bought ~200K  —  OpenAI's biggest backer buys nearly half a million GPUs this year in global race to build artificial intelligence systems
Emma Roth / The Verge:
Threads rolls out a way to reshare photos and videos without quote posting the original post, while crediting the original poster; users can disable the feature  —  Threads is rolling out a new feature that lets you share someone's photos and videos without including the original post.
Jez Corden / Windows Central:
A look at Microsoft's risky Xbox strategy, where exclusives are the exception; sources say Microsoft is working on cross-platform Xbox interface Project Rainway  —  Microsoft's strategy has Xbox's core fans upset about the future of console hardware.  Today, we're going to analyze the strategy …
Google DeepMind:
Google introduces FACTS Grounding benchmark for evaluating the factuality of LLMs, and announces a leaderboard that ranks Gemini 2.0 Flash Experimental on top  —  Our comprehensive benchmark and online leaderboard offer a much-needed measure of how accurately LLMs ground their responses …

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Myles McCormick / Financial Times:
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